Bitcoin Forum

Had sometime really interesting to me....

I have a decent balance of BTC...  close to 7 BTC,  and I decided to send some small amounts of coin (approximately $5.00 worth) to donate to a worthy development cause.

I ended up losing access for the time being to the above amount of coins!! Caused quite a scare at first...  (said I had that amount less to spend)!

I am assuming this is blowback from the P2Pool mining days I used to engage in? ?  Piles upon piles of pennies?  LOL

Ok,  I am back to having access to the inaccessible BTC, so no big worries.  It didn't take more than 20 mins....

Just haven't seen that issue yet.... Anyways, would still love to know the cause.

   

Really need more details if you want help.
What wallet did you use?
What coins did you loose access over, the 7btc or the 0.715 btc transfer?
What did you engage in during you p2pool mining days that would cause this?

I guess it was just the change and you needed some confirmations for your client to recognize that it is yours again.

The coins are back now.... so everything is normal! But it defiantly scared the piss out of me for a little bit! LOL

I use MultiBit....  I use the default wallet in it.  I lost access to the value listed in the subject for what appears to be one transaction or so (my spendable balance went down by the amount in the subject).

I did run my own P2Pool,  and I had about 2.2 TH/s from February until fairly recently (mining just isn't as profitable as it used to be). It was a merged P2Pool, but nothing special.

I am going to assume it was all the smaller deposits of coins.....

Thanks for your offer of help anyways!

If you dont mind, Id like to explain the reason for this even though you allready regained access. This will happen again and I think its important that you understand it.

Its basically this:


Bitcoin works very similar to cash in a sense that you have bills that are not divisible. In your case you had a 0.715 354 32 BTC bill, among others. Every input you receive is a single bill and if you want to spend parts of it you will get change [1]. Some wallets allow you to spend "unconfirmed change", Multibit does not by default. Thus your 0.715... BTC are esentially gone until the transaction gets its first confirmation. If you take the TX-Id and watch it with a blockchain explorer you will see that there are two outputs. One for the person receiving your coins and one for your change. Until the change is confirmed multibit treats it as it would any other unconfirmed transactions and acts like it has no control over it.

[1] this is done durring the TX, its not like the other person is actually returning anything to you. Another picture is to imagine lumps of gold. Your 0.715... BTC lump of gold has to be melted down in order to be spend partially.

This is exactly what I was saying.

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Bitcoin works very similar to cash in a sense that you have bills that are not divisible. In your case you had a 0.715 354 32 BTC bill, among others. Every input you receive is a single bill and if you want to spend parts of it you will get change [1]. Some wallets allow you to spend "unconfirmed change", Multibit does not by default. Thus your 0.715... BTC are esentially gone until the transaction gets its first confirmation. If you take the TX-Id and watch it with a blockchain explorer you will see that there are two outputs. One for the person receiving your coins and one for your change. Until the change is confirmed multibit treats it as it would any other unconfirmed transactions and acts like it has no control over it.

[1] this is done durring the TX, its not like the other person is actually returning anything to you. Another picture is to imagine lumps of gold. Your 0.715... BTC lump of gold has to be melted down in order to be spend partially.
[/quote]

Ok,  I get it now....  you explained it in a very detailed yet easy to understand way!

And it's funny...  I now realize it probably wasn't the P2Pool Mining then....  that "bill" or "brick of gold" was probably from a conversion I did a while back from LiteCoin to BTC.

I will summarize it a little..... Technically I donated to someone about $5.05 CDN with a $288.28605 CDN bill (rough conversion to Canadian funds), and had to wait until the person received the money to get some change back! But technically the receiving person didn't give me the money back....  the network/blockchain/ledger gave it back.  

Very cool explanation. I just checked out the TX-ID in Multi-Bit,  and it shows the details of it (have to scroll through the window) including that exact amount that was missing from my spendable balance (the amount int he subject line)

Thanks for everything.

Ryan