Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys. I am helping a friend out to cash out.
He has mycelium and the coins are in SA watch only account.

I tried to create backup for private keys.
But when I create a backup, QR codes are made for all the other accounts but not for this one so it' driving me crazy.

Is there a way to import private keys for this account if I don't have the keys encrypted nor the QR code?
Many thanks in advance!

How was the watch only account created?
Anyone can import a Bitcoin address into Mycelium to create a watch only wallet, but without the private key you can't do anything else.

Sure, there is.

But you actually need to have/know the private key.
If you have the private key, you can simply import a "new account" and use that private key.

Without knowing the private key, you won't be able to spend the BTC. A watch-only wallet is just an imported address without any ability to spend from (therefore watch-only).
That's basically the same as looking at any random address. Without the private information required (the private key), you can't spend from it.


If your friend does not have any backup / QR / private key, he can't spend the coins.

If he doesn't have the private keys or recovery seed (12-word seed) to that address then there's no way he can transfer that funds from mycelium to another wallet addy.

Does your friend created the account in mycelium by the "advance" mode or "Add Bitcoin HD account"? or just imported the address there?

Having a watch only wallet means you can just watch the activities of the wallet but can not spend any coin. It's the same as watching an address in a blockchain explorer. The difference is that you can create a translation but can not broadcast it until you have the private key.

I thought I could change the watch only to a standard type wallet by importing private keys?? It works for all the other SA accounts as I created backup and gained QR codes and such, so I thought it was weird that this is the only one not doing it.

You said you don't have the private keys. If you have them: import them!

Advanced->generate BTC SA account is what he believes he did.
He has the seed but the account being SA I seed seems kind of useless at this point..
He doesn't recall gaining a private key upon the creation of the account, is it possible or does he not know what he is talking about?!

Suggestion: create a new account in the same way (ideally on a different device), and see if any of the steps rings a bell.

Correct. The point of a watch-only wallet is that it can't be taken without extra information.

Mycelium hs a feature where you can change the SA account to a watch only wallet by deleting it's private key.
Since your friend believes he created an single-address account and didn't import a public key then I suppose he mistakengly deleted its private key which converted the wallet to a watch only wallet.

Unfortunately, after deleting the private key there is no way to recover it.

How do you delete private keys? He doesn't remember deleting anything from the account, so I'm trying to explain how this isn't going to work unless he recalls anything.

I would consider this a very poor feature. Do they have a warning message before executing this deletion? However, even if there is a warning, I always do not read them in full unless it's very short and very precise.

Anyway, if such thing is true then I think there are no hope left for OP.

Well, it's under Advanced for a reason.

Right after creating it, there's a warning:
Backup missing

When entering the wallet, the warning gets bigger:
No backup - no bitcoins! In
order not to lose your bitcoins
when your smartphone is lost
or broken please make a
backup of this address NOW
and keep it in a safe place!
It also gives the option to BACKUP NOW or BACKUP LATER.

When deleting the account, it asks:
There's an option to:
After clicking YES, it gives a big popup with "Are You Sure? This cannot be undone!" and the addresses you're deleting.

That's on you :P

I've never used this feature, but after checking, it looks foolproof (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot-proof).
In short: I don't think it's a poor feature at all!

No, that's not possible.

If he generated the private key using mycelium, he definitely was told to back it up. He might have forgotten this. Or he didn't care.
If he imported an address, there was never any private key to start with.

Either way, this is a prime example on how fool proof methods can never be fool proof enough and that for the majority of non-techy people a wallet has to be as simple as using a credit card without any addresses, private keys, transactions, confirmations etc.
Basically for the mainstream user, you'd need to remove every technical aspect of bitcoin. And even then it wouldn't be fool proof enough..

Let say it's not and for users like us, it seems not poor but here we have an example - someone might deleted their key without reading all this information and now it seems the coins are gone. For a noob sometimes the easy terms are unknown like "watch only".

Obviously, it varies from people to people to get the insight of a message.

I always found Electrum a very good option for me.

No, seeds of wallet are not useless and if he has the wallet seeds according your above messages then he can still restore the mycelium wallet with or without the private keys and what he need to do is restore the wallet using another device. Click on restore backup  and select the seeds option.

In OP's specific case, the mnemonic code is kind of worthless.
At least, it is not usable to recover that one private key OP's friend is looking for.

The private key never was derived from the seed. It was added as an "additional account" (or similar) inside of Mycelium. It has nothing to do with the mnemonic code and the HD wallet itself.

I think this is what it is. HD wallet works fine but SA address needs private keys but my friend really has no idea what he did or didn't do.

It's pretty large amount and I have tried to figure it out for over a week, I even recieved a very suspicious e-mail from a 'Russian hacker' who insists he can help restoring the wallet by cracking code or whatever, but I think it's time to let this go. Thanks everyone for your help.

He loaned some cash to a guy and he got paid back with the coins, and he isn't bitcoin savvy, so at this point I'm thinking it's either the guy who paid him back gave him a wrong instruction(whether onpurpose or not) or he accidently deleted the keys and don't remember.

One thing for sure is this guy is extremely cautious and probably read every single instruction very thoroughly, so I wanted to believe he didn't leave any information behind and it would be possible to recover.

Well it seems like there's no possible ways to do so, so we are giving up on it. Thank you all so much for your help.

Try to reach out to that guy (who sent the coins) and ask him about the instructions he gave to your friend. It might help to figure out what happened because knowing how the watch-only wallet was created is the key to solve this problem.

You will receive more emails/pms from newbies offering to help you. Do not trust them and ask them to post here if they want to help.

The first mistake your friend did is receiving the money he loaned someone through crypto when he's yet to understand crypto payment because the payment sender may have just scam your friend but to understand the whole issue probably.
1) Whats the relationship between your friend and the person that sent the payment?
2) Is there a chance to get the payment tx ID?

Coins are from a long time ago and he lost contact of the guy:(
Yes as tempting as it sounds I am ignoring all the emails offering help.
Thanks so much for your time and advice!

In this case, it is very well imaginable that your friend got scammed.

If the instructions were to import an address, your friend never was in possession of the coins.
This is a relatively common scamming technique to scam people who are completely new to bitcoin. Usually done via blockchain.com, but works with any other wallet too.