0 - mocacinno

Thank you for brightening my dull friday afternoon 

Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous. You can follow the unspent outputs, and if (at one point) an address linked to an exchange or service with mandatory KYC is funded, you have a (very small) chance of recovering your funds.
Offcourse, as soon as the funds have moved a couple of times, there's a small chance of finding the real culprit but instead you'll find an innocent person that just got payed by an unspent output that could once be linked to a crime.

There are a couple of things you can do if you get scammed tough:

• Go to the police, at least they'll be able to gather some statistics and maybe if they ever crack down a huge scam network they might be able to recover your funds
• Follow the unspent outputs and check walletexplorer if one of the funded addresses is ever from a KYC mandatory service. Maybe you won't find the culprit, but odds are you'll end up with somebody that did business with the culprit. Offcourse, if a mixing service of some sorts is used, your trail ends
• Depending on the mode in which you were scammed, it might be possible to get to the ip or account of the scammer... Bitcointalk and other fora/services keeps ip logs, domain names need to be registered, chat applications need to be downloaded or connected to a central server,... All of these things can be faked/hidden tough

You're also right about monero. Once BTC gets exchanged for a privacy coin, you're more or less out of options...

Maybe it's a good idear to tell us what happened exactly, it's kind of hard to give advice without knowing the exact story...

I have 5 tBTC on my mobile wallet... I can send it to you if you post a signed message you'll give me the tBTC back once you're finished with your tests. I'm not a tBTC hoarder, but i do develop applications from time to time, so i use the tBTC myself from time to time, and i don't want to have to start mining on the testnet network when i need a fresh batch.

I followed your link, and was greeted with following message:


Also, i really hate to see cloudflare ssl licences on delicate services like online casino's, and i fail to see the bitcoin logo with your accepted payment options...

What you did in the end was more or less the same as creating a new wallet and moving all funds to this new wallet... The big difference is that you sweeped all funds into the first couple of addresses of your existing wallet instead of creating an actual new wallet (by using the same seed as the previous wallet, you restored your old wallet instead of creating a new one).

All in all, this shouldn't be a real problem... As soon as you start deriving addresses that have a history, you'll see some extra transaction history, but that should be about it.

The thing is still wanted to stress (i'm repeating myself here): i don't think there is a real life situation where you'd actually need to pre-generate 60.000, 40.000 or even 5.000 addresses. Nor is there a situation any situation where you'd ever need to leave a gap between 2 derived addresses. It's best just to create a wallet, leave the gap limit at 20 and just use the next unused address in the list (or use the receive-tab, which will automatically present you with the next available, unused address).
There is no real benefit in leaving gaps, other than some security trough obscurity.

But i'm happy you got your problem sorted out. There's no real like-button on bitcointalk, but the post in which you gave thanks to the posters in this thread is certainly appreciated
By the way, it would be nice if you could lock this topic. If you keep a topic open after the problem has been resolved, spammers will keep on replying to this topic in the future.

from https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/faq.html:


Basically, increasing your gap limit untill no red addresses remain should do the trick...

Since a gap limit of 50 seems to be insufficient, try:
wallet.change_gap_limit(500)
wallet.storage.write()

if that isn't enough, increase the gap limit untill no more red addresses remain...

But am i right in my newfound assumption that you created a wallet with 60.000 addresses, then randomly picked an address each time you wanted to receive a payment instead of using incremental addresses? If so, odds are that your problem isn't easily solvable because electrum wasn't coded for this usecase.... See the link posted by RapTarX.

If you followed best practices and used incremental receiving addresses, there should be no problem (AFAIK), but if you picked random addresses, electrum will stop deriving new addresses as soon as it derived x unused addresses (x = gap limit). By picking random addresses, the derivation will stop as soon as you left a gap between 2 used addresses that's bigger than the gap limit.

In this (nonstandard) case, i guess it would be best to create a new wallet and send all funds from your wallet with 60.000 private keys (and public keys, and addresses) to the new wallet... But this time, don't pre-generate 60k addresses, just use the gui to show you a new receiving address each time you want to receive a payment... The gui will usually show you the first unused address it derived instead of picking a random one, so by following these best practices, you won't end up with a huge wallet full of gaps in the future...
A different approach would be to export the private keys of the funded addresses and import them into a different wallet (right click on every address with a nonzero balance and chose "private key", save them in an ascii file, import them into a new wallet... (warning: if you pc is compromised in any way, this is a very dangerous process)...

