What version of electrum are you using ? Is your client synced (green dot at the bottom right corner) ?

Check the address on multiple block explorers (e.g. look Jansaa's post) and then open electrum and go to the console (View -> Show Console -> Console-tab) and enter:

If it returns true, the address definitely belongs to your wallet.
And if those block explorer additionally show that a transaction has been received AND confirmed, you can be sure that you have received the transaction.
In this case the problem would be a displaying issue (e.g. using old version which can't sync).

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This doesn't even make sense.
A bitcoin transaction doesn't need any verification at all.

UTXO -> Sign transaction -> Broadcast transaction... That's all you need. Never any 'verification' when sending/waiting for a transaction..

We need more information to help reconstructing what happened. Please answer these questions:

• What OS are you using ?
• What wallet did you use ?
• Where did you download the wallet from ?
• Did you verify the downloaded wallet ? If so, how ?
• What kind of 2FA did you use ? (e.g. RSASecureID, GA-app on your mobile, ... )

This is the information we need at least. The key element would be the wallet used and the verification of the wallet.

This was a bit of an overkill regarding the fees.
As you can see at https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,2h, 10 sat/B would have been enough to get your transaction confirmed within the next 1 or 2 blocks.

86 sat/B was waaay to high. This could have paid you 8 or 9 transactions.

The next time, check the mempool (https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,2h) and / or look at https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-calculator/ to pick a suited fee.

A transaction can be considered to be 'gone trough' after 1 confirmation (gone trough, but not 100% irreversible).
Your TX gets the first confirmation when a miner builds a block with your transaction included.

Each further block mined upon this chain will add 1 more confirmation.

So in total you need your transaction to be confirmed plus 5 additional blocks being mined. This generally takes about 60 minutes (if your TX gets included in the next block mined).
After it got the first confirmation, you can only wait for the miner to create new blocks.

Why are you trying to 'fix' your concept by hook or by crook ?
You goal shouldn't be to have an idea with almost no technical details, and trying to 'solve' problems people find by thinking about this idea for a few minutes.

If you are serious with your approach, think properly about your idea, look for attack vectors, create a whitepaper.. and publish it.
But beginning with a small idea (which theoretically doesn't actually work) just to later add 'fixes' to it isn't that great..

Dice rolls are never random.

If you knew all necessary information (exact surface conditions, air resistance, rotating speed, ..) you could predict each roll with your dice. That's far away from being 'truly random'.




You can't say that, no.

The probability tells you that if you are doing up to an infinite amount of rolls, you'll have pretty close to 0.166666% of each result.
But this is NOT a guarantee. Especially with such a low number (300), this doesn't need to be the case at all. You'd need at least a few hundred thousands of tries to be sure the output is 'kind of random'.




No need to waste your time. The human brain is less than '1/10 random' as an PRNG.



If you want to create the private key yourself (without any wallet), i'd suggest to boot up a live linux, let it run a few minutes, open and close random programs, and then use /dev/urandom to generate a private key:


This is way more random than your brain or any dice rolls can ever be. And it only takes 5 seconds compared to a few hours.

What are you referring to with 'hash' ? The address itself is a hash of the public key (It is the RIPEMD-160 hash of the SHA256 hash of the public key).

Also, which recovery service is it ? And what exactly are they going to do ? Simply bruteforcing a private key wouldn't make sense.


I am with AdolfinWolf here. The link to the service and the original 'instructions' could be very helpful for us to understand what you mean.

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That's nonsense. Noone will be able to 'recover' (or better: crack) a wallet with knowing only the address.
This is the whole sense of such a big keyspace..

The error message containing Missing inputs (from your 2nd screenshot) indicates that the inputs the transaction is trying to use are not available. They do not exist.


This, together with your statement:


leads me to the conclusion that you have been scammed.


Never, ever let anyone else create a wallet for you. Everything a wallet does is to manage your private-/public- keys.
Anyone who knows the private keys (or the seed which is used to derive the private keys) can spend/access your bitcoins.


Could you please explain why and how someone else created a wallet for you ? Did he 'sell' bitcoins to you this way ?
I hope you didn't lose too much money.

That's correct.




Nope. That's horribly wrong.

If you don't have a private key / seed, you don't have control over your coins.
Any other 'security number' lets just assume that you are talking about some kind of 3rd party hosted (web-)wallets. Those are NOT considered real 'wallets'.

The ONLY way to access / use your BTC is to sign a transaction with the correct private key. 




If you rely on another company to give you the money back, you are doing something terribly wrong.
No other person except for the wallet owner should have access to the private keys. If the 'company' has access to your private keys, you are not using a proper wallet.

What do you have stored on your SD card ?

Just the blockchain + chainstate files or all files which are necessary to run the node ?


With blockchain and chainstate files, you should be able to simply swap the card into multiple devices to have your blockchain available.
If you however intend to run your node on multiple operating systems without core being installed there, you'd need to have all necessary binaries stored there too.

Generally it is definitely possible to swap the card between multiple devices. But what would be a windows phone for ?

The next time make sure to check the mempool (https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,8h) and/or check the estimated fees (https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-calculator/) before sending a transaction.

Also, it is recommended to have the RBF-flag set. Most wallets have an option to either enable or disable it.

With the RBF-flag set, you will be able to 'pump' the fee after the transaction has been sent if you see that your tx won't confirm in the next few hours.




