Bitcoin Forum

Near the end of June I sent about 7 coins to a friend.  Days later he told me that the bitcoins never arrived.  Because I was busy I didn't check on things for a few more days, but when I finally opened my wallet again I was surprised to see that the transaction still said "0/unconfirmed" for that transaction, even though I had an updated blockchain.

Again, I got busy and didn't have time to sort it out.  I assumed that my friend had given me a bad address.  As it turns out, he didn't.  The transaction as it appears in my wallet says that 7 BTCs were taken from my balance and turned over to his address which appears correctly in the transaction history of my wallet.  I kept putting off really looking into it.

Today, I attempted to send 5 BTCs to somebody else.  Now the same thing appears to have happened.  The transaction says "0/unconfirmed".  The address is correct.  But, blockexplorer does not show any incoming activity to the address I attempted to send coins to.  The coins, however, have been deducted from my balance.

The two transaction I speak of are the last two transactions I've attempted to make from this wallet.  I'm running OS X Lion, though the first transaction would have been when I was still running OS X Snow Leopard.  I'm currently running v0.3.24.  I have the latest block history.  I run bitcoin from an OS encrypted user account.  Additionally, I encrypt the wallet.dat using truecrypt and I only decrypt it when I need to send coins or check the balance.  Otherwise it's encrypted and backed up in several places.  My computer is malware and virus free.

What the fuck is going on?  Why are coins being deducted from my balance, not arriving at their destination, and not recieving any confirmations?  I'm concerned for the rest of the coins in that wallet.  I don't know what to do because I'm afraid that if I try to send them to a new wallet the same stupid shit will happen.

http://i52.tinypic.com/2vkx26o.png

You mean you havent sold them all already  ???

Are you sending with miner fees?  I'm seeing more and more fees are required (beyond what the client is asking for) to get transfers though in any reasonable timeframe.

Maybe I will if I could get the damn things out of my wallet without them vaporizing.

No, I haven't sent with any fees.  So, what, since I didn't add any fees it's going to take months to get the transactions through?  Without paying the fee might they never get processed?

It most likely will get processed... but yea I could picture it taking a long time....

I've see it take as long as 6 days if you send something without fees....

Over 2 months, though?  That can't be right.

Is there some kind of debug output I can generate to see what the client did with these transactions?  Were they even announced to the network?  Is there some way to retroactively add transaction fees to past transactions that didn't have them?  If not, maybe there should be, cuz this is fucked up.

You can see the unconfirmed transactions here: http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/

I doubt the 2 month old is there though, but it does not hurt checking. The new one should be there.

You can make new transactions with the same coins. i.e., double spend them, but just send them to the same addresses you were going to send them to. It might help to include a bigger fee. If the new transactions are accepted, the old ones will be irrelevant.

I tried searching the page for the address to which I attempted to send the coins this morning and didn't see anything.

How do you make new transactions with the same coins?  Also, I know the recommended transaction fee is 0.01, but is that enough to get a transaction in a new block within, say, a day?

Well I don't think the present client supports that, but in principle you just construct a new transaction. Make sure to use up all the coins in those addresses, so if anyone tries to plug the first transaction into a block, it won't be valid. Someone made a client that lets you pick which addresses you send from, you could try that one. You could try removing all the blocks in your block chain since before you sent the coins, that way the client doesn't think it's double spending.

Another thing is to just wait with your client on, because it will rebroadcast the transactions after a random amount of time less than 30 minutes.

Won't starting the client with --rescan fix this?

No, that's when you know the transaction's been processed, you can find it in blockexplorer but your wallet isn't showing it :)

In his case, his wallet knows the transaction but nobody's willing (or succeeded yet) to process it into a block.

Ah, okay...

Idea: copy the wallet and export the private keys using bitcoin-tools, compile the latest experimental client from git and import the keys into a new wallet (the ones that received coins).. the record of the transaction being broadcast to the network will not exist in the new wallet, so you can double-spend them to a different address in your new wallet.

Edit: It's possible to transfer keys between your old wallet and a blank one by using pyWallet.

Yeah, I tried -rescan first thing and it didn't work.