Just make sure you always hold on to the 60k wallet, since you never know if somebody is ever going to fund one of your old addresses (either by mistake, or as a habit).

there is a difference... walletexplorer combines the information it gets from all transactions...
If you have 3 addresses in the same wallet that were funded with 1 or more unspent outputs, you have this initial situation:
Address A: unspent_output_A_1, unspent_output_A_2
Address B: unspent_output_B_1
Address C: unspent_output_C_1

Now, let's say you make 2 transactions:
transaction 1: uses unspent_output_A_1 and unspent_output_B_1 as input and funds address D en address E
transaction 2: uses unspent_output_A_2 and unspent_output_C_1 as input and funds address F

blockchain will tell you address A and B belong to the same wallet (because unspent outputs funding these addresses were used together in tx 1)
blockchain will tell you address A and C belong to the same wallet (because unspent outputs funding these addresses were used together in tx 2)

walletexplorer will combine this info, and tell you address A, B and C belong to the same wallet because it analyses tx 1 and tx 2 and combines the info.
walletexplorer will also use community info to link addresses to services. If wallet explorer knows address A belongs to service X, it'll indicate that also address B and C belong to service X

If you re-create your wallet from seed (and you used the correct seed phrase, the one you wrote down when creating the wallet with 60.000 addresses), electrum should have derived exactly the same private keys -> public keys -> addresses as in your initial wallet (the one with 60.000 addresses) and you should see all historic transactions right away (only if your original wallet had any historic transactions offcourse). The difference between your "new" and "old" wallet is that in your new wallet, only 100 unused addresses after the last used address will remain.
In your op, you said you wanted to remove the last 20.000 addresses, but in reality, keeping a gap limit of 100 is more than enough... I don't know why you'd ever want to pre-generate 40.000 addresses... Your wallet will just derive more addresses as soon as less unused addresses as the gap limit are available.

If you don't see your historic transactions, 3 things could have happened:

• You used the wrong seed phrase (in this case: make sure you used the same seed phrase as the 60k wallet)
• You hand-picked addresses to get funded that were over the gap limit (in this case: increase the gap limit and restart)
• There is a connection problem to the electrum node (do you see a green button at the bottom corner)

The Load transaction menu is not meanth for this purpose.

This is only true if the OP actually used his 60.000 addresses. But, if my interpretation of his op is correct, he just generated 60.000 addresses beforehand, so most of them will be unused. In this case, the procedure of my first post will probably help him. When the wallet is re-created from seed, electrum will stop deriving new addresses as soon as no funded addresses were found for the last 50 (or 100) newly derived addresses, so his wallet will probably end up containing little over 50 (or 100) addresses (depending on how many of those 60.000 addresses were already funded).

The easyest, non-technical way to do this, would be to make sure the gap limit is 50 or 100, then just restore the wallet from seed.
This will only be a problem IF you randomly picked and used addresses and left gaps of unused bigger than 50 (or 100). In this case you'll need to adapt your gap limit to the biggest gap between 2 used addresses.

Step 1, from the console:
wallet.change_gap_limit(50)
wallet.storage.write()

Step 2:
create a new wallet, from existing seed


PS: make a new wallet but keep the old one, especially if you have meta-data attached to transactions or addresses... Restoring from seed means you'll use this meta data (labels)

I just wanted to confirm your toughts... Ip's are not stored in the blockchain... If you create a transaction and initially broadcast it to one or more nodes, these nodes could theoretically store your ip. However, these nodes simply do not know if you broadcasted a new transaction, or just rebroadcast a transaction you yourself received from somebody else.
It's a little different for SPV wallets, for example electrum. Theoretically, an SPV wallet does not rebroadcast transactions. So if an electrum wallet user is connected to an electrum node and sends a new tx to this node, the node operator could potentially store the ip together with the tx, so he'll be able to identify you (that's where tor might come in handy)

That's true, untill you decide to spend those unspent outputs. If you spend multiple unspent outputs funding several addresses, everybody will be able to link those addresses together. And with some clever analysis of the receiving address, the amount of outputs (change),... one could potentially start to trace you (like you said before, as soon as you filled in KYC info for a service and somebody is able to link you to this service, you are no longer anonymous).

A big exception to all this is the people that were ignorant enough to use a web wallet, exchange wallet, casino wallet. Next to making their clients vulnerable to loads of other attack vectors, the online wallet operator could link every address to a user.

