Balance on PC vs Android App different?

[elrodvoss]

Evening,

I am posting this in the newbie area cause it may be a very newbie question.

I sent 10 coins to another online wallet through the normal BitCoin Wallet program that you download from the website.  I set it up to charge the 0.01 fee and it shows that 10.01 coins were sent to the address.

Now I have a App on my android phone called Wallet Balance.  It shows that 14.0 coins was sent, but what is odder still is my PC shows a balance of 20.2 Coins and the Android App shows 14.17 Coins.

It has been 48 hours and I believe the main PC total is correct, but if both are grabbing the same info, does anyone know why it could be so off?

It does show the transaction, but the totals are off. (both sent and remaining balance)


Could this just be a bug in the app or am I missing something else?

As always, thanks for the advice in advance.

-elrodvoss

[lassdas]

What source does the Android App get its info from?

Havent used anything else than Electrum on my Android so i can't really tell,
what i can think of though is that the wallet.dat from your PC is different from the wallet.dat on your Android.

Example:
You want to send 10BTC, but only have 2x 7BTC transactions in your wallet, it will send all of your 14BTC, 10 to whoever you want to send them to and the remaining 4 back to yourself.
Those 4 will end up in a new address that your Android probably doesnt know of, it will only see that there were 14BTC going out, although you only sent 10 and got 4 back.

[Stephen Gornick]

It has been 48 hours and I believe the main PC total is correct, but if both are grabbing the same info, does anyone know why it could be so off?

The problem is likely that you are misunderstanding a detail specific to how Bitcoin works. 

Your PC's wallet for the Bitcoin.org client doesn't hold bitcoin in "an address" your bitcoin holds transactions for many addresses.

As a result, if you try to monitor the wallet balance from another tool, such as that Android app, it will not stay in synch because it doesn't know all of the addresses that the Bitcoin.org client holds.

There is no good method for monitoring the balance of the Bitcoin.org wallet, other than the Bitcoin-qt client itself.

If you want to be able to access a wallet from both your PC and a mobile client, use a wallet that support that.

For instance, Blockchain.info/wallet is a hybrid EWallet that can be accessed from the web as well as from the Blockchain for Android (and for iOS) mobile client.  That service stores only an encrypted copy of your wallet so the site itself doesn't have access to your private keys.

There are hosted (shared) EWallets as well ... Paytunia's wallet is accessible from the web and from Android.

[elrodvoss]

There is no good method for monitoring the balance of the Bitcoin.org wallet, other than the Bitcoin-qt client itself.

If you want to be able to access a wallet from both your PC and a mobile client, use a wallet that support that.

For instance, Blockchain.info/wallet is a hybrid EWallet that can be accessed from the web as well as from the Blockchain for Android (and for iOS) mobile client. 

Thanks for the info.  Sorry for the delay in reply.

I am curious though, will blockchain.info allow me to use my current wallet/address from my bitcoin-qt client or will I have to have another wallet/address and just "transfer" the coins from my qt client to blockchain wallet?

[Puppet]

There is no good method for monitoring the balance of the Bitcoin.org wallet, other than the Bitcoin-qt client itself.

If you want to be able to access a wallet from both your PC and a mobile client, use a wallet that support that.

For instance, Blockchain.info/wallet is a hybrid EWallet that can be accessed from the web as well as from the Blockchain for Android (and for iOS) mobile client.  

Thanks for the info.  Sorry for the delay in reply.

I am curious though, will blockchain.info allow me to use my current wallet/address from my bitcoin-qt client or will I have to have another wallet/address and just "transfer" the coins from my qt client to blockchain wallet?

You can import private keys in blockchain.info wallet, but its not very easy and I wouldnt recommend it if you dont know what you are doing.
If you just want to be able to check your balance online, import the public key (bitcoin address) in to blockchain.info, so it becomes a watch-only address. That also makes it safe that no browser exploit or keylogger could be used to steal those coins, you would still need the regular desktop client to send coins. Make sure you backup your wallet.dat.

[elrodvoss]

Well I created a Blockchain.info wallet.  I like how their system is set up.

So I set up my bitcoin-qt wallet as watch only.  Blockchain was showing the same amount as the previous app.  21 coins vs 27 coins.  So once I got everything situated and was comfortable with the website I transferred everything from my QT wallet to my Blockchain wallet.

It shows the transaction, but it has 6 coins unconfirmed, which would be the odd part.  I understand that I have to wait for it to go through and Im sure that after 10 mins it will be fine.  I always pay the 0.01 or 0.02 fees as I do believe in bitcoin and I want it to thrive.

So I guess we will see if everything syncs up correctly.

I will keep you updated.


Thanks for all your help and info on new sites and apps.

-elrodvoss