Bitcoin doesn't really have "accounts" per se... they're more of an abstract concept that some wallet applications (like Ledger Live and other BIP44 compatible wallets) use... for the wallets that do implement "Accounts", because they are generally HD (hierarchical deterministic) wallets constructed from seeds, they will indeed have multiple keys/addresses for the "accounts".

Bitcoin Core, whilst it is an HD wallet, doesn't use the concept of accounts anymore (that functionality was deprecated a while back). So, with Bitcoin Core, you have your wallet.dat and it holds many keys/addresses. Like other HD wallets, this is generally because it is trying to provide unique addresses for all your receive (and change) activity in an attempt to prevent "address re-use".


This can indeed be somewhat problem to go to an explorer and work out what your wallet balance should be as you could be looking at 10s or 100s of different addresses with UTXOs etc (depending on how you have been using the wallet).

It's essentially why wallet applications are used... they hold all your keys (and therefore know all your addresses) and are able to track everything for you. The issue you're running into is that your Bitcoin Coin wallet.dat files, being old, are not currently synced and therefore, potentially not giving the correct balances.


This is generally very much unlike ETH, which tends to use the one single key/address for your entire "account"... so it's a simple lookup on the explorer.

Thanks for coming back and updating us... and that's good news that you had a positive outcome in 1. Getting your funds back and 2. Getting some substantial gains!

Still, it isn't great that you had to wait for 8 months!!?!

Better late than never, I guess.

My guess would be that, rightly or wrongly, most people just don't declare it at all. After all... "Bitcoin is aNoNyMoUs!"

Some countries have defined laws now regarding cryptocurrency and income and capital gains and how this should be declared etc... some don't. And I dare say that there is probably a significant proportion of people who don't even realise they are required to pay taxes on their crypto assets and income derived from such.

However, generally as far as the taxman is concerned... "Ignorance is not an excuse"

These 2 things are generally mutually exclusive... or to put it another way, risk and return are generally proportional.

As one increases, so does the other... as one decreases, so does the other.


The unicorn of investing has always been the "low risk, high return" investment. I'll just say that history shows that a lot of money has been lost betting on "horses with a horn glued to their heads"...

Indeed, that SMS message is from someone attempting to login or reset your password etc.

So, it seems someone has got to your email/login details as they work through the data dumps from the many, many security breaches   They'll have scripts setup to test each one and see if they're still valid and/or work on other websites as well... Don't be too surprised if you start getting more "Password reset" links or other security warnings from various places.

If the Nano S is working fine with Ledger Live, then it would appear that the issue is specifically with Electrum and it's Ledger plugin. You might want to raise an issue on the Electrum Github Issue tracker: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues

Note that the Devs will require that you're trying this on the latest version of Electrum (currently 4.1.5) before they offer any support.

Apparently it uses more space, so there is less room for apps... the current Capacity is 138Kb, which is slightly less than I remember from the last update. I only have 2 apps installed on it anyway... so I didn't really notice if there was any less space. Space has never really been an issue for me. I'm not holding 759843 different coins/tokens... and I rarely trade/switch between the ones I do have.

I however was somewhat surprised to see that the Bitcoin app is now a whopping 62kb. Nearly half the available space just for Bitcoin.

Given that it appears the OPs wallet is not synced, the changes to the balance were most likely a result of the wallet syncing in the background and adjusting the wallet balance as new transactions were found and processed.

No. the amount being transacted makes pretty much no difference in terms of transaction priority. It is almost exclusively the fee rate being paid.

As at 00:30 UTC, Friday, 3 December 2021... there are only around 8 blocks worth of unconfirmed transactions... and the vast majority of those are all using 1 sat/byte fees... If network conditions stay the same (no guarantees), there is a relatively good possibility that your transaction will get confirmed in the next few hours without requiring any intervention.

However, if you have an urgent requirement to have the transaction confirmed, then I would agree with the others that using Electrum+Ledger device to bump the fee via RBF is the best course of action.

Yeah... I guess one flaw is that the "bounty" sent to the "PKI wallet", would need to be sufficiently large that it would actually make an attacker want to steal it.

For instance, if you only send $100... and they could potentially make thousands from exploiting access to the PKI in other ways, then they could just ignore the BTC in the wallet, steal thousands from abusing the PKI access and the entire system fails.

Also, with this system, you're potentially tying up large amounts of money, to "prove" that the keys are "safe"... which doesn't really prove that the keys are safe anyway... it just tells you that no one has moved the coins. Either way, you're likely losing out on a substantial amount of money. It's either stuck in the wallet, or an attacker steals it.

Even if the other party was "staking" their own BTC to prove that their keys were safe... it still doesn't really prove that at all. Just that no one has moved the BTC.

If you don't have space to run a full node with all the block data... running a pruned node and working with old wallets is going to be very frustrating!