Looks like that's actually working as designed... If you look at the sourcecode, china seems to be the only option

Others have already replied you need a translation and probably think about accepting other crypto's, so i'm not going to go into that.
I did wanted to go into other details:

• I like the layout, it seems pretty clean to me... Even in chinese it seems pretty obvious what i'd have to do to roll with you
• I didn't dig to deep, but at first sight, it seems your game is provably fair... Always a big plus
• On my screen setup, your layout does need some little tweaks... For example, your "hot wallet content"-box: the text does not fit the table (or is it because google translate messed up the layout?)
• It seems some links (like terms and conditions) do not work, or is it a translation problem on my side (did google translate mess this up)
• I'd rather not see delicate services (like gambling) behind cloudflare... Letsencrypt's x3 certificates are free and really easy to install using certbot...

Sorry for the late reply: I have a week off work this week, so I'm afk most of the time.
To answer your question: it's about me not completely trusting electron cash's Dev team. Electrum is written by Thomasv, it has been community vetted so many times... Electron cash is a fork of electrum that has been modified. After these modifications, I don't feel it has been reviewed quite that much, so I don't feel secure importing keys or seeds into a wallet I don't fully trust, and keep on using said keys or seeds afterwards.

This is not an accusation tough...

Be careful with support groups. Always keep in mind your private key and seed phrases must remain private at all times. Never ever share them....

1) In your case, it should be fairly trivial, since you already indicated you were a new user... If you've never purchased btc, and nobody every gave you any btc, your btc wallet should be empty.
Moreover, if you open your electrum wallet, the wallet used to generate the address you wrongfully funded, and you see no balance while still seeing a green button at the right bottom corner, the odds of a btc address in this wallet being funded are small.

2) if your btc wallet is empty, you don't need to create a new wallet

3) same answer, if you don't own any unspent outputs on the btc network, you don't need to sweep funds...

I think the main problem here is the confusion... You bought BCH, BCH is not the same as BTC. Both are forms of crypto currency, both use the same private key format, both share the same history,... But after BCH forked from BTC, both coins became seperate coins, with seperate networks and seperate wallet software.

Electrum is wallet software written to connect to BTC nodes. The BCH you purchased was used to fund an address on the BCH network. The thing is: if you used a BTC wallet to create a BTC address, you can still export the private key from this BTC wallet and import it in a BCH wallet.... That's all... Both networks are completely seperated. Spending unspent outputs on the BCH network will have no effect on the BTC network and vice versa.

I'm leaving the office now, if you have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask them here... Either somebody else will try to answer them, or i'll answer them when i have some spare time during the weekend.

That's actually what i assumed  
don't be to hard on yourself tough... You're not the first one that buys the "wrong" coin, and you probably won't be the last one either...
That being said, BCH might have as much potential for increasing/decreasing in value as BTC... Personally i think BTC would be the safer bet, but that's just my gut feeling. It's perfectly possible that in a couple of months/years it becomes clear that holding on the BCH gave you more profit/less loss than holding on to BTC (i personally doubt this, but it's certainly possible).

As for your initial question: like i said: if your btc electrum wallet has funded addresses, make sure you create a new (empty) wallet and sweep all funds from your old wallet to the new wallet. Afterwards export the private key(s) from the addresses you mistakingly funded (electrum's gui should have an easy to use wizard to export the first 100? private key(s)) . Then use a BCH wallet and import the private key(s) belonging to the wrongfully funded address(es) and you should be able to spend your BCH.

I haven't tested this in a long time, but to the best of my knowledge, this should still be possible.

Well... I try to stay objective, so i don't like to be drawn into the political debate surrounding the bitcoin forks.

I personally feel that the people that forked BTC to create BCH had every right to do so, and the changes they made in the sourcecode were valid.
However, i feel they failed to gain traction for their project, the major part of the community stood behind BTC, most dev's stood behind BTC, most companies stood behind BTC. So at some point they should have realised they were not the original BTC, but merely a fork...

Instead they tried to sell BCH as the "real" BTC (not with these exact words), so some newbies were more or less "lured" into buying BCH, a coin that has not as much support, is not used that much, has less hashrate, has a low price, isn't accepted by the majority of the community,...

Now, once again, i'm more interested in the technical aspect of bitcoin, i'm not trying to make any legal claims here... This is just the way i percieved the whole BTC/BCH debate.

Not really, i try to stay away from bitcoin cash... However, if i remember correctly, i used the electrum fork for bitcoin cash for splitting my funds when BCH was initially forked.

I think it was https://electroncash.org/, but you should do your own research before installing this tough

should be fairly simple... export the private key from your electrum wallet and import it into a bitcoin cash wallet. If i'm not mistaking, this should work.

btw... Treat the electrum wallet as compromised as soon as you export any key(s)... Create a new wallet and move all funds from the compromised wallet to the new wallet before exporting the private key.