I'm seeing the same thing with the latest send on one of my computers (tx not announced). On my other (same OS, same version etc) I don't have any problems at all.

On the problematic client Bitcoin is constantly writing 1MB/s data to the disk (edit: And not to any file I can see growing in size!). Thinking it was due to a corrupted blockchain I cleaned it up and copied the blockchain from my other client - but it didn't make a difference.

Slightly weird. I'm leaning towards an OS X specific bug in .24 that doesn't manifest itself on all configurations. The only difference between my two clients is that one is portmapped (>100 connections) and the other isn't (8).

you could delete your blockchain, then restart the client with -rescan and it'll re download the block chain and those 0/unconfirmed should vanish.  It'll take a while to download the chain though.

Will

I had the same problem in the past, only way i was able to solve it was to make a copy of the wallet.dat, remove everything, blockchain, database. Put back an old backup of the wallet (one that doesn't contain these transactions yet) and let it redownload the full blockchain.
Today -rescan might just do the trick, but since the transaction is stored in the current wallet.dat i think it still shows the coins missing.

Why would he need a fee to send 5 & 7 BTC?!?!?

edit: sent 1 BTC and it has 4 conformations already. Stop spouting shit.

Same thing happened to me Wednesday.  I had corruption in my block chain.

I shut down Bitcoin
Made a copy of the entire bitcoin directory for safety
Deleted everything in the bitcoin directory
Copied over a wallet.dat from before the corruption started
Restarted Bitcoin
Bitcoin downloaded the block chain and rebuilt my missing transactions.

My corruption was the result of my Bitcoin client crashing.  Pay attention to any error messages you see.

First of all, are you now, or were you ever, running a modified client that messed with the required minimum transaction fees?  If so, there's your problem.

If not, then your problem is that you have an unconfirmed transaction that the network no longer sees, and that will thus never be confirmed, tying up your coins in your wallet indefinitely.  You need to remove that transaction from your wallet file.  I don't specifically know how to accomplish this, but as the wallet file is just unencrypted binary data, and the client that reads and writes the wallet file is entirely open source, it is definitely possible.  Somewhere out there should be a wallet munger program that lets you import/export private keys, modify transactions, etc.  Obviously make a wallet backup before trying anything like that.

So, thankfully I backup my wallet frequently.  I found a backup that I made on 6/24, the day before the first bad transaction on 6/25, and restored that wallet.dat and the bad 0/confirmations transactions were gone and my balance reflected what it should be had I never initiated those transaction.  I still don't understand why, even if I didn't include a fee, those transactions essentially never got off the ground.  Later I'm going to cross my fingers and try to send a coin or two with a transaction fee and see if everything's back to normal.

Moral of the story, make frequent backups people!

I never pay a fee and have yet to ever see a transaction take longer than 20 minutes to confirm. FWIW.

For those who didn't make any backup, I made a script that cancels those tx's: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=31418.0

you can use jack's script, or download your own berkeleydb tools and rebuild the db following this guide

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=31415.0

Yeah I stopped waiting as well now. I have a new automatic & encrypted backup made whenever the wallet file changes so it was easy to roll back (complete version history available).

I'm still interested in exactly what the Bitcoin client is doing writing 1MB/s to disk with no actual file getting any larger though.


Ah I've missed that, although I do use the excellent pywallet script for wallet manipulation :)

I think you should change the title of your thread from " bitcoin client is eating my bitcoins, WTF?"  to  bitcoin client is not confirming my transactions, WTF?

I came to the forums and saw this thread title, and instantly had a horrible fear that there was a major bug with the client.

If you like bitcoins,  there is no reason to cause unneeded alarm with sensational message subjects that are not accurate.

+1, the devs monitor for threads like this, and the title is definitely misleading

I think it is updating the database of peer IP addresses in a stupid way. I never got up to 500 peers but I've noticed that the more connections you have the more frequent the updates.

Hmm. The code must be extremely bad if it can reach 1MB/s doing that.

