Generally speaking... you shouldn't lose bitcoins. If you have appropriate backups and can access the private keys, the coins are yours and you will be able to get access to them, even if you need to use other wallets or software to do so.

Think about paper wallets... they are simply a private key printed on a piece of paper... how can that be upgraded? And yet, they're considered to be one of the most secure forms of "long term" bitcoin storage (assuming they were generated correctly and stored safely).

"Major upgrades" may cause problems with using the network, like when High S Value transactions were no longer allowed, if you didn't upgrade you would find that you could not create/send transactions to the network. However, your coins were not lost. They were still contained within the private keys that your wallet controls.

The only real scenario I can think of where not upgrading could really lead to losing coins, is a security vulnerability is discovered that allows someone to hack your wallet and gain access to your private keys. If you don't update your system you are effectively leaving yourself open to attack.

Basically this works like any other exchange/trading system... like shares or foreign currency exchange.

You have people who want to buy and people who want to sell... when you get a buyer and seller who agree on a price, that defines what the current value is. This value will generally shift based on supply and demand... if more people want to buy, and supply is low, the price will tend to increase as buyers "outbid" each other to try and get the limited supply.

When supply is high, and demand is low... price will tend to decrease as sellers "underbid" each other to try and get rid of their stock.

All the 3rd parties are doing is reporting either what the current buy/sell price is on their platform (for instance, in the case of exchanges like Poloniex or Bittrex)... or what is likely to be a weighted average from several sources (in the case of Google search or Preev). They do not set the value, they just report what bitcoins are currently being bought and sold for.

I'm getting very confused with your shotgun approach to trying to sort this out... Surely, given that you don't have your root key paper backup, the current goal should be to try and recover the wallet files that were apparently deleted? Did these not have your private keys etc in them?

Also, how do you know that your wallet files were deleted? Where are they no longer visible that leads you to believe they got deleted? Are they not showing up in Armory? or are they no longer visible in a specific directory on your hard drive?

Did you try and use the recommended recovery software to find deleted files in the Armory directory?

First of all, just some advice... if you're going to post logs, please use pastebin.com... otherwise it just makes the thread page ridiculously long!

It looks like there was an IOError of some description... I'm not familiar with the code there, so hopefully one of the Armory Devs might be able to elaborate
The weird thing being that according to the comments in the code the forkOlineWallet function is used to: "Make a copy of this wallet that contains no private key data"

Anyway, looking at the rest of your log... it would appear that the wallet file that you might be looking for is:
Wallet (2AYDvuXW7): Mainwallet

No, that would be a massive security vulnerability if private keys were left laying around in plaintext debug logs!

I assume that you have no been able to find anything using the recovery software?

Default fees will definitely be this much if the OPs transaction has a large number of inputs resulting in a large transaction size. The appropriateness of a transaction fee is not (and should not be) determined by the "total" value being used. Fees should be considered in terms of sats/byte or btc/kB. This is how miners look at the fee.

Recommended fees can be seen here:
https://bitcoinfees.21.co/
https://btc.com/stats/unconfirmed-tx


From the screenshots, it looks like blockchain.info wallet on a mobile phone... Like the desktop browser version of the wallet, it allows for a "custom fee" to be used. It is set in sats/byte. So you can specify exactly what you want to use for a fee rate.

I am about 99.9% sure that the reason the OP is having such a large fee calculated is due to them receiving several transactions of small amounts of bitcoins from their mining activities. With current fee rates of ~300 sats/byte... every input to a transaction will require ~300 sats/byte * 148 bytes = 44,400 sats as a fee... so if you have 10 inputs, your fee is at least 444,000 sats... as I mentioned earlier, as your fee was around 715,000 sats, I would guess you have around 15 inputs in your transaction. Mostly likely as a result of accepting a bunch of "dust" sized transactions from mining.

NOTE: There is a danger that doing this will result in a transaction that ViaBTC won't accept (ie. if it includes any dust sized outputs) and your transaction may get stuck. Attempt this at your own risk.
My suggestion if you're wanting to reduce your fee, is set the custom fee to at least 10 sats/byte (i'd suggest 11+ sats/byte to account for any round errors) and then try and push your transaction using the ViaBTC TX Accelerator

By default wallet files are usually created in the "%appdata%\Armory" directory... looking at your log files from earlier, on your PC that would appear to be:


wallet.dat has nothing to do with you at the moment... that is the wallet file created by Bitcoin Core (aka Bitcoin-qt), but is not used or related to Armory in any way.

You may need to enable the "Coin Control" features to see this.

