Did you try doing what the error message suggests and either:

1. Tried clicking the "click here" link to learn how to "refresh your wallet"
or
2. contact Exodus' "24/7 support" using either the email address provided or the "contact exodus" button?

Seems like that might be a good way to find out why Exodus' service is not working properly

I wouldn't say they were trying very hard...
 

At least they're "honest"... 

It honestly doesn't look like any wallet.dat I've looked at. Most likely the wallet file is either totally corrupted or you don't actually have a valid wallet.dat... especially given that Bitcoin Core and PyWallet refuse to read it.

Try opening it in a plain text editor and see if you can search for: name

If there are any that show up, you should see something that looks like a Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrency) address immediately following the word "name"... and if you find that, then you might actually have a wallet.dat that is just corrupted and you might be able to recover some data from it.

The blockchain sync should automatically rescan your wallet as it goes (assuming you have the wallet already loaded in Bitcoin Core while it is syncing).

Also, you don't need to muck around with commandline arguments or shortcuts... you can just use the rescanblockchain command in the console in Bitcoin Core.

Depending on the service the sender used, you can often (but not always) tell if someone has sent from an exchange or other custodial-type service... as your transaction will be "batched" up and included in a "Pay2Many" type transaction (ie. 1 or 2 very large value inputs and then 10s/100s of smaller outputs). However, even a scenario like this is not "100% guaranteed", as software like Electrum and even Bitcoin Core allow users to send "Pay2Many" transactions... and some online services don't batch transactions.

Sometimes, it is possible to lookup the spending addresses on walletexplorer.com and you will see the name of the exchange/website (for the bigger, more popular ones).

But in general, it's pretty much impossible to identify with any real certainty what wallet a transaction originated from...


May I ask, why you want to know and/or care?

Yes, bob123's instructions are sound. I have a slightly more thorough guide (with pretty pictures) here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4746784.msg43255691#msg43255691


Secure, yes... anonymous, No.

Bitcoin is far from anonymous... pseudo-anonymous at best if you follow best practice. Don't make the mistake of ever believing that you're anonymous.

I just tested this (with TestNet)... I created a "paperwallet" (using the TestNet version of bitaddress)... then sent 0.1 tBTC to it (from Electrum)... then I selected the "Cold Storage" option from Mycelium menu, tapped "QR Code" and scanned the QRCode of the private key generated on bitaddress...

It detected the 0.1 tBTC, I setup a transaction for 0.0123456 tBTC and sent it back to a new address from my Electrum wallet... Looking at the transaction created by Mycelium, the "change" was sent back to the original paper wallet address:



So, I'm not sure what happened in the OP's case? Maybe just rescan the QRCode from the paper wallet and see if it finds the correct address/coins? Mycelium says after you scan the QR Code that it is "using a private key with the following Bitcoin address:" and then lists the Legacy, Nested SegWit and Native SegWit addresses generated from that private key.

Bottlenecks for syncing of Bitcoin Core are usually:

1. HDD instead of SDD. Due to the way Bitcoin Core, there is a lot of reading/writing from/to disk during sync. HDDs are orders of magnitude slower than SDD... storing the blocks (or at least the "chainstate") on SDD will significantly boost sync speed.


2. Low RAM. If you don't have much RAM, Bitcoin Core needs to write out to disk more often... which will exacerbate any storage device speed bottlenecks as per #1. If you have a lot of RAM, or you're not using your machine for anything else while Bitcoin Core syncs, you can set the dbcache value to at least half of your system's total RAM amount. This gives Bitcoin Core more room to store temp data in RAM rather than reading/writing to disk. You can set this within Bitcoin Core GUI in the "Settings -> Options -> Main" tab:

(As you can see, it defaults to 450MB)

or you can use the dbcache parameter in your bitcoin.conf file:
Where XXXX is "half your total ram" in Megabytes... ie. 4096 = 4Gigs, 8192 = 8 Gigs. 16384 = 16 gigs etc.


3. Low-end CPU. There is a lot of processing involved with validating all the blocks etc... a low end CPU will slow this down


4. Low bandwidth. It's a total of ~350Gigs of data to download... if your internet is super slow, this will impact the syncing rate. It's generally not as much of a bottleneck as the other 3 points, unless you're still on dial-up or your ISP is throttling your connection due to bandwidth restrictions etc.


5. No peers. Generally not a huge issue for the vast majority of users, but if you're not seeing any connections on the "Window -> Information" screen, then it's possible that your connection is blocked (check firewall settings etc).

Was just playing around with BitGo (trying to figure out how to restore their wallet to Electrum)... they seem to support BCH and are "technically" 2FA as they setup a 2-of-3 multisig and you need to config 2FA on your account using GoogleAuth or YUBIkey etc.

However, given the difficulties I've been facing trying to figure out how to recover the BitGo wallet, I would not recommend them.

That's not entirely accurate... if the OP sends their entire balance, the "unconfirmed" UTXO will be included. However, this only applies if the webwallet in question (BitGo) actually supports the spending of unconfirmed coins.

I've never used BitGo, so not sure if they support that or not.

For anyone who is interested in this, you can find the "Wall Observer Thread" over there --------> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.0

try to seach in the .bitcoin directory using this command:

By default... any file/directory that starts with a '.' is "hidden" and won't be shown with the standard ls command... you're looking for .cookie file, so you need to show hidden files/folders using the -a switch.

