PSA: A Foot-Gun in Bitcoin v30

I’m a Bitcoin fanatic. I’m also the guy who loses sleep when Bitcoin software accidentally turns into a foot-gun. So I’m writing this because I’m genuinely worried some of you could get hurt by a Bitcoin Core v30 bug.

Here’s the simple version:

Bitcoin Core v30 has a bug where, in certain situations, trying to “upgrade” an old-style wallet can cause Bitcoin Core to delete your entire wallet folder. Not just the one wallet you were upgrading. The whole folder. That can include other wallets and even backups you kept in that same place.

Why this is a big deal?

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In v30, Bitcoin Core stopped supporting the older “legacy” wallet format. So if you upgraded and you still had an older wallet, you basically got pushed into one path forward: migrate (convert) it to the new for

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