Every time you want to open an "old wallet" that was last used from outside of the time period that match the blocks still on your disk, you'd need to redownload the entire blockchain again. This can take many hours, if not many days

The ideal solution is a full, unpruned node.

If you absolutely need to run it pruned, then you might want to edit the bitcoin.conf file (or start from the commandline) and pass in the -wallet parameter as many times as necessary to open all of your old wallets at once.


For example, if you had the following wallet files:
old_wallet.dat
wallet_2015.dat
my_wallet.dat

You could start Bitcoin Core:





You don't rename the .exe file... you "append" the -reindex parameter to the end of the command... You either need to create a shortcut to the bitcoin-qt.exe and then edit the properties for the shortcut to change the "target" like so:


NOTE: make sure that the path to the bitcoin-qt.exe and the "start in" are relevant to YOUR setup... Based on your screenshot, I would guess instead of C:\Program Files\Bitcoin... it should be G:\Bitcoin for your setup.

Alternatively, just launch it from a "Command Prompt" window (Start, type: cmd)... then enter this command:


That'll start up Bitcoin Core GUI, opening your old wallet.dat files... and start the reindexing process... This will likely require downloading and validating the entire blockchain again... but when it's finished, all the old wallet.dat's that you open should be "synced" and ready to use.

Another thought occurred to me... Do you just have one wallet file setup within Electrum... or did you create different wallet files for each hardware device using the Master Public Keys from the other device and the "normal" Electrum wallet?

I was just mucking around testing some stuff... and found that the Ledger detection could be a bit "inconsistent" with multiple wallets open within Electrum... sometimes it would find it, sometimes it worked first time, sometimes it just refused to find it no matter how many times I rescanned etc.

With just a single wallet open, it was much more reliable, finding the device every time.

It seems that this bug has been fixed in the new 1.5.3-beta1 release: https://github.com/sparrowwallet/sparrow/issues/311#issuecomment-984853015

So, maybe grab the new beta version and see if that works for you.


On a side note, that giters website is dreadful. It doesn't handle the markup in the comments very well

Are you using the GUI Bitcoin Core client, or running commands from the command line?  If you are running the Bitcoin Core client... it should show you at the bottom of the GUI window if it is currently syncing.

Alternatively, just look at the "Window -> Information" menu item... and check what the "Current Block Height" listed is... if it isn't at least 712289, then your client likely isn't synced properly:



Until your client is synced, you won't be able to send any transactions, as the client cannot guarantee that your wallet balance is true and correct.

That is unfortunate that you have been unsuccessful in getting your funds returned... from a genuine mistake.

It also seems a bit sketchy that you can just setup a wikileaks group and start asking for donations... I'd be very very hesistant to donate anything, knowing that this is how the whole thing seems to be setup!

That probably explains why they advise using "1.5V Constant Voltage" rechargeable batteries... A lot of the "long life" rechargeable batteries often run below 1.5V, which seems likely to cause issues with this device.

Hopefully this is something they can rectify moving forward.

Well... looks like the answer was November 30th, 2021

They've put out an update to support Taproot amongst other things:
https://support.ledger.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010446000-Ledger-Nano-S-firmware-release-notes?docs=true


Update was simple enough... saw the "New Firmware" banner in Ledger Live, clicked update now... followed the prompts... it even has the "re-install apps" feature at the end of the process that will put all the apps you had installed back on the device for you.

The entire process took less than 5 minutes.

Honestly, the Nano S is somewhat notorious for being quite selective about which USB ports and cables it will work with... There are multiple threads on this forum and reddit with users having issues with certain USB ports.

The only hub I've ever tried it with, was connecting it through a USB port on my monitor... and that actually seemed to work fine.

I assume you're using Windows 10?  If so, when you have the Nano S connected to the hub, do you see any "unknown devices" listed in the "Device Manager" app?

This is really a "Coke or Pepsi?", "PC or Mac?", "X or Y?" type question... with no real right or wrong answer.

You're going to fine proponents of both... and users that dislike both, for a variety of reasons. I have both, and find that they're pretty much equally capable, and cost about the same when I originally bought them. They both had their pros and cons.

At the end of the day, you'll need to look at all the features of both, and likely the price point + shipping and make a determination as to which works best for you personal situation. While I would struggle to currently recommend Ledger due to the quality issues they have had of late, if the choice is between no hardware wallet or a Ledger, then I'd say, get the Ledger.

But don't necessarily ignore other wallets like Coldcard or BitBox either.

We are really spoiled for choice these days... and that is always a good thing!

I agree with Pmalek, avoid Blockchain.com. It is simply not reliable and doesn't really support importing keys properly.

I would highly recommend you use Electrum: https://electrum.org/#home
and read the guide here on how to verify the digital signatures: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5240594.0

Electrum will let you import private keys and will show the funds "instantly"... and it's a lot more reliable than blockchain.com