Bitcoin Forum

ill keep this short and to the point, thanks for any and all help.

 I store my wallet.dat file in an encrypted drive away from my wallet program, and delete the wallet.dat file from the bitcoin folder after every use.  I loaded up yesterday, sent a tx, it was deducted from my wallet, but no confirmations, no record of the tx on blockchain.info, and no credit for it on the other end.  Closed the wallet, resynced, re-opened, and now I have more coins in the wallet than I did before.  Made several more attempts to send coins out, some of the tx's went through, some didnt (didnt as in, they were deducted from my wallet but no credit for them on the other end, and no recored on blockchain), but they were ALL deducted from my wallet.  I ended up breaking up the tx's and sending several smaller ones until my wallet was empty.  After all the txing, for which I payed fees on most of them, including the ones with "no record", i am down quite a few coins.  

I have all the info for the tx's that were deducted, but not credited, and I cant for the life of me figure out whats going on.   pls pls pls help, I really appreciate your time.

-a noob

and yes my wallet is the newest up to date version, its the one you get from "bitcoin"

You say you keep your wallet on an encrypted drive/folder and delete it after every use.

Now for the dumb question: Did you backup the wallet back to the encrypted folder after every use, before deleting it?

thanks for the reply!    no, i keep the wallet files where they are normally downloaded onto my computer, its just the wallet.dat file that i move and encrypt

however, there MAY have been 1 time before all this crazyness started that i trashed the .dat file instead of re-copying it, but that was only after the first tx that didn't go through. as for the rest of them, i re-copied the .dat file from the system folder -> the encrypted drive every time,

That wasn't my question:
The wallet.dat file, that's the only file that matters.
After using it, do you copy it back to the encrypted drive or do you just delete it?
What I mean is, the wallet.dat that is on your encrypted folder is a new one that you copy there after every use or is still the original one that you put there the first time?

Ok, you answered above.

If that's what happened then the 100 addresses buffer would be sufficient to keep your coins there.

Have you tried running Bitcoin with the rescan option to see if you get your coins back?

I have not tried that, not exactly sure how to do that, i'm going to take screen shots of all my dead tx's, uninstall, and re-install the wallet, and try again, I think the last time i did that it had to re-sync anyway so I assume it is more or less the same thing.  It will probably take a few hours to re-load so ill let you know what happens after that.   Thanks again so much for your time and help, ive been playing with btc for a while but ive never had a problem like this.

any guess as to why I had a bunch of extra coins in the wallet when I opened it the second time? (before all the txing)

No idea why you would have extra coins on your wallet. Maybe those transactions that never hit the blockchain disappeared from your client and you got your coins back?

It's hard to pin point the problem without knowing exactly all that happened.
I've been using Bitcoin for over a year now, still using my original wallet.dat, which have thousands of addresses in it and also made thousands of transactions and never faced a similar problem.

very strange, resyncing now, ill let you know, thanks again

UPDATE:

just finished reloading wallet, and the same transactions are listed, and still, when I search them, there are no records.  i've got a network firewall, anti-everything, i've scanned the comp 100 times, and it looks like some of my btc are just never coming back..  now i'm afraid to tx anything back to my wallet at all, i don't understand how this could be possible

Well, the only solution for you is to install pywallet and remove by hand those transactions that weren't sent.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34028.0

It can get a little sketchy. I hope you're good with computers.

I whitelisted you so you can ask for help on the Technical Support forum or on the pywallet thread.

This:
 Or import all of your privatekeys into an online service like blockchain.info's online wallet, generate a new wallet using your bitcoin client, and send everything from your online wallet to your new wallet again.

How about the lost transactions, how could I have a record of something that blockchain doesnt?  does this mean my coins are gone forever?  tyvm again.

No, your coins aren't lost. If they weren't sent you still have them as long as you have the private keys for the addresses, which you do if they show up on your wallet.
That probably happened because you closed your client before the transactions got propagated to the network.
You still have those records because sent transactions get recorded on the wallet.dat file, even if they aren't accepted by the network for some reason.
In normal circumstances your Bitcoin client should rebroadcast those transactions. Have you tryed leaving it open, and connected to the network for a couple hours straight to see if they get rebroadcasted?

im sorry for being such a noob, but, how do i get them back now?  should I be asking this somewhere else?

