Thanks. I do have 2 Armory machines - one online and offline. They're running a slightly older version of Armory (0.91.2), so I would might want to update that first.

This version isn't terribly old - it's actually new enough to be able to offer to do a secure download to update Armory. But I probably wouldn't want to do any sort of download onto the offline machine anyways - so I'll probably take a bit of time to upgrade Armory on both machines, downloading a 'deb' package for the offline machine, if such a thing is still available.

Or maybe I'll want to build Armory from source - as I heard there was some weird thing in Armory where it was collecting data from users ie reporting the user's IP address to the Armory organization for marketing / survey purposes, and I wanted to look more into that before actually using Armory, and make any changes to maximize privacy.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=731315.0

https://pay.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2d5ze7/armory_wallet_collecting_data_from_users/

I also wanted to look into using Tor before doing any sending, so as not to give away my geographic location. So much stuff to figure out still.

But anyways, if I understand you correctly: you're saying I could create a wallet on the offline Armory (with no blockchain downloaded), put a password in this Armory wallet, and send some coins there from bitcoin-qt.

I assume you mean:

• really doing a "send", sending them over the network in the normal fashion via the blockchain (in which case I believe the new Armory wallet can actually be hierarchical-deterministic, since Armory itself created the private keys based on the HD "master" code), and not

• merely doing a "sweep" importing the coins (essentially "offline") from the bitcion-qt wallet into the Armory wallet (in which case the Armory wallet would not be HD, since it would necessarily contain keys which weren't generated using Armory's particular HD scheme).

I guess this makes sense. And even while Armory doesn't have the full blockchain downloaded yet, I guess I could simply check the addresses on blockchain.info to see if the coins are there.

Now this brings up yet another question:

Assuming my bitcoin-qt client doesn't have the blockchain downloaded yet - but I do of course have my original wallet.dat file containing my coins:

Is it possible to send coins from a bitcoin-qt client which doesn't have a local copy of the blockchain yet?

In other words, if blockchain-qt has the wallet (with the private keys), but it doesn't have the blockchain (with the worldwide transaction history), can bitcoin-qt send out coins?

I'm guessing that it could.

As far as I understand, having the wallet.dat containing the private keys simply means that the bitcoin-qt client "broadcasts the attempted spend to the network" - and as long as the signature of the spend is found to be valid (by being based on the private key, which is in the wallet.dat file), then this is all that matters - and the distributed consensus is worked out by the miners on the global blockchain in order to decide whether to actually confirm the transaction (and it doesn't depend on my local copy of the blockchain).