DogeCoin Core offers an easy way to dump your entire wallet in human readable format. Now, why would you want to do that? Well, maintaining the blockchain takes up bandwidth and space on your network and computer. Having the ability to get all your addresses out means you can transfer them over to a USB, or any other cold storage, and get rid of your client entirely.
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Accessing the command line
Accessing the command line in DogeCoin Core is pretty simple. In the Help menu in the top left of the UI, there is a Debug window. Opening the debug window gives you access to more information about the application itself, peers, network traffic, but what we're after is the Console. The console is a powerful tool and gives you more options than the base UI does. However, it is equally dangerous. It is recommended to disable internet connection before doing anything else, just to be safe.
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Dumping your wallet
Ensure you're focused on the window and are typing directly to the console interface. The command is relatively simple: dumpwallet "filename", I would do dumpwallet walletdump.txt. You will be required to unlock your wallet first if you encrypted it with a passphrase. You can do this by typing walletpassphrase [passphrase] (timeout) before entering the dumpwallet command. Once you press enter, it should just say null.
Subsequently, you can import the file as well with importwallet dumpname in my example, importwallet walletdump.txt. You'll see that when we dumped it we made it a txt file, this isn't required it just makes it easier for you to open, though your computer would most likely identify the content as text regardless.
You also can obtain the private key of a single wallet. The dumpprivkey <address> command will allow you to get the private key of a single wallet for exporting.
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Accessing the file
Windows:
The file is not saved to the data directory like you'd expect it to be. It's saved to the install location of the executable, usually in program files, but we'll go over locating it.
- Find a shortcut to open DogeCoin Core
- Right click it, press open file location
- This probably will bring you to another shortcut, if it does, right click that shortcut and open the file location.
Eventually you should reach an exe file called dogecoin-qt.exe. In that folder you will also find your wallet dump.
Linux (thank you u/zopiac!)
Linux dumps can be found at ~/ instead of the dogecoin-qt executable location.
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Reading the file
The dump isn't too complicated, you'll see all of your address pairs being in the format:
privatekey zuludate type= # addr=publickey hdkeypath=path
type= varies from change=1, reserve=1, and label=string (receiving addresses you made). All you need though is the private/public key pair, and change=1 is nice to know because that means it's a change address.
It is important to note to never let anyone access your private master key.
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Afterwards
All wallets, including the empty ones, are usable. The dumpwallet command already labels their type for you, so it saved you some time. Now that you have all of your keys, you don't need a client anymore. And with that I direct you to another ELI5 by our great u/Fulvio55 that goes over using coinb.in to send DOGE, and using bitinfocharts to track transactions and check balances.
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Conclusion
Maintaining your wallets by yourself means your coins are completely in your hands, there is no middle-man client to use bandwidth or take up space. Using coinb.in you will make and sign, then broadcast transactions directly into the network. Freeing your mind from how much bandwidth you're going to use or what happens if an attacker gets into your network because of an open port. You become your own client.
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