CPFP only works if the transaction contains a change (and OP has access to the priv key of the change address, obviously).
Most web wallets for example don't give you access to your change addresses. RBF would be recommended here (if the flag is set).

No, definitely not.

The energy is not 'wasted'. It is needed to secure the whole network.

I don't understand why people think it wastes 'too much energy'. It is just a small small fraction of what the banking sector needs.

Also, how should the network be secured if the energy wouldn't be 'wasted' to secure it ?

Sure, we could easily shrink the energy consumption / hashrate to 1/10th of the current. But this would also mean that the network is 10 times less secured against an attacker.
And this also means that 10 confirmations then are worth as much as 1 confirmation is worth now..

That's a risk, yes. But it is no the only risk.

The URL can look perfectly fine to a customer (because it is the correct URL entered), but you can still be redirected to a site controlled by the attacker.
This can happen through DNS spoofing. An attacker replaces the IP of the official server with his own IP in the DNS record for the web wallet site.

Once someone logs in into the attackers 'wallet', he might simply redirect the traffic to the official web wallet. Then, a few days later, he might empty all wallets at once.


You need to rely on DNS. There is no real way to secure yourself from such an attack (especially since the times of dynamic IPs). Using a web wallet is ALWAYS a bad idea.

Well, this depends on how safe/secure you want your system to be.

The maximum amount of money you are ready to store on your computer (which is connected to the internet) fully depends on your own preference.

Usually, you shouldn't store more than a few hundred $ worth of cryptos on your desktop pc. It doesn't matter whether they are hold in 1 or 5 wallets.
If an attacker can compromise your system, he will gain access to all of your wallets on this PC (not necessarily instantly, but definitely slowly over time).

Note, that a shady wallet can be malware itself. Only trust recommended, open-source and verified wallets.


If the amount of money you hold can absorb the cost of a hardware wallet, get one. It will save you a lot of money in the long run.
Without being too techy and security-minded, the chances are high you will get infected with malware sooner or later.
The only chance to circumvent this is to either store your coins offline (paper wallet, offline-/online- setup) or inside of a hardware wallet.

We are definitely still in the early adoption phase.

If you look at how many transactions are done on the bitcoin network or at the number of people who own bitcoin, you'll realize that the number is way lower than one would assume.

After a few years (e.g. 10), the adoption will be many times higher than it is currently.
Even though this is not an indicator for an extremely increasing price (what most are aiming for who hope to be an 'early adopter'), this means that the whole eco system around bitcoin is going to get bigger and bigger.

I can very well imagine a future with shops hosting their lightning node, accepting BTC naturally. Compared to such a future, we are at the very beginning (where a lot of people still havn't heard of BTC and only a minority does own some).

Being vulnerable to a 51% attack does not come from a low amount of nodes.
And it also does not come from 'bad code'.

An malicious actor needs at least 51% of the hashrate to be able to perform a 51% attack.


The reason that BTG was so vulnerable to a 51% attack comes from the extremely low hashrate of the network.
Such an attack would not be efficiently doable on the BTC network, thanks to the high hashrate/difficulty.

BTG was/is not the only coin vulnerable to 51% attacks. A lot of coins do have an extremely low hashrate, which makes it possible to simply rent the necessary hashrate to perform an 51% attack.

High hashrate/difficulty => Low chance of 51% attack and vice versa.

Of course it is possible.

But the question is whether this is necessary for your needs.

As ETFbitcoin mentioned, you don't even need to develop your own API. You can simply use the RPC interface to communicate with your bitcoin core instance.


If you need an API for a lot of transactions (e.g. you are accepting BTC on a website): Setup core on your server (preferably in a DMZ), then connect to it using RPC commands to retrieve information. But note that you should store your coins on a different machine and NOT on the one accessible from outside.

If you want to be safe for 'home usage', you don't need a server at all. You might simply install core on your main machine and use it as a wallet.
Core will download and verify all blocks/transactions, just without an additional server.


I think we can give you a better overview regarding the options, if you tell us what you want to achieve with your setup (the main purpose).

I doubt it.

I really can't imagine how people would join an ICO (people still buy shitcoins and tokens ? really?) made by a web wallet (i am still wondering how people can be that uneducated to use an online wallet).


Webwallets need to be abandoned. And i am sure this will happen. But it will take some more time.

I think the few people who lost money through all of these vulnerabilities which do only exist in web wallets, are not enough to scare the whole userbase.

But i am confident that the day will come where some smart mind will make use of all of these naive user trusting web wallets.

Many people will cry, a few will be richer. But hopefully these people will learn that using an online wallet is the most retarded thing to do (besides leaving coins on an exchange).

Just because the standard of living has improved in the last 200 years, this doesn't mean that my statement is wrong.
You have to include the changing definition of 'rich' and 'poor'.

Those who are considered poor today, will be considered 'more poor' in 30 years. Even if 'more poor' in 30 years means that they will live better than today.
'Rich' and 'poor' are 2 relative terms. They are not absolute.


The gap between rich and poor is widening. That's a fact. And just because the poorest person in your country still can afford to eat 2 or 3 times a day, it doesn't mean that he is way richer than people were 200 years ago...

That's black and white thinking. But you can't split everything into either being black or white.

You aren't converting addresses this way. You are simply hashing them.
And since addresses already are RIPEMD-160 hashes, they won't get shorter (or whatever you are expecting to happen).


My previous post explained how to do this based on an example. Implementing it for a list of addresses shouldn't be a problem at all anymore.