Bitcoin Forum

For some reason, one of my outgoing transactions has simply never been verified by anyone, even though transactions that took place after that one have a whole bunch of confirmations.  My bitcoin application is still downloading lots of blocks.  I don't get it.  Is there some way to get help to get this transaction processed?

0\Unconfirmed 3/21/2011 19:10 To:1KWCfAWnxCreasVqBWRgT5aQ1zeWsUorkb  -0.10

Stuff is downloading, stuff is uploading, but this one thing just won't do anything.  Should there be some kind of time limit imposed on transactions being processed, and if they aren't processed in that time period, they get canceled or something?

Run Bitcoin with the -debug switch, double-click that transaction, and post the transaction dump here.


That will probably be in a later version. Several people have been having problems with "stuck" 0-confirmation transactions.

How can you have outgoing transactions if your client is still bootstrapping?

I don't understand that last question.  My client is running, it's downloading blocks, lots of stuff has been confirmed many times, including stuff that happened after that one that I'm talking about... it's just this one transaction that is stuck for some reason.

Uh, here is the dump:

http://img847.imageshack.us/i/bitcoindump.png
http://img847.imageshack.us/i/bitcoindump.png
I could not copy/paste the text, for some reason the application never lets me do that. :(

That transaction is invalid because the coins it is based on have already been spent. It will never confirm. Luckily, it only has one input, so you didn't lose any money.

Probably this happened because you were running two different instances of Bitcoin with the same wallet.dat, or you restored from a backup and then sent bitcoins before Bitcoin could learn about new spent transactions.

Here's the transaction that you accidentally tried to double-spend:
http://blockexplorer.com/tx/7da5483ea794430ba26819f8e3b18b041804593ceee6a1b5a50c3c2718751cf8

Ooooh... Well, how do I clear it up?  My bitcoin client thinks I spent that money, doesn't it?

You already spent that money, so you didn't lose anything by sending it again unsuccessfully. One of your other outgoing transactions for 0.1 BTC is using the same money.

There's no way to remove the transaction using Bitcoin, though it will go away if you restore a wallet backup from before the transaction. Doing this could cause other problems, though. I'd just leave it.

So, even though it says -0.10 in my transactions list, it actually doesn't get included in the Balance until there are confirmations?

Normally sends are reflected in your balance without confirmations, but I think in this case it won't be because there is a conflicting transaction. I'm not sure, though.

I just did the calculations manually, by inputting numbers into a spreadsheet and having it calculate for me.  According to my spreadsheet my balance should be 1.46, my bitcoin client says it is 1.36.  If it were not including that unconfirmed transaction of -0.10, then why is it 0.10 less in the bitcoin client's balance, than it is in my spreadsheet?  Shouldn't it be the other way around, my spreadsheet reporting 0.10 less in the balance than the bitcoin client's balance calculation?  As far as I've been able to tell I put all the numbers in correctly.  There are exactly 73 transactions, and all of them are put into the appropriate cells using the All Transactions list.  I'm confused.

I really wish this client allowed me to copy everything easily into a spreadsheet.

Are you including the broken transaction in your spreadsheet?

Yes.  Which is a negative transaction, not a positive, so it shouldn't have caused the spreadsheet's balance to be higher by 0.10, but rather lower by 0.10, than the bitcoin client's calculation.  I'm still confused.

I don't know why that is happening.

If there was a way to copy text from the bitcoin client directly into something else, like a spreadsheet, then it would be easy to verify the calculations, without human error.  I've done the best I can, and I can't see where I've made any errors in my transcription into a spreadsheet.  Therefore I think there is an error in the bitcoin client somehow.

You can get a textual list with listtransactions on JSON-RPC. I think this is how you do it, though I don't have a Windows machine with a recent enough version of Bitcoin to test it on:

Open a command window in the directory where bitcoin.exe is located. Run Bitcoin with RPC enabled:

After it has started, run it again (without shutting down the first instance) with an RPC query:

The asterisk might need to be escaped. You should get a list of all transactions.

Thanks Theymos a huge bunch! :)  Now, how do I load this into a spreadsheet?  Hmmm...