That link I posted above is to a thread that have a tool that you can use to delete those unconfirmed transactions.

I'll move this thread to the Technical Support forum. Maybe you can get some better answers.

thanks much appreciated

I took a screenshot of all the unconfirmed transactions, when all was said and done, after I tx'ed the coins out of my wallet to an online server, I went from having 80 more coins in my wallet, to having 2 less than I originally started with, so up 80, and now down 82, or down 2 depending on how you look at it.  If i delete the unconfirmed transactions than it sounds like i'm just taking a hit, and dealing with it.  Where do I go from here?   

thanks a bunch

It's hard to say.
Please clarify something: What do you mean by taking a screenshot of the unconfirmed transactions and by tx'ed the coins to an online server?

I clicked details for each unconfirmed transaction in my wallet, and then took a screen shot, saved as jpeg.  Remember, these are the transactions that deducted from my wallet but didnt go anywhere

The only logical explanation I can think of (if this is even possible), is that somehow I got credited for the same transaction twice without actually being sent that amt (unless someone made a mistake and sent me 80btc out of nowhere).  When I opened my wallet and realized I had nearly twice the btc I had before, i sent the entire balance of my wallet between about 10 different transactions, but all to the same place (I broke the transfers up because I was worried about something weird liek this happening).  All transactions were deducted from my wallet balance, but only 78btc of 160 actually made it, while the other 82 are either non existant....or.....I don't know, but I do have the details for each and every transfer that seemed to fall off the face of the earth.

This means that overall, I have 2 less btc than I started with, but seemingly 82 less.   make sense?

Also, I was charged a fee for almost all the transactions, including ones that didn't make it...

I don't know, really. Your only hope is pywallet, like I said. Delete the bad transactions, or even delete them all and let the bitcoin client get the transactions that are on the blockchain and leave you with the remaining funds.
I could try doing that for you, but there's always the trust issue, and I can't be sure if it will work.
Only one time I deleted 1 transaction from my wallet, so I'm not a professional, far from it.
At maximum, if I did it, I'd have to send you the funds that could be recovered to a new wallet you would create, as you couldn't trust this one anymore, even if I fixed it.

EDIT: Well, the good news is that I grabed a backup of my wallet and deleted all transactions on pywallet. Restarted bitcoin-qt and no balance or transactions were showing. Closed it and this time I restarted it from the command line with the -rescan command and it retrieved all my transactions from the blockchain and my balance was there, just like before. It could work on yours also.

Thanks, I guess i need to know how to do this stuff so ill give it shot, well see what happens

thanks

See my edit above.
Which operating system do you use? Maybe i could write you a guide with what I done. But if you use windows that'll be tough because I don't remember the correct paths for stuff.

Well, the first step is you install https://github.com/jackjack-jj/pywallet
It has instructions there on how to install it for Windows, Mac and Linux.

how do you do the -rescan command, command prompt?  do i need to install pywallet first?  is the rescan thing different from jsut loading the blockchain to a new wallet?

The -rescan is done from the command line, yes. It's a feature included with the bitcoin software, no need for pywallet. But that won't solve your problem. It looks at the blockchain to see if any transaction that include your addresses are there. The transactions that are giving you the problem aren't on the blockchain, but are recorded on the wallet as unconfirmed, so -rescan will just skip them.

You really need to delete the transactions first and do the rescan after that.

ok ill try, and let it go over night, get back to you tomorrow, thanks

This seems like the simplest solution.

UPDATE:   so I tried messing around with pywallet without much luck.  I found my oldest wallet.dat file that I had stored on my drive and tried loading it.  When the bitcoin client was done syncing, the 2 missing btc were sitting right there, and all the unconfirmed transactions were gone.  It was a bit more than 2 so perhaps I was credited my fees for the transactions that didn't go through.  Anyway, very strange thing, seems to be all good now.  Where in your opinion is the safest place to keep them? not sure how much I trust this wallet...  and again, thanks for all the help