Bitcoin Forum

Amazed by the ease of transaction with bitcoins I bought some at mtgox. Then i installed a wallet on my pc. Next i transfer one bitcoin to my wallet. No bitcoin is received to my wallet ??? But i see my wallet has not completed synchronizing. That was a few days ago, and now it is close. Will the bitcoin arrive when sync is finished?? Or is my bitcoin lost in cyberspace? (is that possible?)

Aslong as the address is correct, and the private key to it secure your coins are fine. You can try looking up the Transaction ID from mtgox and searching for it on blockchain.info for reassurance.

Oh how I hated that initial synchronizing  :D

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I too came close to giving up on it when I first found bitcoin and chose to test it. Boy am I glad I did'nt!

If any noobs are reading this thread, just boot your client up and leave it running overnight, that's what I did, much easier than raging all day about having to synchronise :P You guys lol :P I remember when internet connections and Bittorrent were so slow you had to wait over night before you could download a full game, now it easily takes less than an hour on a fast connection.

Yes the coin will appear once you download all the block chain (takes days)

If you don't want the hassle of keeping an updating block chain choose a lite client wallet.

More precisely, it will appear once you have downloaded the block your transaction resides in. Then you will need to wait for a couples of blocks in order to get some confirmations, which will allow you to spend them.

One can download most of the blockchain through torrents and make it faster.

What he said.

Remember that if you recently transfered your coins then the transaction will be in a recent block. One of the last blocks that will be downloaded and confirmed. I think your all good.

Or use a lightweight client

Either wait for use a lite wallet. I use multibit regularly and have never had any problems.

Definitely a good option as well.

If you are on an older version of the client (pre v0.8) that was a big problem.  It is mostly resolved with v0.8.

If you have a screensaver (or worse, sleep mode), Bitcoin-Qt might not get the full resources it would benefit from and thus syncing isn't happening as quickly as it could.

That's pretty handy. Why can't this be built into the actual client?

Well, thanks for the replies. It turns out you all were right. The coin showed up as soon as the sync was done. Anything else would ofcourse have been great dissapointment. Will a transaction that not find its destination address just reside in cyberspace forever?

Ouch... And it seems you're not the only one:
 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150724.0

I'm sorry for you and hope you'll somehow be able to recover them / find the thief.

If the transaction is in a block, then it has already found its destination address.  If it isn't in a block, then there is a possibility that it will eventually expire if neither the sender nor receiver are re-broadcasting it.  As long as someone is re-broadcasting the transaction on a regular basis, then it will continue to hang out in the memory pool of the full nodes on the network while it waits to be included in a block.