Clarification about old generated addresses?

Question

I often create a batch of wallets (on an air gapped RaspberryPi) for later use. But would like clarification on a few things:

1) With these recent forks, are wallets I created with the 0.11.1.0 cli (or older) invalid or have the potential to decay in anyway?

2) Can empty wallets from the batch still be used with the latest client 0.12.0.0 and beyond?

3a) Is a wallet/address that was never used (e.g. no initial deposit) invisible on the monero blockchain (since no transactions took place)?

3b) Is it correct that: whether the wallet was generated several months ago, or yesterday; only when a deposit/transaction is created will be the first time the monero blockchain knows about it?

Answer 1

I would answer the questions grouped.

1 and 2:

The address format has not changed from 0.11.1 to 0.12. So all monero addresses that you generated are still valid and you can send to them with 0.12.0 wallets. But to move the funds again from a 0.11.1 wallet you need to set the ring size to 7 manually since otherwise the 0.12 v7 network would reject your transaction. Use the following command on the cli

transfer 7 ADDRESS AMOUNT

More information is available here.

3a and b:

Short answer is No.

The blockchain will never know about your addresses. It only saves, transactions, so it will never know about the addresses you generate with your wallets. Monero also uses stealth addresses, so each transaction you are receiving will not have your address linked to it. The transaction will go to a unique address that is displayed on the blockchain but there is no way for anyone without your private view key to know that the unique address on the blockchain belongs to your generate address.

Bonus you mind want to look into sub-addresses in order to reduce your batch creation overhead. (You will get multiple addresses from one wallet so only one backup seed is needed.)

---