Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

does restoring BTC-funds with 12 word seed restore old transactions as well?


Thank you!

Yes. If you use the seed phrase to recover a wallet which you have used for transactions before, you can see all the transaction history. Go for history tab to see the transactions.

The transactions are recorded on blockchain. A reputed SPV wallet should be able to synchronize with the blackchain and let you know the amount of coins that you have and to also let you see your transaction history.

Of course, you will see all your transaction of your old wallet when you import your 12 word seed phrase of the old to the new wallet.

You should make sure that the new wallet synchronize with the blockchain for you to be able to have full access to on your old wallet and see the transaction history.

You should try this for yourself. Don't trust, verify. Restore your wallet and see if it works.

That’s one of main reasons for seed phrases to restore back everything on that particular wallet, if it were private key it would be just the transaction in the corresponding private key, except maybe the master private key.

My advice will be if it is a just the transaction history you after, it is best to use the master public key alone or better the address it self. Importing seed phrase especially if it is a cold wallet wouldn’t be advisable

As other members have already explained: all bitcoin transactions are stored on the blockchain which is a public ledger. Your wallet app will search for all past transactions linked to your addresses to calculate your actual balance and know which UTXOs are still available to spend.

If you have labeled your transactions, then those labels won't be restored if you restore your wallet from seed as those information are saved locally. You need to export them to a .scv or .json file from the old wallet then import them manually into the new one.
If you want the labels to be restored automatically then you need to use the LabelSync plugin.

If you initially created your seed using Electrum, all you need to do is import that same seed in a new Electrum wallet on your new device. But if you have a BIP39 seed created with a different software/hardware wallet (I am not advocating for exporting seeds from hardware wallets into Electrum, and you shouldn't do it unless it's absolutely necessary), you will need to tick the BIP39 seed option in Electrum's settings when restoring your wallet. You also need to point the software to the right address format and derivation path. Electrum offers an option to scan default derivation paths automatically if you don't know how to set it manually.

It's weird that you haven't already done this despite your previous history (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=925185;sa=showPosts).

Anyways, the misconception here is "restoring BTC-funds", which isn't what the 12 words seed phrase is for.
It's actually a mnemonic that can be used to (re)compute your wallet's private keys and addresses.
The client is the one that will use those restored data to check for associated transactions based from your (auto-)selected server's data.
By "associated transactions", I mean including those with outputs that you already spent.

The transactions are never lost. In fact, if you know the address of the wallet, you or anyone else can see them. They are public. The amount of words of the seed or the having access to the wallet itself has no influence on that.