David Veksler

How to transfer Bitcoin from a Multibit Classic or Multibit HD wallet into Electrum

Multibit was one of the better Bitcoin wallets between 2011-2016. However, in 2019, both Multibit Classic and Multibit HD have been abandoned by its owner Keepkey and are no longer supported. If you still have Bitcoin in your Multibit wallet and need to get it out, read on.

You can still try to send Bitcoin out of Multibit is make a transaction directly in the wallet. However, there are a few reasons why you might not want to do this:

  1. Multibit does not support dynamic transaction fees, so your transaction may fail, be too expensive, or worse, be accepted but be stuck for weeks (before being rejected) because the fee is too low.
  2. Multibit does not support SegWit addresses, so you will not be able to send to a current wallet.
  3. If you have a wallet with many transactions, it may fail to sync, or sending them all in a single transaction will fail because the transaction is too large.
  4. Spending your entire wallet is a privacy risk and costs you money. You just want to load your existing Bitcoin addresses in a modern wallet!
  5. Multibit has various bugs which may prevent it from syncing or being able to send transactions.

If you don’t want to or can’t send from Multibit for any of these reasons, you can still migrate your Multibit keys to another wallet. Here is how to do that with Electrum.

1: Export your private keys

There is a node.js script to export your multibit keys, I think the manual method is just as easy:

For Multibit Classic:

Search your multibit wallet folder for a .key file. Your Multibit wallet is here:

Mac OS

Multibit Classic ~/Library/Application Support/MultiBit/*.wallet

MultibitHD ~/Library/Application Support/MultiBitHD/<wallet-id>/mbhd.wallet.aes

Windows

Multibit Classic C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\MultiBit\<wallet-name>.wallet

MultibitHD C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\MultiBitHD\<wallet-id>\mbhd.wallet.aes

If you don’t have a .key file, go to Tools-> Export Private Keys

After you find the .key file, open it in a text editor. The key file should start with the line: “KEEP YOUR PRIVATE KEYS SAFE !”

The keys start at the last # line, and look like this:

Kwm7awpt2QiuWE2n8d4WpJFB8HkEL5TgtiECg7spzJ4zbX6uiScY 2013-05-14T00:58:46Z

The bold text is the key.

Import your keys into Electrum:

Get Electrum from https://electrum.org/#download

Start Electrum or select File-> New. Select “Import Private Keys”  

For an existing wallet, you can also Import (this adds them) or Sweep (this moves the balance into the wallet).  

Import your Multibit HD recovery seed into Electrum:

If you have an Electrum HD recovery phrase, select “I already have a seed”

After you enter the seed, click on options and check bip39.

Next, set the derivation path as m/0′ 

(that’s zero and a single quote)

Now you can import your Multibit seed into Electrum

If you forgot your password:

Ask me for help 🙂

Still need help?

If you only have an encrypted Multibit wallet, and you don’t know the password, you will have to brute force the Bitcoin wallet password.  The good news is that the encrypted Multibit .key file only uses 3 md5 iterations, which means it’s easy to try millions or billions password variations until we find the right one.

If you have questions about this guide or still need help, give us a shout!

If this guide helped you recover your Bitcoin, consider sending a tip to 3PoVZA7CZCo8df7WKXZXGskGqTfDacsDah

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