Bitcoin Forum

Somehow one address that I used to receive 7.68 BTC from bitstamp.net is gone from my Multibit wallet.

I have been using Multibit 0.5.18 on an Ubuntu laptop, the wallet was placed inside a Truecrypt vault that was placed in a Dropbox folder. I have also been using the same Dropbox account on other computers and I assume that the Truecrypt vault was synchronized in such a way that the newly created address in the wallet got lost.
I have now been generating hundred of new addresses in my wallet in hope of by magic finding my lost BTC, but so far no luck.

Is my BTC gone forever or can the private key for my address be generated given that I have the wallet and the password?


the BTC address is:  1B5CNWL6SmCMT9AawaGo1kBDrHG5Cbi2zD

What exactly did you put in the encrypted container? Do you have the 'multibit-data' folder?

Did you ever back up the wallet with a private key?
if so i am sure you could just load that onto another wallet

Hello ralle99,
MultiBit Classic creates addresses using a random number generator (i.e. it is not deterministic) so you need the private key that was generated when you generated it. Created any number number of new addresses won't recreate that particular address.

You need a wallet or private key export file with that address in to recover your bitcoin.
Have a read of :
https://multibit.org/en/help/v0.5/help_fileDescriptions.html

If your wallet was encrypted, then the automatic private key exports can be very useful in recovering your private keys. These are datestamped with the time of the operation so you don't tend to have sync collisions with those files as they are (practically) uniquely named.

Hi jim 618,
I was hoping that the keys, to some extent, was generated deterministically :'(

Thanks for the informative answer, now I at least know what to focus on.

I will go thru my old hard drives and see if i can find any backups with the right key.

I have the wallet_name-data folder and wallet_name.info file and the wallet_name.wallet file.

but if i understand jim618's answer, that don't help if they are the wrong version.

thanks for the answer anyway.

If the backup is too old it wont help that is correct. However the wallet_name-data folder should contain a subfolder name key-backup with individual .key files. They have a timestamp in the name. This might give you a clue as to which the last key added was.

One advise: Backup the entire folder of the wallets, for your own safety.

One thing that i did not mention when i created this thread is that i have replaced the harddrive on my laptop. I still have the old hard drive and when i started dig in to my old ubuntu installation in the old disc, I found that Multibit generate a log file. So i opened the log file and searched for my lost BTC address and to my surprise it was there!
the log also contained the location of that wallet that was used to generate it, and it turned out that i had been using a wallet that was basically an old backup of my normal wallet. the Old backup was still there on the disc so now i have my BTC back:)

sorry for wasting your time with such a trivial mistake;-)

good you have your bitcoins back ;)

That's great that your 'backup' hard disk contained your wallet data and you managed to get your bitcoin back.

You might want to experiment with a deterministic wallet (such as MultiBit HD) where you can use a set of 12/18/24 random wallet words to recreate your private keys and addresses. That way, as long as you keep your wallet words safe you can always restore from them in case of computer loss/ theft.

Thanks for the tip jim618,

I like the consent of having all keys generated deterministically from the "wallet words". I will definitely check it out!