Bitcoin Forum

Hi

I sent 0.06849 to 1A5iCBMXPJF7esUssyaaeLpTocoyW2EK6n. At this time my client, bitcoin core was syncing and was 4 hours behind.

I entered the password and everything was good. My balance deducted. But I couldn't see it under the "transactions" tab. And the syncing got stuck at 4 hours.

So, I restarted the client and now its synced, my balance deducted but nothing shows up in the transactions or the blockchain. As if the bicoins were never sent but my balance has gone down by exactly 0.06849 BTC.

Im trying to -rescan but i dont think im doing it correctly. The console gives me "Method not found (code -32601)". What am i doing wrong here?

PLEASE HELP ME.

I would at least try to -rescan successfully before panicking. Can someone guide me with that please?

Please post the TX id.

You do not -rescan from console, but you launch bitcoin core with it.

In any case shut down any running bitcoin-core first.

in Windows you hit Win + R, enter c:\program files\bitcoin\bitcoin-qt.exe -rescan and hit ok.
for Linux you open a terminal, enter bitcoin-qt -rescan and hit enter.
I assume MacOS will work similar to Linux.

Can't because it isn't showing under the "transactions" tab.

Thanks! Trying now.

Its probably lost in limbo. If the client that initially broadcasted it forgot about it and the blockchain explorers did not pick it up, its very likely that only a very few clients even know about this TX.

re-scan didnot work! now im panicking!!! pleeaseee help. any suggestions?

It is not possible for a TX to be "lost in limbo" for any amount of time. An input is always either spent or unspent. If an unspent input is part of an unconfirmed TX that has been accepted by the nodes then for all intensive purposes it is "spent pending confirmation" however if the TX does not confirm after 24 hours then the input will again be spendable.

Yea, chill for the moment. a year or so ago, I "lost" a transaction, I just figured it would eventually work itself out. it took about a week, but it did... So, give it a couple days before freaking out..

The input no, the actual TX yes.

While this is true if it is known to all the nodes, a TX may not be known to all nodes. The one in question does not show on blockchain.info [1], blockr [2] nor on blockexplorer [3] which makes me think that very few nodes know about it. While the explorers are not important I also think the miningnodes do not know about it, thus it would be impossible to confirm.


Not if the client you are using "forget" it still can spend the input. Since the -rescan did not work, OPs bitcoin-core still has no idea it is actually able to spend the input of the missing TX.


But it was well propagated, wasnt it? It would not advice panicking either, but I also think that just waiting is not enough.


I have read in the past that sometimes once is not enough. As I wrote above I dont think waiting is the way to go in your case. I personally would try at least one more -rescan because it does not take that much time. If that fails the next thing I would do is to launch with -reindex. This will take more time as you are rebuilding the data in the chainstate folder, which holds the information about your unspend outputs (see [4]).


[1] https://blockchain.info/address/1A5iCBMXPJF7esUssyaaeLpTocoyW2EK6n
[2] http://btc.blockr.io/address/info/1A5iCBMXPJF7esUssyaaeLpTocoyW2EK6n
[3] https://blockexplorer.com/address/1A5iCBMXPJF7esUssyaaeLpTocoyW2EK6n
[4] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory

Agree, i myself also had a few lost transactions that didnt appear on blockchain.
Didnt take me long time to go into panic mode, since even after re-downloading blockchain problem preserved.
In the end everything showed up and was fixed, so just dont panic

In the console, enter:


Find the output with the smallest number of confirmations.

The "txid" from that output is most likely the most recently sent transaction from the wallet.

Take a look at that txid in a block explorer such as blockchain.info or blockr.io and see if it is the transaction you think you are missing.

listunspent

I had 5 coins go missing from mutlibit a few months ago, I was doing a lot of transactions and I figured It was my error somewhere, then I looked into it and figured that I was missing exactly 5 coins. I reloaded the blockchain on multibit, or whatever they call it, and walla, it showed up. 5 coins i wasn't counting on showed up..

what wallet are you using? if it QT, then there has to be a re sync or something..

