Please help me find the disappearing-tx bug!  
I'll give 0.2 BTC to someone who finds the pattern!

I need your help with this one!  I'm going insane trying to figure out the pattern behind this bug.  90% of my tx go through fine.  It seems to only happen when I'm not paying attention.  

Symptoms:

(1) Transaction is created and broadcast
(2) Tx shows up in ledger/history with zero-confirmations, wallet balance is reduced
(3) As soon as the tx is included in a block, the tx disappears completely.  Wallet balance returns to previous value, as if the tx never happened
(4) Restarting Armory doesn't help.  The only way to fix/find it is to do a rescan ("Help"->"Rescan Databases").


What I know about this bug:

(1) I'm fairly certain that the bug only occurs when the transaction has no outputs to any of your wallets.  Every time I've triggered it, has been with a tx that has a single output to an external address (i.e. the target address is not in any of your wallets, and there is no change output).  I suspect the number of inputs doesn't matter, but I think I've only seen it when there was a single input as well.

(2) I think it might be related to freshness of outputs: it may only happen when you are spending outputs that were just received a few confirmations ago.  And I think only without a restart between receiving and spending.

(3) It definitely happened before on a run where I did a rescan.  It may have to do with fresh-rescan-on-load vs read-stored-histories-from-last-load (but I'm somewhat certain this is not a requirement to trigger the bug).

(4) The fee does not appear to matter (seen it with

In order to test this, knowing that you need perfect-sized inputs, you'll need to use coin-control.  Deselect all but one address in the coin-control window, then use the "MAX" button to send the entire input to an external address not part of any of your wallets.  When the tx is in your ledger, you can double click on it to verify that there is only a single output and a blank in the "Wallet ID" column.

This is the last major bug that needs to be fixed before I can do a release.   Once I find a pattern and can reproduce it reliably, I can debug it and verify it's fixed.  Right now I can't reproduce or verify.  Tell me the pattern and you get 0.1 BTC!

P.S. if you want to run Armory on testnet, see the instructions here:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=341252.0

The consensus seems to be that no one thinks it's worth doing this.  I still think it makes sense to do as one of those latent upgrades that goes in now but isn't active until 12 months from now.   But as you can see from the discussion some people are very focused on overhauling the SIGHASH system entirely, and don't think it's worth the effort to do this small change.  I disagree, but what can I do?

Amazing!  I didn't think it would be this easy!  We were told this would be difficult to deal with, but apparently it doesn't have to be hard.

Our email:


Reply:

The malicious website is already offline.  I wonder if they will attempt to fight the suspension...

Well, it's less of a bug and more of an unimplemented feature.  I haven't gotten around to handling P2SH addresses and the testing that needs to be done to make sure I don't lose people's money.  It's one of the things I'll be implementing in the next version which is all about important-but-not-critical updates :  Unicode issues, database optimizations, layout updates, P2SH handling and general polishing.

i probably would've done it sooner if I had realized that RAM reduction was going to take so long!  I'll have it soon, though!

Just to clarify... you can't arbitrarily make any kind of backup for any wallet.   Wallets created before this new version require all four lines.  If you make new backups of an old wallet, single-sheet or fragmented, it will all be four lines, because the chaincode is randomly generated along with the root key.  (1.35 and 1.35a)

If you create a new wallet with the new version of Armory, it will now derive the chaincode from the root key.  Thus it doesn't need to be backed up, and will automatically use 1.35c. 

The backup window will show you as much information as you need to be backed up.  Please do not discard the chaincode on any old backups!  They are still required to restore old wallets!  It's only if the wallet was created after 0.88.1 will you be able to make a 1.35c backup.

Please only download Armory Bitcoin Wallet from https://bitcoinarmory.com

We have identified a clone website which provides malicious download links for our software.   All software and communications by Armory Technologies, Inc, will happen via the domain bitcoinarmory.com.  There are no other domains under which we operate!   We use the following [offline] GPG key to sign all software releases, and sign all employees' GPG keys:
 
Armory "Offline Signing Key": 0x98832223
(please do not use this key for encrypting email to us -- only for authenticating software and employees!)

