Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys,

I'm new to the BTC scene and have just started buying some of the coins available on coinbase in the UK.. I have left BTC and ETH on the wallets on Coinbase for now but I've transferred some LTC to my Electrum wallet, I used the receive function to generate a key and then put that in Coinbase to send to it. I believe I didn't have my wallet 'open' or online at the time so I'm not sure if this means I did not 'receive' it or it will show up later, I've tried restarting the wallet but no luck. Have I made a newbie mistake and lost the transaction? Thanks in advance.

You can be off line and will be able to receive your coins. Every address is public and every single one of them exist in the network.

Have you used litecoin electrum?

As everything is public you can try to enter your litecoin address on this website: https://chain.so/  and tell us what happens at end. This chain.so is a simple blockchain explorer that runs a node and by doing that it has access to all records of transaction that happen on the blockchain. If it shows you have your coin then you are good as it is most likely problem with litecoin electrum. But if it doesn't show any coins try to go to coinbase and see in case you miss typed the address.

Cheers, tell us what happened at end so I and others can tell you what could be done if it can be done.

Thanks for your reply..

I've only used Electrum, so not a litecoin version from what I can tell, does that matter? Do I need a litecoin wallet to store litecoins? (sounds obvious but just checking)

How do I get my litecoin address? There seems to be a lot of address and keys involved, which one should I put in to that website? Thank you

Ok looking in to this further and realising I need a LTC wallet, because I've sent this to a BTC wallet key, is there a way of retrieving it?

So you were using Electrum for BTC (downloaded from electrum.org (http://electrum.org)), right?

And I assume you are using a 2FA wallet and the address you used to receive the coins starts with a 3, right?

If that's the case, just follow this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umsIy1ks8vg

That has worked! Absolutely spot on, thank you.. a quick question hopefully to add to this, when I got sent the LTC, I noticed there was a bit missing, I've read about it being 'change' from a full block or something like that, is there a way of getting this back as well? Thanks for all your help guys very much appreciated.

You are probably talking about the transaction fee. There is no way to recover that amount since it was paid to the miners to get your transaction confirmed. Even if you sent the LTC to the wrong address, the transaction was still valid and it got confirmed (for a price, which was the tx fee).

I know there's transaction fees etc, but I read about 'Change' as well, is this something different? See below for what it was defined as:

Change

Let’s say you are spending $1.90 in your local super market, and you give the cashier $2.00. You will get back .10 cents in change. The same logic applies to bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin transactions are made up of inputs and outputs. When you send bitcoins, you can only send them in a whole “output.” The change is then sent back to the sender.

Thanks

That's true. But you transfered the LTC from your Coinbase account to a single Bitcoin address. So I don't think there is any change.

If you look at the transaction id, you will probably see something like this (example):

200 LTC (Coinbase) -> 10 LTC (your address)
                                 190 LTC (other Coinbase address)

So the whole amount of LTC you own was sent to your Bitcoin address and the remaining (owned by Coinbase) sent back to Coinbase as their change.

Here's a better example:

Let’s say you are paying for a $21 meal at a restaurant. You pull a $20 bill out of your wallet. You search your wallet further and find a $10 bill. You give both bills to your waiter. The waiter rings $21 into the till, pockets $4 as a tip, and gives you $5 as change. The $20 and $10 were inputs. The $21 was an output to your payee. The $5 is a change output returned to you for use in a future transaction. And $4 was consumed as a service charge.

Thanks

Change is refereed to inputs and outputs of a single transaction. So the more inputs and outputs you have the bigger the transaction is in size which could result in a higher fee. But for this particular case you don't have to worry much about it.

The transfer from coinbase need time and you must to verify you mailbox because when coinbase make that transfer he send to you mail with the details of that transfer