I guess it is possible that one of the peers you're getting data from may, for whatever reason (unknowingly or maliciously), be sending your node bad data... You could try "banning" all the current peers and see if it continues to happen.

Otherwise, it's likely some transient hardware issue with your setup... and those are an absolute MoFo to try and diagnose/rectify

Seems like your Electrum Android wallet isn't syncing properly or something... I was able to create a watching-only wallet just fine:



Not sure why they wouldn't be able to sweep the private keys though... I can only think that your client is connected to a server that was lagging or not properly synced. Are you connecting to your own node/servers or are you using public ones?

 The funding transaction obviously exists and can be seen/synced... and I can even create an unsigned transaction from the watching-only wallet.

Obviously, not having the private key, I can't attempt to sweep or sign/spend the coins.

Almost any relatively modern PC is likely to "smoke" a Raspberry Pi in terms of speed/processing power... Where the Pi "generally" wins is in size and power requirements, although there are those intel compute sticks and/or NUCs which are similar to Pi's in that regards.

Where the Pi as a bitcoin node really suffers is, as you've already noted, is the initial block download (IBD) phase (3.5 days!!?! )... and any time that a substantial number of blocks need to be synced (ie. if your node was offline for a couple of weeks).

The Pi simply doesn't have the raw processing power to crunch those numbers... and can even run into thermal throttling issues (although this can be mitigated with a good case/fan etc) which make it even slower.

Still, the IBD issues can also be mitigated if one has access to a trusted node that they can clone the block data, chainstate and tx indexes from.

Over the last 4 days since I got Umbrel up and running, I haven't really noted too many performance issues... that's with tor + bitcoind/lnd + electrs + mempool + btc-rpc-explorer + btcpay-server + RTL all running.

On a bare board, sitting on my desk, it seems to run at or below 50C for the most part... so performance wise, I'm pretty happy with it all.


Anyway, I'm going to "destroy" it all and give MyNode a go this weekend, just to see what that is like... I'm still not sure which setup I prefer at this point.

You can simplify it down to this... To be able to send bitcoins from, or recover, a "standard" wallet... a person would need:

- A copy of the wallet file + the wallet password, if any.
or
- 12 word seed phrase + the "seed extension words" (aka "passphrase"), if any.


To be able to send bitcoins from, or recover, a "2fa" wallet... a person would need:

- The wallet file + the wallet password, if any + Google Authenticator 2FA code
or
- 12 word seed phrase + the "seed extension words" (aka "passphrase"), if any.


Note that in both instances, as long as someone has the 12 word seed phrase + the "seed extension words"/passphrase (if used), then the wallet can be fully recovered and coins accessed... regardless of any wallet encryption passwords or 2fa.

So, if no seed extension/passphrase is used, then the 12 word seed phrase is all that is required for recovery and full access.


In the case of 2fa wallets, if you lose the 2fa device for whatever reason (ie. phone is wiped/broken/lost etc)... then if you don't have a backup of the 2fa "secret key", then the only guaranteed way to recover is using the 12 word seed (+ seed extension words). Note that while some users have had success in the past contacting TrustedCoin from the email address they originally used to sign up for the 2fa wallet and were able to get their 2fa key reset, this should NOT be counted on as a recovery method, as there is no guarantee that TrustedCoin will do so again in the future.

Interesting... but I'm not surprised that Bitcoin has the highest usage. I would assume that the amount of data (note: not just the number of blocks) being processed on the Bitcoin blockchain is quite a bit larger than the other private chains.

Still, running on a Samsung SSD... even an external one, I would have thought that it should be easy enough for the system to keep up, given that I have run multiple chains on an HDD.

I'm sure that running it one at a time will stop any issues, but could be annoying depending on how long it's been since that chain was synced and how long you have to wait for it to sync up.

In that case, it looks very very likely that you are not going to be able to recover anything of value

I guess it can't hurt to try looking for all files and trying the brute force option... at worst you'll waste some time, at best you might you might stumble across a wallet file.

Best of luck.

To recover, you will need either:

- Your wallet file+password+Google 2fa
or
- Your 12 word seed

Given that you've lost your 12 word seed, then your only option is if you still have access to the email address that you used to setup your 2fa wallet, then contact TrustedCoin from that email address and explain your situation.

They have helped other users in the past by allowing them to reset and resetup the Google Authenticator so they can regain access to their wallet funds.

Are you sure you're dealing with actual inputs... or are you looking at addresses? It's possible that some of your addresses contain multiple UTXOs, so if you using addresses, it's possible you might still be exceeding the 20 UTXO limit.

Which tab in Electrum are you spending from? The "coins" tab or the "Addresses" tab?

Based on the error message, it looks like you were trying to pay an invalid invoice. SO, did you actually have a lightning invoice created that you were trying to pay? Note that Lightning invoices are generally time-limited (minutes or hours usually) and from what I can gather, as a payment processor, MoonPay invoices generally tend to only be valid for a few minutes.

So, if you don't send within the specified time interval, the invoice will be void and then any attempt to send will fail.

Got to agree with the K.I.S.S. proponents here... a simple private+public keypair loaded with $10 is probably the best solution here.

I would be very surprised if a standard private key was rendered unusable by any future changes to the network, so that shouldn't be an issue. Then some basic steps to make sure the private key is "safe" (eg. printing on waterproof paper and/or laminating etc) and then handing it over (maybe with some basic instructions on how to store it safely) and then all you can do is hope for the best

Yes, it's fine... I'm currently running 0.21.1 and it works completely fine with Armory 0.96.5. I don't anticipate any issues or breaking changes with the upcoming 0.22 either, but it's impossible to say 100% until it has actually been released.

