It's a known problem:

https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=016660200577587308545%3Aesf40ml9aag&ie=UTF-8&q=electrum+windows+7&sa=Google+search#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=electrum%20windows%207&gsc.page=1

a quote from the first hit:

3 possible things could have happened, but without further info, it's hard to say which one exactly:

• Did you enable 2FA? 2FA is provided by a thirth pary and is a paying addon...
• A second thing the "commision" might have been is the transaction fee.
• A thirth explanation: are you sure you aren't talking about the change funding the change address?

Well, theoretically, there are more potential explanations for what happened, but these 3 have the biggest odds...

1 - mocacinno

Personally, i feel bad i had to remove my support for the tag, but with the withdrawal of h4ns, i'd be supporting something the original victim doesn't want support for. It's perfectly possible it was a case of backmail, but so far there is no proof...
Blackmailing is a real life offence, not just breaking a forum rule, i personally feel that if h4ns is being blackmailed, the least of his worries would be getting GP tagged or flagged, he'd rather see him fined or behind bars. The only way to do this is getting law enforcement involved.
But once again, this is all speculation... I've seen no proof h4ns is being blackmailed. It's perfectly possible GP just payed h4ns the €210 to get rid of this problem, or that h4ns just decided to forgive GP since he tought €210 wasn't worth his troubles...

But, if there ever is a flag for blackmailing, and there is sufficient proof for me to conclude h4ns was blackmailed, i'd support that flag in a heartbeat. For now, i have left negative trust on GP's profile based on the things i've actually observed: his erratic behaviour, the fact that he posts medical information about mental illnesses without consent (thus invades other's privacy), the fact that he twists words and defenitions to find loopholes (think about fixating on dates, the word "donation", the fact that he makes financial claims for unproven facts and then deducts refunds from these claims,...

@GP's rant: keep repeating the same semantics over and over again won't make me change my mind. I find the fact that you don't think an email is a written contract semantics. I find the fact that you brought the word "donations" in your emails semantics. I find the fact that the original flag wasn't pinpointing the exact date semantics.

I'm not in DT1, but please contact Theymos if you feel i should be excluded from DT1 if i would ever make it into there by the voting system (highly doubtfull, i don't think a lot of people would ever include me in their trustlists)

The only reason i withdrew my support was because h4ns withdrew his flag... For some strange reason, you've gotten what you wanted...

I have, my memory fails me so i cannot find the topic in question.

This would change everything offcourse, but it would be really hard to proof blackmailing unless h4ns could confirm this.
If h4ns is being blackmailed, i'd encourage him to go to his local law enforcement agency and open a case against GP, then come to the forum with this case. Theymos has ip logs, there are payment traces, GP has an active website and claims to have defended cases. I'm pretty sure a serious law enforcement agence would be able to trace him in case somebody opened a police report against him.

I will continue to support all flags i'm confronted with that are based on valid claims, this includes any future flags on GP (for example, a flag for blackmailing, eventough i don't know which type of flag you'd have to create if you were being blackmailed). At this moment, I'm just confronted with the fact that the flag creator withdrew his flag, and i'm not presented with evidence that he was being forced to do so... So i feel i have no other choice but to drop my support for this particular flag.

I have mixed feelings about this post... But here I go:

I will drop my support for h4ns's flag and exchange my negative tag on GP's trust page by a different negative tag because h4ns withdrew his claim. I feel that when a flag has been dropped by the flag creator, i no longer have the right to keep supporting the flag or tag, since withdrawing a flag more or less means that h4ns was reimbursed or forgave GP (unless he tells us otherwise).

However, i still believe my initial support for this flag was correct. I read h4ns's topic and to the best of my knowledge, i tought it was valid.
I am not a lawyer, and i'm not interested in discussing wether or not an e-mail is to be considered to be a written contract (or not), or that mixing the word "donation" into the conversation results in making every payment a donation (or not).
As I said: i'm not a lawyer,  it's perfectly possible that in a court of law GP's statement would hold, however, my gut feeling tells me these are all semantics, and i believed there was some kind of agreement between GP and h4ns, and GP did not honour said agreement thus deserved a flag and a tag, no matter how hard he tried to focus on the semantics to find a loophole that would prove his "innocence".

But, like i said, the withdrawal of h4ns more or less forces me to withdraw my support... I still wouldn't trust GP with a single penny, the way he handles all criticism tells me i never want to be a client of his company, and leads me to believe he'll be able to weasel his way out of any commitment he makes.

No, doing this would be giving a donation to the miner or mining pool that solved the block including your spending transaction.

Spending an unspent output to fund a valid address whose private key is nearly impossible to find does not donate to a miner, but merely "destroys" the unspent output.

like Deathwing already said: not on bitcointalk... But don't despair, if ~$9000 is all you need, there are plenty of IRL organisations that could grant you such a loan (banks, loan sharks, pawn shops, friends, family). If you really believe in your project, loaning $9000 should be the least of your concerns.
In my country, it seems to be pretty easy to get a loan up to and including €15.000. Offcourse they charge an intrest rate of 5% and up...

BTW: please don't open a poll to ask these questions

I just wanted to chime in my 2 satoshi's...
The average faucet seems to be paying out <50 sat (source: a quick browse trough the list of faucethub, coinpot, freebitco.in,...).

This means you'll have to make about 2 million claims to "get" 1 BTC.
If you incorporate the fact that at least half of the faucets are dry, scams, dissapear, or have hidden their claim button so good nobody can find it), you'll need to visit at least 4 million faucets to get 1 BTC.

Opening the faucet, filling in all those captcha's, you addresss, claim, popups, even more captcha's.. I estimate it takes 2 minutes to make a claim.

So 1 claiming 1 BTC would be equal to spending 8 million minutes =~ 133.000 hours.

So, with the current BTC rate, you'll make about ~7 cents per hour... If the minimum wage in your country is higher than 7 dollarcents per hour (substract the energy you used for that hour of claiming, substract the cost of decent internet, substract the cost of the device you use to claim), it would be wiser to get an IRL job and convert some of your wages into btc rather than spending your time claiming from faucets.

That being said: there are "real" online faucets that aren't a scam (they "pay" 7 cents per hour)... I wouldn't trust those telegram bots tough, i don't get their businessmodel, i don't see where they get their money from, so i don't think they can operate without scamming people.

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)