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Armory is a tool for advanced users, holding serious quantities of money -- please make sure you download the correct version and verify hashes & signatures before installing it!    There are instructions at the bottom of our downloads page that describe how to verify the signatures in Linux.  Windows is a bit harder, but possible if you install gpg4win and verify the SHA256 hashes file.  


P.S. - I am not posting the link to the malicious site here, because it's unnecessary and I'd prefer people only be exposed to the good domain.  If you have a reason for it (such as doing a security investigation), please contact me.

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This is a repost from the main Bitcoin Discussion thread.  Please reply there.

P.S. This usually happens when Armory is connected to Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind, but Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind has not yet established any connections to the outside world.  Armory forwards the tx to Bitcoin-Qt, it forwards it to all 0 peers, and then won't broadcast/forward it again.  That's why you have to clear all the memory pools...

Right-click on the transaction and view it on blockchain.info.  If they are on blockchain.info, they are just slow.  There's nothing you can do.  If they are not, then your broadcasts went nowhere, and they can be re-broadcast (but for reasons difficult to describe, this isn't easy to do).

In the latest testing version (now available on our website), there's a new "Help" menu option that is "Clear all Unconfirmed".  That will allow you to rebroadcast the exact same transactions (after restarting Armory).  If you're using 0.88.1 or earlier, you'll have to stop Armory and go to the ARMORY home dir (where your wallets are stored), and remove mempool.bin.  Also restart Bitcoin-Qt if you're running it manually.

[WARNING] Malicious Armory Website Clone Found!

More info in this thread:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=339403.0


Also, just posted the latest testing downloads to the [real] website since they have proven to be more reliable for most people.  Got one more major bug to squash, and some polishing, then I will make this an official release!

Please only download Armory Bitcoin Wallet from https://bitcoinarmory.com

We have identified a clone website which provides malicious download links for our software.   All software and communications by Armory Technologies, Inc, will happen via the domain bitcoinarmory.com.  There are no other domains under which we operate!   We use the following [offline] GPG key to sign all software releases, and sign all employees' GPG keys:
 
Armory "Offline Signing Key": 0x98832223
(please do not use this key for encrypting email to us -- only for authenticating software and employees!)

---

Armory is a tool for advanced users, holding serious quantities of money -- please make sure you download the correct version and verify hashes & signatures before installing it!    There are instructions at the bottom of our downloads page that describe how to verify the signatures in Linux.  Windows is a bit harder, but possible if you install gpg4win and verify the SHA256 hashes file. 


P.S. - I am not posting the link to the malicious site here, because it's unnecessary and I'd prefer people only be exposed to the good domain.  If you have a reason for it (such as doing a security investigation), please contact me.

Please try the latest testing version:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=299684.0

There was a major fix with regards to tx broadcast issues.  Also, the whole "mempool" thing is now an option in the "Help" menu: "Clear All Unconfirmed"

I don't agree with goatpig's explanation here.  People like to dwell on the possibility of collisions, but it's irrelevant.  A collision occurs at a rate similar to winning the Megamillions jackpot six consecutive times.  It doesn't happen.  No decisions should be made based on that possibility.

However, it is true that there are serious privacy implications to reusing addresses.  Luckily Armory wallets were designed to generate an infinite number of addresses from the paper backup seed, so you can use a new address with every transaction, without any risk of your backup going bad.  Just use a new address for every incoming transaction, and Armory will use a new address every time it needs to make a "change" address. 

However, it may not be a bad idea to split your coins into a couple different addresses in your wallet, again for privacy reasons.  But it's not critical.  Keeping them all in one address is fine for security reasons.

