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I was asking myself the same question posed at How to run a bitcoind on a hosting securely?

At the above posting, George Pearce provided a good suggestion. However, I have questions but Stackexchange would not let me comment to George.

My questions are:

Bitaddress.org shows 8 addresses. How does one generate hundreds of addresses? How does one get the keys privately, without Bitaddress.org knowing about them and without sending these private keys through the internet from Bitaddress to me? How does one generate testnet addresses?

I would need to use testnet coins while I'm developing and testing. Blockchain (https://blockchain.info/q/addressbalance/1EzwoHtiXB4iFwedPr49iywjZn2nnekhoj?confirmations=6) and BlockExplorer (http://blockexplorer.com/address/mudBLTzFRz4o17Y9CbaWRB9Qr8BkFeYiYj) do not seem to work with testnet addresses. Is there a service that does work with testnet?

Community
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JLP
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2 Answers2

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In order to reach the testnet version of bitaddress you must append ?testnet=true to the url:

https://www.bitaddress.org/bitaddress.org-v2.9.3-SHA1-7d47ab312789b7b3c1792e4abdb8f2d95b726d64.html?testnet=true

the9ull
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  1. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_version_1_Bitcoin_addresses - you can read about how to generate adresses by yourself. You can also use getnewaddress RPC command to generate a lot of adresses. dumpprivkey can show private keys for them.
  2. You can use http://blockexplorer.com/testnet to see what's going on testnet.
Zergatul
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  • Thanks for your input. In regards to the link, don't you have to be an cryptography expert? How does one "Perform SHA-256 hashing", "Perform RIPEMD-160 hashing", etc.? I think I understand the RPC method. I assume that I can call getnewaddress and dumpprivkey multiple times on the Bitcoin program, and then copy just the addresses to the server's database? After my users send bitcoin to any of those addresses, then I should see the balance go up in Bitcoin-QT on my home computer. How do I get the confirmations in a response to my web app from BlockExplorer? – JLP Feb 11 '14 at 03:08
  • Here are a lot of useful functions on C# written by me http://pastebin.com/Sv76ZZnu, which are using openssl. You can rewrite them to any other language. Yes, if users send bitcoins to addresses, which are present in bitcoin-qt, you will see total balance, or you can see balance of any specific address with command `getbalance`. Cmd `getbalance` can show balance with confirmation. Confirmations - it is just blocks depth. For example: you create transaction, which is included in the latest block - it is 1 confirmation. If after this block there is a new block - 2 conf. And so on. – Zergatul Feb 11 '14 at 09:48