Bitcoin Forum

Was purchasing some Steam games for Bitcoin and this error message popped up:

"Error: The transaction was rejected.  This might happen if some of the coins in your wallet were already spent, such as if you used a copy of wallet.dat and coins were spent in the copy but not marked as spent here."

Happened in this order:

1.  Sent 2 BTC which went through fine and showed up on the blockchain.

2.  Went to send the remaining 4 BTC owed and then I got some sort of runtime error and had to restart my computer.  Fairly certain that the error occurred due to low disk drive space.  (A transaction with 0/unconfirmed status shows -4.00BTC from my wallet although nothing shows up in the blockchain to the address I sent it to)

3.  Waited a bit for confirmations to show up on the first 2 BTC (2-3 confirmations now) and nothing about the 2nd transaction appeared on the blockchain so I went to re-send the 4 BTC and got the above error message.  My wallet now shows a 2nd -4.00 BTC transaction that didn't show up on the blockchain either although my wallet balance is showing 4BTC less as well.

Google'ing the error message has some results but no actual explanation of why or how to fix it.

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Edit: Apparently one of the 2x 4BTC transactions have shown up on the other person's wallet, although the blockchain shows both as unconfirmed.

Here's the blockchain page: http://blockchain.info/address/1DTVTpqXufEb1CwfbSMNNvNJRs1yLciMhd

http://vvcap.net/db/HkXJb8wVGpaaW1t6LsJR.htp

The 4 BTC are MIA...

Most likely your client resent the orphaned transaction after a period of time had passed and it didn't show up in the blockchain, after restart of course. 

So if it resent it does that mean that the recipient will have something show up in his bitcoin wallet?  Or will the coins just be lost into the ether?

Also, I noticed that it had a pink warning message on the blockchain mentioning a double spend or something like that.  The 2nd 4BTC transaction remains unconfirmed though.

The already confirmed transaction is going to stick, the second transaction that triggered the double-spend is going to be ignored by the network forever.  If it all happened as you said, the exact same inputs should have been used for two different transactions; but I now question your story, since this shouldn't be possible accidentally.  If the second set used overlapping transaction inputs, but not the same set, the other inputs are functionally tainted unless & until you can get a guru to dive down into your wallet.dat file and destroy the second transaction, so that it will stop resending it to the network.

I am not that guru, and it's probably not worth it.

Well, it's been half a day later and no changes in the wallet (I do have to admit though that I don't recall exactly how many BTC I had before I started sending to zakcy for the Steam games), but on the blockchain the 2nd unconfirmed 4BTC transaction no longer shows along with the message about a double spend and warning to not accept sends/receives from the person who initiated the transaction (ie. me).

Perhaps the original error message popped up and the coins were never actually deducted (best-case scenario) even though my wallet shows the transactions or the coins are just gone (worst-case scenario).

Feel free to question my story if you like but it still remains that it happened exactly how I explained things.  I'm sure people like to troll on the Internet for no reason but I would hope it'd be a bit far-fetched to make such a long and somewhat detailed post trying to figure out what happened and how to prevent or fix it if it does occur again to someone else or if it's some fault in Bitcoin as a whole.

At the least, I can be somewhat relieved that it only involved 4BTC (which sets me back about 8 days worth of mining) as opposed to a far greater amount.

https://i.imgur.com/QTMRT.png

https://i.imgur.com/2T5qJ.png

Oh man, you removed your bragging rights by censoring your balance :(.

Run in the console bitcoind.exe -rescan . It rescans the blockchain(rescan, not download!). It might help.

censoring your balance is useless, considering I can just look up your bitcoin address in the blockchain and find out your balance.
1BtFuHKpgkdxWvFXb45BXhoMPgbD8x5XGF
18i2NyJx25CX3P1sWJhqQeNEbfNes5Arpc
are two addresses you used to send bitcoins to that guy. :p

I'm that guy!

Luckily, it fixed itself a while after the mishap. The unconfirmed transaction disappeared from the blockchain trackers.