Hi zaico,

Please grab the latest testing release from here:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=299684.0

It has a long first-run startup time as it builds a new set of databases it requires for operation (30 min-3 hours), but should startup fairly quickly after that.  You don't need to do anything else except install the new version over the old one (your wallets and settings will be untouched).  This version uses about 1/20th the RAM of the version posted on the website.  In fact, we're just about to update the website even though this is a testing version, since it's proven to be far more reliable!

SimonL, you definitely earned your bounty!  Thanks for looking into that!  The fact that you do have a corrupted/malformed wallet file confirms that this is probably related to the last person who reported this.  They removed the corrupted file and the behavior went away.  It sounds like perhaps you just need to remove the WO wallet and re-export the watching-only wallet from the offline computer, to replace the corrupted one (it looks like Armory couldn't fix it).  Unfortuantely, it doesn't carry the comments with it... will add that as a later feature (to merge wallet files).


Do you have a lot of addresses?  This particular crash looks like what happens when Armory gets "swamped" in processing, and falls behind trying to catch up.  Still some errors in my error-handling procedures, but I haven't seen it happen under nominal conditions.  There's definitely some room for improvement there...


That's actually somewhat normal.  It's an "error" in a code path sense, but simply because something it was trying to do was already done. I should fix the messages...


Yeah, Armory has always had a problem with this.  I think it would be a serious project to fix this.  Right now I guess we should add to the documentation that you need to disable sleep/power-save if you want to keep Armory running all the time.  However, now that its startup time is dramatically reduced, it's not so terrible to close it when you're done ...





Ahh, super interesting.  There's a file that stores the scan state, and it's apparently not being released from the previous scan, in order to be opened for the next one.  I will look at that.  1x bounty for you!




Can you please open Armory and use "File"->Export Log File and email the result to support @ bitcoinarmory.com?  Those crash reports are pretty much useless for us.  It gives us a tiny hint of where the problem is, but the log gives us the whole story.  And please use the menu, since there's multiple logs that Armory will collapse into one.   Or maybe you can find some interesting error messages in the log and post them here.

Since Armory doesn't save any registry settings, there's not a good way to signal to it that you want to change your --datadir.   If you move your --datadir, there's no way for Armory to know where it is when you start it.   The only way to do it is really to modify the shortcut as you did.  Technically, all other options could be put in a armory.conf file in the Armory --datadir, but haven't gotten to that yet.  Similarly, I could just write a registry setting for Windows.  Meh.

Just about to release a new version that resolves all this.  Uses more disk space, but uses dramatically less RAM.  Should behave the same except the first time you run it will have to build databases.  After that, very fast!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=299684.0

Let me know if that works better for you.

You can click "Receive Bitcoins" over and over and it will generate the same sequence of addresses as the first time.  Though, if you are online, and you have money in address, say, #23, Armory should've detected that and filled the list up to #23.   (the default is 100 addresses, you'll have to manually generate them for going higher than that).

I don't understand.  Why not generate an address in your Armory wallet, open Bitcoin-Qt, and send all your money to your Armory wallet? 

If you are using auto-bitcoind, you'll have to close Armory and then open Bitcoin-Qt.  But that's fine.  Money still moves even when Armory is not connected. 

I don't promote the feature much, because it's minimal security improvement.  But it does protect against the simplest of keyloggers.  There's this notion that all viruses are omniscient, and targeting your bitcoin wallet.  If it's targeting your wallet, the OSD keyboard probably won't help.  But if it's just sucking data off your system looking for banking login passwords, etc... you avoided giving away too much info.

But I agree the feature is really quite minimal in terms of its security benefit.   (and generally, I try to assume omniscient malware when thinking about security, but not everything has to be super-effective to be part of the interface)

Btw, Armory has this.  Click "Show Keyboard" when it asks you to type in your password.  Lots of crazy options for scrambling it, though they're not actually that useful (it's almost intolerable to type with a scrambled keyboard)