I've actually given up on getting this client installation to perform any send transactions. With the new fixed wallet I again tried sending coins and just like last time they stayed at "0/unconfirmed". I even got to see "0/offline?" - this on a client with 8 peer connections and receiving updates to the block chain without issues.

(I don't consider the title to be misleading - if we ever want to get non-techies to feel comfortable using Bitcoin with the official client)

Fair enough.  Title changed.

Also, I tried to resend 5 BTCs with a 0.1 transaction fee (10x more than the minimum) and after almost 2 hours the transaction still says 0/unconfirmed.

I'm glad it's useful ;)

Thanks for changing the title.
The transaction fee is not the problem.
You are just throwing money away with that.

how many connections is it showing and are you using the latest client?   what you did should have worked.

In most cases I agree with you, but I told him to do that just to see what it was... I was trying to rule out everything I could think of...  my next line of thought was that he's possibly using an older version of the client.

Both him and me are using the latest client on OS X - and at least mine has 8 connections and is getting block chain updates.

I still believe there's a bug that shows up on some system configurations. I'd be interested to hear if others on Mac are seeing the 1MB/s constant writing to disk as well. It could be a tx-thread gone into a loop.

("Some", since my other client has no issues performing transactions)

edit: Possibly related thread about the Mac client and hard drives on the newbie forum: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33237.msg415894#msg415894

A while back I seem to remember somebody saying something about problems with the bitcoin client running from an encrypted home directory on OS X.  I do notice that it runs much more responsively from a non-encrypted account.  On my encrypted account sending bitcoins can take up to 10 minutes, and usually during that time the CPU is being used a lot and Activity Monitor reports bitcoin as "not responding".

Edit:  Oh, and my latest transaction shows 1 confirmation now, so it looks like it worked...after over 2 hours.  Is this how this whole thing scales?  In another year I can imagine it being no faster than the present banking system for international transactions.

Well, yes the "satoshi client" code is really bad. On Mac it shuld be very easy to debug; just do:

sudo dtruss -n bitcoin

and it will show you what's it doing while grinding the disk.

Maybe this problem will motivate you to send fees. Like i always do.

Fees are required in most cases, it is part of the design of Bitcoin to compensate miners for the work they do making it cryptographically difficult to attack the blockchain. If you sent without fees, then you would have used an altered client that doesn't comply with the fee rules, and you get to eat your humble pie.

Older bitcoin clients (in bitcoind at least) have this option to remove unconfirmable cruft, but this does not seem to be present in .23 onwards:
deletetransaction <txid>
Normally used when a transaction cannot be confirmed due to a double spend.
Restart the program after executing this call.

Wait, what? None of the two replies above have anything to do with the issues discussed in this thread.

(TX not getting sent at all is not due to fees and fee-less .24 is a configuration option and not something "altered")

In my case I have two identical clients where one cannot send while the other can. I've even copied the blockchain between them so I know it's not corrupt.

I am referring to the case of the original poster, not your followup posts which may or may not be the same issue. At this time I have not reviewed what you have posted closely, but it is important to note how the Bitcoin transaction fee policies come about:

-0.01 BTC fee per kilobyte of transaction, but:
  -If the blocksize (size of all transactions currently waiting to be included in a block) is less than 27 kB, transactions are free.
  -If the blocksize is more than 250 kB, transactions get increasingly more expensive as the blocksize approaches the limit of 500 kB. Sending a transaction when the blocksize is 400 kB will cost 5 times the normal amount; sending when it's 499 kB will cost 500x, etc.

-If the blocksize is over 4kB, free transactions in the above rules are only allowed if the transaction's priority is above a certain level.

-Transactions within each fee tier are prioritized based on several factors. Most importantly, a transaction has more priority if the coins it is using have a lot of confirmations. Someone spamming the network will almost certainly be re-using the same coins, which will lower the priority of their transactions. Priority is also increased for transactions with more BTC, and reduced for transactions with more data.

You can see the more factors in play, the lower the priority. Version 0.3.23 requires a minimum of .0005 BTC for low priority transactions.

This means there are several factors involved whether the bitcoind that p2p network members and miners are using relays a transaction or includes it in a block, and the newer version of bitcoind have different rules.

