Woke up this morning to see my balance had doubled??

[Bordomboy]

I have been using the satoshi client from the beginning and have several backups of my .dat files and even cloned my wallet onto a usb device a couple of years ago. Its been working fine having a wallet on my hard drive and on the usb, I simply load one or the other periodically and make sure it is up to date. Last night, I was booking a trip on cheapair and spent about 3.47 btc from my satoshi client (version 0.8.5 beta) from the usb backup... it took a bit for it to sync, but no problem.

This morning, I looked at my 'overview' and saw that the 3.47 transaction was listed twice and my confirmed balance was listed as double what it should have been.  One of the transactions shows 0 confirmations and checking the transID on blockchain.info, I saw that it is not found.

Doing a bit more research with the wallet addresses on blockchain, I found that the client had basically taken my entire balance, sent the 3.47 on to the address provided by cheapair and the rest back to one of my other address stored with the client. The extra transaction, for some reason, is listed on the transactions tab with a "?" and won't go away.

I closed that version and opened the one stored on my hard drive, from which the usb was cloned.... it showed a single transaction for the 3.47 and the balance is what it should be less that amount.

So, after catching my breath from thinking someone had sent me that much bitcoin, I'm wondering what happened? I've never had this error occur before and am confused about it, but more importantly, how do I remove the extra "?" transaction from the history and thus return the balance to normal?

Thanks in advance for any insight.

[FiatKiller]

Check this thread out! https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=459990.new#new

I think we have a problem.

[nibyokwy]

this reddit post explains what you are probably seeing. i am unsure how to fix it though.

[niceli]

Can somebody explain this in simple words? Is it a serious problem within the core protocol or something that can be fixed?
Is this related to the mtgox reported problems with bitcoin?

I wonder why all of this is showing up at once?

[FiatKiller]

this reddit post explains what you are probably seeing. i am unsure how to fix it though.

Sounds like we should start with  a fresh wallet and copy what we can out of the problem wallet.

[Bordomboy]

It is strange.

I forgot to add that I'd backed up all of my addresses to a Blockchain.info wallet last fall, so checking my balance on there was how I figured out that my entire balance had been sent to one of my old addresses. I created a new address in the hard drive client and sent them back to myself... other than getting charged a transaction fee, the transaction was listed as "sent btc to yourself".

[FiatKiller]

It is strange.

I forgot to add that I'd backed up all of my addresses to a Blockchain.info wallet last fall, so checking my balance on there was how I figured out that my entire balance had been sent to one of my old addresses. I created a new address in the hard drive client and sent them back to myself... other than getting charged a transaction fee, the transaction was listed as "sent btc to yourself".

Good idea, but the article says it may lead to failure of the wallet, so best to be safe.