I created a somewhat "hacky" fork here: https://github.com/HardCorePawn/pywallet

It suppresses the "keymeta" output spam... and ignores other errors in more modern wallet.dat files (from the top of my head, "bestblock" and "hdchain" cause issues, there may be others). Fairly sure that it would break the "recovery" feature, but it makes --dumpwallet work

Given the large increase in price of BTC, and the obvious surge of "help I have old wallet.dat, how do I get keys/bitcoins!!" type posts that inevitably accompany a bullrun, it would be useful to have:
- updated Pywallet that works "properly" with newer wallet.dat files and doesn't just suppress/ignore errors
- Python 3 compatibility would be a bonus, as Python 2 is now completely unsupported

I'm not sure why you even want a .pem file? No wallet in existence uses .pem files... and trying to extract keys from them is quite difficult and time consuming.

What are you actually trying to achieve? The mass extraction of keys from a wallet.dat without requiring Bitcoin Core and/or the password?

If you're just wanting to extract keys without having to load the wallet.dat into Bitcoin Core, then PyWallet is probably the best utility for just dumping keys straight from a wallet.dat (it even works with encrypted wallets). If you're trying to dump keys from encrypted wallet.dat files without knowing the password... well, that's just impossible.

---

With regards to PyWallet, I have a forked version of PyWallet that suppresses all the "KeyMeta" warnings (caused by updates to wallet.dat format since PyWallet was last updated) available here: https://github.com/HardCorePawn/pywallet

So, instead of hundreds of lines of:
being output, they are just ignored... It is non-essential info if you're just after private keys etc anyway.

NOTE: Python 2 is required, will not work with Python 3.

Usage to dump the wallet:

for instance, if your wallet.dat was in E:\bitcoin, and encrypted with passphrase 'abc123', you'd use something like:

To answer your query properly, we'll need more information...

What wallet do you currently have? Do you have an Electrum "cold storage" setup already configured with one "offline" (air-gapped) PC and one "online" PC? Do you just have a "standard" online Elecrum install on one PC? or are you using a completely different wallet and want to migrate to using Electrum?

Also, not as important, but useful information would be the Operating System you are using (and or any mobile devices you're wanting to use).

Ok, which one would you prefer to change? Probably easiest to change Bitcoin Core... basically, you just start Bitcoin Core using the -choosedatadir commandline switch, and it will pop up the "first run" dialog asking where you want to store the data...


A few things to note with this dialog...

1. Make sure you select the "Use a custom data directory" option and then set the path correctly, or it will create a THIRD copy of the blockchain!
and
2. Make 110% sure that the "Discard blocks after verification" box is NOT checked! If you leave this checked, it will immediately delete all but the most recent 2 gigs of blockchain data!


Also, if you see any "free space" warning in red like in my screenshot, you can probably ignore it... you already have the full blockchain downloaded in E:\Bitcoin, so it doesn't actually need 324 GB "free" as it won't need to download them.

Then you don't have any bitcoins...

It's essentially the golden rule of bitcoin... "no private key, no coins"

It is impossible to say with any certainty how long it is going to take.


Your fee rate is around 2 sats/byte... Your transaction is (according to blockstream.info) currently 48.78 vMB from tip. This means, that if no new transactions were created, it would take around 48 blocks for your transaction to be confirmed, which would be around 480 minutes... or 8 hours.

However, that would be an absolute minimum amount of time as, obviously, other people are going to be creating/sending transactions... a lot of which will pay higher fees than you. Indeed, since I started typing this, your transaction is now 49.20 vMB from tip... so it's already another block further away from being confirmed

In reality, it's likely to take days given the current state of the network, due to the current high prices and high network activity. Things do tend to quieten down on the weekends, so there is a chance that the mempool could "empty out" and your transaction will get confirmed then... but again, no guarantees on that.

Would need to see the transaction ID/details to get a proper understanding of what is truly happening... but the "Transaction invalid: some outputs that it attempts to spend have been already spent or are no longer valid" error generally occurs when you spend unconfirmed coins (ie. you're spending coins that were received in a transaction that was not yet confirmed) and then there is a "double-spend" or "RBF" executed on the parent transaction, which then invalidates that parent transaction... which in turn, invalidates the coins you're trying to spend in your child transaction.

More simply:

UnconfirmedParentTransactionA -> CoinsYou'reSpending -> UnconfirmedChildTransactionB

If UnconfirmedParentTransactionA is then invalidated by a double spend or RBF etc, then "CoinsYou'reSpending" no longer exist... so you can't spend them... and you get the error.


If it then sent a while later, without the error, it sounds like UnconfirmParentTransactionA may not have been double-spent/RBF'd. Instead it sounds like it might have just been removed from the mempool of the node you're trying to broadcast UnconfirmedChildTransactionB through. This would also have the effect of making "CoinsYou'reSpending" invalid, as the parent transaction no longer exists.

Then, someone rebroadcast UnconfirmedParentTransactionA, it was re-added to the mempool, "CoinsYou'reSpending" suddenly become valid again, and "UnconfirmedChildTransactionB" is suddenly "valid" again and able to be broadcast without error.

Not really... using the 12 word seed should generate all the addresses your Bitcoin Wallet for Android would have ever created, so you don't need to worry about missing an address or anything like that.

The biggest concern would be whether or not you have potentially exposed either the seed and/or the unencrypted wallet file backup. Did you do all of this on an "online" computer? ie. one that was connected to the internet? Or did you do it all "offline"?

If you did it "online", you'd probably be better off creating a completely new wallet in Electrum using the "File -> New -> Standard Wallet -> Create a new seed" option, then move all your coins from the wallet created from the backup, to the new Electrum wallet.

Was this an exercise in making sure you could recover your Bitcoin Wallet for Android, or were you trying to permanently move to Electrum?