Something is up with your wallet. do this.. take your public wallets over to blockchain.info and add them as watch only see what you add up there. if you have to, take your private keys over and sweep them.. thats what i would do if i did all that i could, but try to reload the entire blockchain or re sync it.. (thats how I actually figured out i was missing 5 coins)

Try sending your entire balance to 2nd address, exchange or any other wallet.
Do a rescan, move funds back, do a rescan again, if nothing appeared in first place.
Had the same issue. That little "trick" helped me.

Good luck! :-)

EDIT: Nevermind, this won't do you any good. You need to export your private keys and import them into a new wallet.

The good news is it sounds like they aren't lost just not showing up. If all else fails you could delete the blockchain files and re-sync, but make sure that you do not delete wallet.dat for obvious reasons.

Open Console and enter
dumpprivkey <bitcoinaddress>  Note:wallet needs to be unlocked first before using this
for each address in turn.  you can copy these to notepad temporarily
(don't forget the change addresses that you may have, and dumpprivkey for each of those as well)

quit bitcoin-qt.

backup wallet.dat to another location. then delete it.

then restart bitcoin-qt, it will create a new wallet.dat, enter in console
importprivkey <bitcoinprivkey> [giveitanameornot]
for each privatekey you from old wallet that you want in this new wallet.dat

parameters in brackets are optional, if you only have one privatekey to import, you can tack on rescan=true to importprivkey eg:importprivkey <bitcoinprivkey> [giveitanameornot] rescan=true and it will rescan without the need to restart the wallet.  if you have more then one privatekey its a simpler task to import them all first, then restart the bitcoin-qt.exe with -rescan using CMD or a shortcut with that added, when its done you will have your bitcoins back.  

Alternatively you can export the privatekeys and then import them into electrum to spend immediately and skip the long waiting for rescan or blockchain download.  

its a good idea for future to only spend your bitcoin when bitcoin walletqt is fully synced and shows a healthy number of connections to peers, it will prevent this happening to you again.

if I helped, feel free to TIP ;)

its not the blockchain, its the wallet.dat that has wrong info about spent coins.  reverting to a backup wallet.dat before the attempt to spend those coins would be the easiest solution as it will not contain that lost tx and coins will spendable.  In the absence of a suitable backup, then next best option to is export and import the privatekeys from the current wallet.dat into a new wallet.dat, then rescan.

Gotcha. That should be a pretty easy fix. I'll edit my previous post so the OP doesn't waste his effort.

Did everything! -reindex a couple of times, replaced the wallet.dat with a backup and then rescanned! But nothing :(
The coins are probably lost forever! Wasn't a big amount but it is a big question mark on the software! Hopefully someone here will be able to tell me what really happened! :(

Coins can't just "disappear" like that from the chain. I had the same issue once. It get fixed after I did what I mentioned in the previous page.
Your case is really strange.

what address were the coins in before you sent them?  They will still be there and viewable on blockchain, unless you spent partial inputs previously from it, then you will have change addresses which will be in your original wallet.dat but hidden from main view, but the coins will be sitting there on the blockchain, so you would need to import the privatekey for the change addresses.

Did you dump the private keys and reimported them into a new wallet?

checked all change addresses. its none of them :(

yes! it doesnt show up :(

then only other possibility i can think of is that you tried to spend coins/inputs that no longer existed currently because the wallet that did not have up to date information on the addresses - you said the wallet was not in sync with blockchain so it would had a incorrect balance displayed at the time you tried to spend.

someone else might know another reason for your problem, but afaik if the coins are present in the addresses on blockchain they should now be present in your new wallet.dat.  bitcoins dont cease to exist, they either move to another address or stay where they are.  use blockchain.info and see the balance for each of your addresses then check against your new wallet.dat, it should all match now.

I'm bumping this, this has happened with me before on multiple watchonly addresses. It's a bug with Bitcoin and wallets. I think they connect to a node that drops and then another node doesn't know about the transaction and the wallet skips it or something crazy.

For me rescan didn't work until I restarted the client perhaps in some cases delete and resync the chain and check to see if you are on a small fork. Regardless there is a weird bug in Bitcoin with txids and I've seen it twice and I send a lot of transactions. The daemon skips transactions sometimes. I don't think this has been fixed an issue should be opened on github.

Wow these things should be investigated.....
Critics will use this against the system ...