Bitcoin Forum

So I open up an old wallet.dat file I had stowed away from 2 or so years ago with quite a bit of BTC in it.

Sync-ed up with the latest wallet, have the password to unlockit, etc..
Problem is, when I send a payment to any address, it becomes unconfirmed for what seems for ever, type says "payment to yourself".
The amount I am trying to send comes out of the total, but it never arrives nor confirms.

I hope the wallet file is not corrupt and something can be done as it has quite a substantial amount of BTC in it. :-(

I'd personally just try to do it the easy way. This is what i suggest you to do.
Download Electrum client (https://electrum.org/#download), so you don't have to mess with any syncing or such.
Then open up your Bitcoin Core, or wherever you have the wallet. Then figure out which addresses have balance.
Then write there the following for every invidual address which you have. You need to have your wallet unlocked.


It should give out a private key string as a reply, so repeat this to every possible key which has some kind of balance.
Copy paste those private keys on a notepad or something, one key on every line.

Then open up your electrum wallet, it will ask you to create new wallet.
Enter the name of the wallet file (does not matter, you can leave it if you want to), then press next and you will see the following:

https://i.imgur.com/gngBXNa.png

Choose the "Import private keys, as you can see above and click next.
After that, enter the keys as shown below (one on every line):

https://i.imgur.com/aU5AmV8.png

My keys start a bit differently, as they are P2SH keys but the same procedure works for your keys as well.
Then hit next again, setup a password if you want to. Although i recommend just sending the BTC right out, when you get a chance as your private keys have been revealed on your screen. I recommend doing this procedure offline if possible as well.

I assume you have more than one backup, right? If you don't have it, you should make them right now.

People use Bitcoin Core for a reason, moving a "substantial amount of BTC" to another wallet is not something I'd recommend. Electrum has had much more exploits than Bitcoin Core.
If thedreamer chooses to export his private key, he can just import them into a new Bitcoin Core wallet.dat. I can't think of a single reason though to explain the described behaviour. Have you (thedreamer) used Bitcoin Core recently with another wallet? Could it be related to a Windows (?) firewall by any chance?

Thank you both for the info and suggestion.

I didn't want to use another wallet as it'll take a month to sync up.   ;)

I have backups of the wallet.dat but at some point I messed up years ago and I have multiples with mixed up addresses. I'd hate to lose this much btc though, so I'll try anything. That's what I get for not trusting an offline hardware wallet. Ugh.

If you are refering to electrum:
Bitcoin core is a full node wallet (does store the whole blockchain).
Electrum is a light-weight wallet (does NOT store the blockchain; it asks an online service to get information about addresses related to your wallet).

So, if the only reason you don't want to use electrum is the sync time, i can soothe you. You just have to download the wallet and start it (takes less than 3 minutes).


Trying out what Sellingaccs suggested is probably the fasted way to access/check your coins.

Please, someone, correct me if I'm wrong:
I suspect you are trying to send Bitcoin from unconfirmed inputs so your current transactions are not confirmed

Open the debug window ----> console tab  ----> "listaddressgroupings"
then check your addresses in any block explorer

Nope. Read the first reply.


Next time please do read the whole post before replying, if they were unconfirmed inputs, they would have already dropped from the mempool.
Unconfirmed transactions are not kept for two years in the mempool, and if they were, they would have still cleared out long time ago.

They may not be kept in the mempools of any nodes on the network, but they CAN still be kept within the wallet file... It is very possible that a transaction was broadcast and recorded in the users wallet, but the transaction was never actually confirmed.

There have been countless instances on these forums of users attempting to "find" transactions where they received "XX BTC" in a transaction 5 years ago etc... but it is currently "Status: 0/unconfirmed, not in memory pool"

In any case, I don't think this is the cause, as any attempt to spend old unconfirmed coins like these should result in a "missing inputs" error when the user attempted to broadcast a transaction spending the "ghost" coins.

"Payment to yourself" should only show if all the UTXOs spent in the transaction came from addresses within the wallet, and all the UTXOs generated are assigned to addresses within the wallet. @OP, are you attempting to send to an external address or to your own address?