That's an interesting little experiment... will definitely be interested to see the results of that!


Sounds like you've got your work cut out for you! Best of luck, I look forward to seeing all the details when you finish it all!

On Windows 10 at least, it's generally not even an issue for storage media any more: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300734/microsoft-safely-remove-eject-usb-flash-drive-not-needed-windows-10

Granted, if you do it in the middle of actually transferring data to/from the drive, things will most likely break... but if the file transfer "appears" to have finished, then yanking the USB drive out is not going to break anything.

It definitely was an issue with earlier versions of Windows... A while ago (was either Windows 2000 or XP), I found out about the write caching the hard way. I was in a hurry (running late as usual) and as soon as Windows showed the transfer had "finished", I yanked the drive and headed off to a friends place... got there (after driving all the way across town) to discover the data on the drive was corrupted

As the saying goes: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"


Honestly, I can certainly understand why some people want to use web wallets, or closed source mobile wallets, or SPV wallets that potentially have privacy concernts etc.

It seems that it comes down to a willingness to trade off convenience and ease of use (and, in some cases, cost) for privacy and/or security. If any given wallet fits with a users personal risk acceptance profile, then all the "evidence" or arguing about which wallet is "best" is probably just a waste of your time

Curious as to why you opted for MyNode as opposed to something like the RaspiBlitz or Umbrel? Asking because I've sort of been on a bit of a mission to try them all... and was considering trying the MyNode setup (the free community edition tho)

Seems that spending $100 on something that is using a lot of open-source software that is freely available and/or included in other packages like RaspiBlitz/Umbrel is unnecessary.

I can certainly understand that someone might want to go with the premium package purely for the support option, so they don't have to rely on forums/telegram groups etc... but charging to get "free" features (btcpay server, Spectr, LNBits etc) from the other systems seems excessive.


Do you not have another node you could have copied the blockchain/chainstate/indexes from? or were you wanting to see what the full IBD time would be like?

In my testing with RaspiBlitz/Umbrel... copying the chain from another node cuts the initial setup time down to hours rather than days.

And even mempool.space suffers sometimes...




There is less than 1 block of transactions available to be mined... and it's recommending 6 sats/vbyte for a high priority... I assume that is simply because the "high priority" value aims to be in within 0.x meg of the tip at all times etc

Still, it goes to show that any "fee estimation" is exactly that... an estimation.

Sorry... just to clarify... you're running 3x cryptocoin Core applications at the same time (eg. Bitcoin Core + Litecoin Core + Dogecoin Core) with all the blockdata stored on the same external drive?

Outside of the initial block download, I wouldn't have thought that running them all side by side would stress things too much... once nodes are synced up, the processing requirements aren't super high.

I've had multiple Core applications running before... I think 5 was my "personal best" (Bitcoin mainnet, Bitcoin testnet, BCH, Litecoin and Dogecoin) and never seemed to have any issues... but that was on a desktop with all the blockdata on the same (internal) SATA HDD.

Oh ok... yeah the graph data not being available makes sense because that is data that the service is recording live based on mempool activity that it is observing... it's not information that can be derived from the historical blockchain data.

So, if the service wasn't running, it obviously can't observe that data

Not sure about the address history being missing tho, that seems like the node hasn't finished indexing properly or something... or that the data is pruned for some reason.

By default, I don't think Raspiblitz has txindex=1 set and you have to explicitly turn that on in the settings.

On Umbrel, it seems like mempool and btc-rpc-explorer are actually setup to use the underlying electrum server (ie. electrs) to retrieve address information. I'm not sure if RaspiBlitz operates the same way.


Interesting... there certainly isn't a "pi" user on Umbrel... I didn't notice if my Raspiblitz install had it, I didn't think to look to be honest... might be worth creating an issue on the raspiblitz github if the raspiblitz sdcard image is created with that default user enabled.

You can't type your seed on the device... because it doesn't work like a real ledger... it is essentially a USB thumb drive that looks like a Ledger.

The idea is that a victim plugs it in... and it opens up the folder showing the ledger.exe that they run... and then it asks for the seed. In an ideal world, the user is smart enough to remember that you should never type your hardware wallet seed into any device that is not your hardware wallet itself and they will be fine.

However, we don't live in an ideal world and given how much money the nigerian princes are still making... there is probably a non-zero chance that someone will fall for something like this and lose coins.

I mean, "EvilMe"™ was just thinking:

1. Twitter/youtube giveaway ("ReallyEvilMe"™ looks over at "games and rounds" forum)
2. Send out fake devices, but promote it as a way to "migrate your current wallet to the security of a hardware wallet"
3. Get people to input their current 12/24 word seeds from their desktop/mobile/web wallets into your fake app.
4. Profit!

I would like to think that something like that wouldn't work... but "RealisticMe"™ knows otherwise.

Stop looking at reddit... it's full of "noisy" people who make mistakes and then blame everything and everyone but themselves

I'm not aware of any proven instance of someone having the correct seed and correct passphrase and generating a different wallet. However, I have seen lots of people swearing black and blue that they are "110% sure" that they have the correct seed and correct passphrase and things are not working... and then I've seen a few instances where 6 months later they post that they had a word wrong or found another piece of paper with the actual seed or btcrecover identified a small typo etc.


You don't need 2 devices to do this... and you don't need to reset anything... just create a passphrase (either temporary or assigned to 2nd PIN) and you can access the "hidden" wallet... there is no need to reset your device and create a new seed just to create a passphrase.