When you sweep it's sending the funds to an address in the new wallet. So it's not incorporating the old wallet's private keys into the new wallet. They are called private keys btw and not private addresses.

If you want to incorporate the old wallet's priv keys into a new wallet you have to create an imported private key wallet:

https://bitcoinelectrum.com/importing-your-private-keys-into-electrum/

you're supposed to place the wallet.dat file before it syncs because when it's syncing its looking for transactions relevant to your wallet. so you place the correct wallet.dat file first.

if you did it afterwards core would have complained and asked for time to go through the chain again but since it didn't it must be what achow said above - you've placed it in the wrong dir.

When you spend bitcoin some coins end up in change addresses so that's probably what happened:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Change

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Coin_analogy


That's why we use wallet software to manage all this instead of dealing with raw private keys because there's a risk you will make a mistake and lose money.

i think you should just keep your bitcoins on coinbase. electrum is not for you. there's no point in using electrum if you have to trust some tech guy with your private keys/seed.

You shouldn't have shared that ciphertext in the OP. I suggest you remove it or someone might attempt to bruteforce your password and succeed where you've failed!

the way electrum works is you are not supposed to have to trust the server you are connected to. so don't worry about malicious servers.

using the bech32 wallet you can sweep the two orphaned private keys (legacy and p2sh-segwit)  thereby sending the coins to an address in the bech32 wallet. make sure you append p2wpkh-p2sh: to the private key for the p2sh segwit address (3 address).

you have to right click and choose use server to change servers. left clicking doesn't do it.

you should really be using bitcoin core for such a large number of addresses. having the blockchain locally means you can handle many more addresses

1. Core will keep creating new addresses so watching only some addresses will not work.

2. Core uses hardened derivation so you can't derive the addresses using the xpub. Furthermore Electrum only supports one address type per wallet while core supports all 3 (p2pkh, p2wpkh, p2wpkh-p2sh). So using Electrum for this won't work.

The best way is what the OP originally proposed - using the same wallet with core on more than one device. As long as its an HD wallet all the derived addresses should be the same.

Are you sure it's not a case of 1 and 2 here? If not then could you share the tx id? It's the large hexadecimal number that you see up top when you right click on the transaction on the history tab and choose to view details. The tx id plus the intended recipient's address and amount would be useful.

the password is salted and run through a hash function and the hash is then used to encrypt the wallet file. so the password isn't stored in the wallet file and there's no way to know what characters were in it.

if you have some idea what the password might be what you can do is make a list of possible passwords to narrow down the possibilities and then use a program to bruteforce the password. maybe hashcat or btcrecover can be used for this purpose

is this you?

you use the master public key also known as extended public key to  create a watch only wallet. you don't use a public key. a public key is just for one address while an MPK/Xpub is for an entire tree of addresses.

btc recover can brute force the password that is being used to encrypt the seed i.e. that seed: line in the wallet file. you could also build your own custom tool using something like hashcat.

2.7.18 can't sync with electrum servers anymore so that's why it's showing a blank history tab.

the location of the wallet file for standalone and windows installer versions is given below: http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html#where-is-my-wallet-file-located

for portable version the wallet file is in a subdirectory of the same directory as the electrum executable. that directory is named electrum_data.

so it depends on what version of electrum you have. check your browser history for the download URL and compare it to the links on the download page: https://electrum.org/#download

ah my bad

https://bitcoincore.org/en/doc/0.16.0/rpc/wallet/importwallet/

you did a user install so you have to add that directory to your path variable or run electrum via  /home/stephen/.local/bin/electrum. you can also create a shortcut to that app on the desktop.

you can't import a dump file like that. instead to create a backup that will work with bitcoin core you need to use the option in the file menu and then in the destination system place that file in the data dir. if the dump file is all you have you're going to have to import each of the private keys individually into bitcoin core.

the only electrum site is electrum.org not theelectrum.org.

take a look at this faq regarding wallet restoration. try the things listed there depending on whether wallet restoration is successful or not.