Bitcoin Forum

Hi , been mining since february and received my first payout from slush pool , my problem is that in the receive coins box on my account I put the sending address to receive coins , not the receive address to receive my coins . Are they lost ?
Hope this makes sense , any help or advice , thanks in advance .

Coins that are sent to an address which you do not have a private key to is lost. Unless someone is using that "wrong" address and is kind enough to send them back to you, you have lost 3 months' earnings. Sorry.

Check the address in a block explorer. See if the address is being used. If it is owned by someone, you can send a small amount of coins to the "wrong" address with a signed message, asking them to forward those coins to you. Slim chance, but worth a try.

That's one thing ,  I didn't know you can look up address's . If its not being used is there anything I can do . Also I have tried importing it through bitcoin consul but I get code error 5  . Are the send and receive address in the same format of encryption .
Thanks for your reply jbrnt .

There is no such thing as sending address and receiving addresses.

There are just addresses.

You sent your coins to someone elses address.   To use an analogy it would be like you intended to mail $100 bills to your postal address but accidentally for the past three months you have been mailing $100 to someone else's mailbox. 

Obviously you can't just import another person's address and have the ability to spend their coins.  If you could then Bitcoin wouldn't be very useful would it.  Your only option is to contact the person who owns/controls the address you sent coins to and ask them to send it back.  If they are nice (and still have the private key) then you might get your coins back.  If they don't then you aren't getting the coins back.

I  take the loss . It's just hard to understand address and private key. I'll do more reading ,

Thanks deathandtaxes

You don't need the private key to send or receive the wallet will sign transactions for you as needed.  You just need to send coins to your address.  If you really want the private key for one of YOUR addresses open the debug window in the client and type
dumpprivkey <your_bitcoin_address>.  The problem is your wallet doesn't have the private key for someone elses address (for obvious reasons).

Sorry man.  If the address you sent the coins to is an exchange, merchant, or web wallet there is a good chance they may be able to return the funds to you.  If the address is listing in your wallet's address book it is probably because you "paid" them at some point in the past.  If you can figure out who it is, you can always ask.

Would the private key be in an old version of bitcoin - 0.86 .
I deleted it and did a fresh install of version - 0.9

The private keys are allways in your wallet.dat no matter which version. I dont think the wallet.dat gets deleted while uninstalling. If you however just deleted the folder with the wallet.dat, your coins are gone.

Starting to understand keys and address now . The hunt begins for my old wallet.dat
Thanks shorena

thats sad man, hope u will recover

Sorry to hear your loss, but at least you have learned something new about bitcoin today.
Good luck for your hunt. :)

Thanks for your support .
Everyone .  :)