I'm still working on  it, but I think I'm screwed.
I've tried to send to my own, new ones and external addresses and they all do the same.
The wallet has a bunch of addresses on it, including the one which got some solo mining blocks but I'm not sure which one that was since. In the transaction history it just shows the incoming mined btc but not the address.

Crap on a handbasket. 

Have you already checkedfrom a block explorer, if any of the addresses contain any balance?
I'd just recommend trying out electrum, even on a offline mode if needed. You can figure out the situation within few minutes, and spend the funds (if such funds exist anymore on the address).

If you see any off the transactions, can you possibly copy the txid and search it with Chain.so (https://chain.so/) for example?

Are you sure it's Bitcoin and not altcoins? I'm asking, because many of the similar threads on this board turned out to have a wallet.dat created by some altcoin.

If you really do have solo mined blocks, you're looking at enough money to contact a specialist if needed. Someone like Dave (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=240779.0), but be very careful who you trust.

When did you solo mine? Are you sure you were mining bitcoins?
Solo mining is kind of impossible for a few years now.




Using electrum on an offline machine won't help since electrum relies on an internet connection to get the status of transactions/addresses of the wallet.
Without an internet connection you won't be able to look up wether funds are available.

It was back in '16 and yes solo mining was MUCH easier then using my own and rented hash.  :D
I'm doing the manual import thing now from the wallet, although now I'm getting crashes from the wallet itself.
I started the sync of another wallet on another PC and hope to switch the wallet to it once it finishes in about a week. LOL

Do they have any updated repositories for the block chain still on the net?

The crashes might be due to your wallet.dat being an old version (wallet also from 2016?).
You might try to start core with the -upgradewallet command.
But make sure to make a backup of your wallet.dat before messing around with it!

I doubt it will work on another PC. But instead of downloading/syncing the whole blockchain from scratch again, you might also try to just move the blockfiles
to your new PC. This will reduce the time it takes, since core then only needs to verify those blocks, instead of downloading them all over again.




I am not aware of such a repository. But moving the files manually to your second PC is the better/faster way.

I believe this was pretty much abandoned since the performance updates to Bitcon Core actually made it sync from scratch faster than you could download and use a bootstrap.dat. I believe this occurred around version 0.14 (https://bitcoincore.org/en/releases/0.14.0/)

Well, I'm hozed and so is about 36.27BTC with it. Ugh..

The wallet/dat file keep saying it's corrupt and crashing the bitcoin wallet, I tried it on 3 different pc's and installs.

LOL.. Guess at least I can laugh about it.. :while crying inside:. ROFL..

No the change happened with version 0.10.

Changing the install and computer is not going to fix the fact that the wallet file itself is corrupted. That has nothing to do with the software.

First make a backup of your wallet.dat file. Then try starting Bitcoin Core with the -salvagewallet option. Please also post the contents of your db.log and debug.log files so that we can see what kind of corruption is occurring (sometimes this information is logged).

I'm starting over from a clean backup of the wallet.dat file before I tried to recover it and mess with it on a new bitcoin installation and sync.
Hopefully it'll work at least where I can get into it. I can't even open it now.

Keepin' on truckin'... :D

Inform us what happens after you try -salvagewallet.

There is python project call pywallet: https://github.com/jackjack-jj/pywallet
Can use that tool to try and recover data if -salvagewallet don't work.

Plz remember make few backup and store on few devices before u attempt anything.

I don't think pywallet will do the trick here.
This project hasn't got an update since 4 years now.

It doesn't work properly with new wallet files since there are parameters inside which are not understood by this tool.

I have found a way to see if a wallet.dat file is a Bitcoin file or an altcoin file.

Assuming you had funds there or generated any address, if you open it with Wordpad or any other text editor, you can ctrl+f and search "name"", and you'll see the list of addresses you had on that wallet, so if they begin with "1..." it will be a Bitcoin wallet, assuming it's not BCash or any other alt which uses also "1..." format but most altcoins use their own number or letter.