Bitcoin Forum

Hi, I know sending btc over expired wallet address will be lost, (you can correct me if am wrong)
well possible to get the fund back ?

Expired means a wallet which private key has lost. Yes, no private key no fund to access. It is lost.

Once a tx get at-least 1 confirmation then it's expensive to recover the fund, once it has 6 confirmations then forget about it. In general, no funds can be back unless you have access of the fund on the wallet it is in.

You mean that expiration Date feature on electrum, right? A bitcoin address never expires. You or the person you are sending bitcoins will still receive funds in the address and be able to spend them even if they are sent after the expiration date.

The Expiration feature is used for payment request QR code so that the person or customer who's supposed to send you some BTC can not send it to you after the quoted price has expired at the set time.

Thanks for your information and it is useful ,
The system or technology can be more informative to prevent such loss like while we about to send to the expired address, it may warn us that the address is expired and fund will be lost.
That will prevent user's bad scenario.

Addresses do not expire. You can use the same address as many times as you like over as many years as you like. As long as you do not delete the wallet file, or always have a back up, then you will always have access to that address. If someone has sent you money and you cannot see it in your wallet, then either they have sent it to the wrong address or your wallet is not syncing properly.

I am not aware of a single wallet which does this. Which wallet are you using that is incorrectly telling you addresses expire?

Again, addresses do not expire.

If you are using a centralized wallet or exchange, then they can change which addresses are linked to your account and which addresses you are allowed to use to deposit coins to. That is entirely dependent on their internal database and has nothing to do with the bitcoin protocol. The addresses in question, although they may no longer be linked to your account by the exchange, have not expired and the exchange will still have full access to them.

If you have sent coins to an address which the exchange have de-linked from your account, then your only option is to contact their support directly and explain the situation. Since addresses do not expire, the exchange will be able to access those coins and credit them to your account. Whether or not they are willing to do so is another matter, however.

can I recover funds from an old adress if have still have the private key?

Absolutely.

The quickest but safest way to do this would be to use a lightweight wallet such as Electrum. Make sure you only download it from the official site (https://electrum.org/#download), and you verify the download by following the instructions in the link at the end of this post. Once you've verified, you can install it, create a new wallet, and select "Import Bitcoin addresses or private keys".

You may need to add a prefix to your private key depending on what type of address you are recovering:

• p2pkh:Kprivatekey... if your address begins with 1
• p2wpkh-p2sh:Kprivatekey... if your address begins with 3
• p2wpkh:Kprivatekey... if your address begins with bc1

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https://bitcoinelectrum.com/how-to-verify-your-electrum-download/

Aside from what has been mentioned by leo, this 'expiry' features exist only on any third-party related services where you need to send a specific amount of bitcoin within a timeframe due to various reasons. For example, shopping with bitcoin where the rates are denominated in fiat. On the network itself, that address is still accessible as long as you have the pkey.

How to Safely Download and Verify Electrum [Guide] (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5240594.0). It is good document to verify Electrum wallet. Don't automatic trust him to get GPG signature of ThomasV, do your double checks to be safe. It is the ThomasV's public key (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spesmilo/electrum/master/pubkeys/ThomasV.asc) that I get from the Electrum site, you can see it when you visit the site, at How to verify GPG signatures.

I see OP is confusing about private key and public key, then addresses so spend sometime to read the Mastering Bitcoin (chapter 4) (https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook/blob/develop/ch04.asciidoc). They are one-way processes so if OP still has private key, he can recover wallet, then get access to the fund.

If you have an unsolved problem, please describe it as precisely as you can.

As previously mentioned, addresses do not expire, ever.
Transactions can not be reverted.

Please tell us which wallet you have used, where you sent the coins to and what exactly the problem is.
The more information you provide, the easier it is for us to help you and therefore you'll receive a solution faster.

By default address wont expire, But its an feature or limitation enabled by wallet custodian for their wallets.
I have already shared one of the examples where the custodian support acknowledges the issue, otherwise they wont.
I have seen some other wallet custodians also having this expiration on their wallets address.

Then tell this person to provide full information regarding sender/receiver wallets, etc..
Especially since the receiver seems to be some service, they are the only one able to help you.




Are you with "wallets" actually referring to a wallet?
Please be more precise.

Who is the receiver? Which service/website/wallet etc. ?
Tell your friend to contact the support of the receiver (website, service, etc.). Addresses do not expire. The used service received the BTC.

Yes I have asked him those information about the issue
also recommended to contact the support once i got to know it, for the least possibility of recovering the fund
i dont know whether he is upset due to the loss or privacy something, couldnt get much detailed info

Wallet address doesn't expire as already been said by others but according to the link you provided the exchange in the subject set time frame for every BTC deposit wallet they provided for their users which make it possible for such deposit wallet to expire cause that's how the exchange designed their activities in terms of anonymity.

If you are not frequently using that custodial wallet you might contact the support, but I never heard about the limitation of inactivity will be expired. This is the reason why I didn't hold my coin for a long time in any custodial wallet, it will take time to contact the support for the reactivation of your account if you are using the email address and phone number verification, make it sure still you can access on it.

They were right, once Bitcoin address was generated upon making a Bitcoin wallet. It will never expire or either vanish. Even the chances of having doublicate address, it wont happen. So, there's no reason your Bitcoin address will be expired, as long as you have keep the private key and password, you can restore it anytime.