Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

Hoping someone can help, I have purchased some bitcoin and made the transaction before realising how long bitcoin core / Blockchain took to load / synchronize. I now have no space left on my surface and have deleted practically everything I can and the block chain is on 12% finished, I'm assuming my current transfer from the exchange to my bitcoin core wallet is floating waiting for my bitcoin core to load then register the transaction. Does anyone have any suggestions what I can do apart from lose the funds? Is it possible to open a cloud based wallet and somehow redirect the pending transaction? Or is it possible to continue the bitcoin core download but onto an external hard drive?
Thanks.

 Where did you obtain an address without loading the wallet to begin with?

These are all valid possibilities!
First: Make a backup of your wallet.dat if you haven't done it yet.

1. You can export the private key, and import it into Electrum (https://electrum.org/#home) for quick access.
DO NOT SHOW YOUR PRIVATE KEY TO ANYONE!

2. As an alternative, you can restart Bitcoin Core with the prune=550 option. It will take only a few GB on your computer, but you still need to complete the 185 GB download (this takes a while).

3. Using an external hard drive is possible too, but slower.

Take your pick, it saves me from typing unnecessary details.

Bitcoin Core loads a wallet the moment it starts up. It doesn't need to be synchronized to produce receiving addresses.

If all went well, your transaction is confirmed already. Your Bitcoin Core doesn't need to do anything for that, all it does is show you your wallet.
The important thing is that you keep your private keys, which are in your wallet.dat.

No. Transactions are recorded on the blockchain. It does not require your wallet software to be open or running for the transaction to be completed and confirmed. Much like you don't need your internet banking application to be running to receive funds into your fiat bank account (bank records the transaction details).

All your wallet software does is scan the blockchain and look for transactions that relate to the private keys that your wallet contains. As LoyceV pointed out, there is a very good chance your transaction is already completed, you just can't see it.

You can check it out if you go to a block explorer (ie. https://www.blockchain.com/explorer) and enter the address you were receiving the bitcoins to, you should be able to see the balance and transaction history for that address and will be able to see if the transaction has confirmed.

You have a couple of options.

• The easiest one is to dump your private key and import it into another wallet
• You can also create, sign and send a raw transaction. This is a complicated one, if you are interested in it, just drop me a message
• You can download the blockchain to a external hard drive. Move the folder Bitcoin to E:\Bitcoin and then execute this command from your cmd
  
  • mklink /J C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin E:\Bitcoin

Don't use online based web wallets, many of them are scam or could be hacked.

Depends on how you define 'load'.
OP downloaded, installed and started core. He then probably copied his receiving address and withdraw btc to it.
Afterwards he realized it took long for the blockchain to sync/download.


@OP
If your reason to run core is not to help the network, you might as well just download a light weight client (one that doesn't need to store the whole blockchain, it uses a server to retrieve information regarding your balance/transactions).
One of the most popular (and reliable) ones is electrum (https://electrum.org/#home (https://electrum.org/#home))

I think the best way is to back up your wallet.dat and remember the private key. Then operate on another computer with enough hard disk space.

 So after getting some expert advice from LoyceV, what did you do?