I can deduce from the screenshot that the original poster's bitcoin address is 1NUd7YZYkVYoue7BgY6URsfKCLDRnu7CgL (http://blockexplorer.com/address/1NUd7YZYkVYoue7BgY6URsfKCLDRnu7CgL). Here are the transactions that were picked up:

http://blockexplorer.com/tx/fc7f3b9b37ebd99a5c4479938f017425457aa392478dae4deed20382cf7a0778#i621162
fee paid: 0

http://blockexplorer.com/tx/4b66d56b8b9fed33f94c21082b6f0756c407c6f41e967dcf94b304c67210b3cb#i727079
fee paid: 0

http://blockexplorer.com/tx/400f321bf6d058d5ed59acc18a25cbf16976fc96bf13f7009c435f307c637209#i872806
fee: 0

http://blockexplorer.com/tx/e995efbd5e993293e393f4b92e3d082f6be4bfa3f05bb7bfc0681dcdd2fd8d4f#i888845
fee: 0

(un-relayed transaction here)

http://blockexplorer.com/tx/cdce1cf30ab041015ae5150eaa8702bf1d37ab1d27c50030bcbc8f6cc4184951#o0
fee: .1

As we can see, there's a lot of no-fee paying. If you read the rules above, you see that several factors affect whether a free transaction gets forwarded or included in the block chain - how many other transactions are already waiting to be included in a block, how recent the coins are that are being used (note the original poster just received a payment the day before, new coins could have been used in the transaction), the size of the transaction, etc. The current bitcoin client will evaluate these rules and indicate the fee to be paid on the transaction, and the other clients know these rules and can decide to toss it in the bit bucket if it doesn't qualify to be free. Note that the client version of other clients on the network gets updated, so previously lenient rules may be more enforced.

While you can set the TXFEE=0 in the newest client's config file, it will not allow you to send transaction that would require a minimum fee (at least not without some hacking or using a non-official version). If the newest mainline client doesn't prompt for a fee, that's because you are in the rare position of using old coins, there are low transactions waiting on the network, and the size of the transfer in KB is small (mainly because you are spending just coins from a single input.)

I'm indeed talking about "0/unconfirmed" (even "0/offline?") and never announced, with an 8 peer connected client fully up to date (and getting updates) block chain.

The thread starter had a month old transaction. Even with zero fees that would've gone through. It's likely it, like in my case, was never announced.

So, just for fun, I redid the exact same transaction I couldn't do with one client with the other one instead. Again, the only real difference is that one is port mapped and has >100 connections, the other is behind NAT with 8. They use the same block chain files, they're up to date and all that.

Both clients seem to write 1MB/s constantly to disk (can someone else on Mac please check this? edit: And are you using Filevault) but the well-connected one runs off an SSD which means I've never noticed it before.

NAT client: "0/unconfirmed", "0/offline?" - sends are never announced. Tried multiple times to send 2 BTC (old coins), no fee.

Mapped client: Sent 1 BTC (old coins), no fee. The announce was instantly visible on bitcoincharts/bitcoin and after a few minutes it could be seen in blockexplorer and had 1 confirm.


I guess one explanation lies in how many peers they have, but the NATed client is never even able to make the announce to the network even though it gets block updates just fine. If that's the general state for NAT clients then that needs to be rethought. Else I'm leaning towards an OS X specific problem in .24 that might or might not be related to the weird disk writes.

I think it might be an OS specific issue. My Win7 client runs behind the firewall only ever has 8 connections but so far all my transactions, with or without fees have gotten their first confirmations in less than 1 hour.

Have you done any port-forwarding in the router, or do you have multiple IP addresses from your ISP? It is my understanding that if you port forward 8333 to one computer, you will completely kill bitcoin for other computers on your local network.

Well, port 8333 is indeed mapped to the other client, but the NATed client that can't announce sends has 8 peers and receives blocks just fine. If the send code needs incoming ports (which I seriously doubt) then that's a huge bug.

You can read what Satoshi wrote about it: http://bitcointalk.org/?topic=54.0

Yeah there's no problem there.