Have a look in "Settings" -> "Options" -> "Wallet"... and tick the box that says "Enable coin control features". You should then get the "Inputs" button section showing up on the "Send" tab Not sure when exactly this feature was implemented, so it may or may not be in 0.13. I know it is definitely in 0.14.1

It would appear that that address is empty anyway (and has been since Jan 2014): https://blockchain.info/address/13oxYTF1CDzz63FV6FDMT7xuzpH8TRnYgb

Perhaps your coins are contained in other addresses? You might want to start checking all the addresses that pywallet dumped on a block explorer and see if you can find the one(s) that has your 2.5 BTC

Another option could be to backup the wallet file... and then update the bitcoin client? Not necessarily to the very latest, but at least something after 0.8.6 and see if it is more stable.

Honestly, I recommend that you get your coins out of MultiBit HD as soon as possible. The software seems unstable and has at least one major known bug that still isn't fixed yet.

If you're looking for a good "light" wallet, then I would recommend Electrum as a replacement. It may not look quite as "pretty" but it works and is actively being maintained.

Nope... sadly it isn't... Electrum uses their own proprietary seed to master private key algorithm.

ThomasV has his reasons for this: http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/seedphrase.html


However, the advice given above is still sound... make sure you have a backup of your seed... that is the whole point of HD wallets. You don't need to worry about backing up wallet files or private keys or passwords. You just need your seed.

Those screenshots show creating a seeded HD wallet... you want to use the following option when you select "File" -> "New/Restore":

After selecting a name for your wallet... select "Standard Wallet":


Then when it asks for the keystore, you want to select "Use public or private keys":


The next window will have a textbox where you can enter a list of private keys that you wish to import.

That is exactly what restore is... it generates a new wallet, but instead of picking "Create a new seed", you want to select "I already have a seed" or "Use public or private keys".



In your case, restoring from a seed, you want the "I already have a seed" option. Is this an Electrum seed you are restoring? or a seed from another HD wallet?

Have you attempted to use any "undelete" recovery type software? There are several software packages that can help recover accidentally deleted files. As long as you haven't been writing data to the drive in question your chances of recovery are fairly good.

Recuva is considered to be one of the best... also, the tools mentioned here might be useful.

Also, don't create duplicate threads

So you have opened MultiBit...

And you selected: "File" -> "Open Wallet"

It should have opened a window asking you to select a wallet file, did you see something like this:


You want to select "multibit-data", then click "Open", you should see this:


Now you want to select the "wallet-backup" folder and then click "Open", you should see the "multibit-YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.wallet" files:


Select the wallet file you want and click "Open".

You should go back to the main multibit window, and it will start synchronising the wallet. This may take a while, so be patient. After this has finished you should see all your addresses, transactions and coins.

Ok, so if the webpage says invalid mnemonic, you have indeed copied something wrong... it is likely to be that you've just transcribed one of the words incorrectly. As I remember, when blockchain.info gives you your 12 word seed, it does it 4 words at a time... and uses numbers... ie.

Make sure you are NOT including the numbers when you type the mnemonic in... it should ONLY be the words:

Also, double check the spelling of the words... there are a few that a quite similar... I helped a fellow user a few weeks ago, one word in their mnemonic was written down wrong... you can get words like this:

So a missing letter or an accidentally added letter or changing of 1 letter can mess everything up!

So, if it isn't the numbers and you are typing 12 words, I would suggest that you look at the list of words here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/english.txt

See if there are any words that are very similar to the ones you have written down (like kid/kit/kite) and maybe try different combinations

pywallet also has a recovery mode for attempting to find deleted wallet files... whether or not it is able to find anything after the drive has been formatted and had the OS reinstalled is another story...

Read more here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=38004.0

You can double check your 12 word seed... create an "offline" copy of this website: https://iancoleman.github.io/bip39/

The instructions for creating the offline copy are at the bottom of the page. After you have done that, open the offline copy in your browser. Then do the following:

1. Put your 12 word seed in at the top as the "BIP39 Mnemonic"
2. Under "Derivation Path" click "BIP32"
3. Set the "Client" dropdown value to "blockchain.info"

You should be able to see the addresses for your account at the bottom. If these addresses do not match with the one that you deposited bitcoins to, chances are that you got the mnemonic wrong. How that happened if you took a screenshot is beyond me. I could only guess that there was a bug in blockchain.info and the mnemonic they displayed was not the one that got set up on your wallet ID.

If the address does match, at least you'll be able to use the matching private key to sweep or import that address to another wallet and recover your coins.

Did you do the "walletpassphrase <password> <timeout in seconds>" command?

Something like: walletpassphrase thisIsMyPassword 600

Then try the dumpprivkey command again.

It would appear the parent transactions are slowly confirming... there is currently only 1 unconfirmed parent now.

I have tried pushing this using AntPool... hopefully that will confirm and then we can try pushing your actual transaction

Did you mean BitcoinJ? Available from here: https://bitcoinj.github.io/

They have pretty thorough documentation and support there if that is indeed the project you're trying to use or is there a project called Jcore?

There is also the BitcoinJ subforum here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=138.0