X action with no validations after a number of days

[Ascholten]

I have a transaction that came in that is for a very small amount, however a few days have passed and there are no verifications on it.
I have had some transactions, some of them rather small too, that have came in after it that verified already.

Is this normal that a transaction can hit your wallet and sometimes sit a few days before it gets verified?
If this is not normal and this is a corruption somehow, what becomes of the thing then?

Thank you
Aaron

[Revalin]

Would you mind posting the address or txid so we can have a look?

[Ascholten]

Here is the Transaction ID.   hope it helps.   Im kind of a neophyte when it comes to looking this stuff up etc.

a30389e86e9bfe184c362f0be4f2872021fc684f1a03cf46119761c391a85045

Like I said it's a very small transaction, I can't even tell you where it came from, but just seemed strange that it's not starting to verify yet.

Thank you for your assistance.

Aaron

[Revalin]

Sure enough, the network doesn't see it.  What was the From address?

[Ascholten]

the from address is saying unknown.... yah big help right?

Aaron

[Stephen Gornick]

I have a transaction that came in that is for a very small amount, however a few days have passed and there are no verifications on it.

If that was a transaction sent to you, then perhaps it was a double spend.  If so, it will never confirm because the funds it was expecting to use have since been confirm in some other transaction.

To clear this transaction from your memory pool, you can simply close your client and restart it.

If this was from SatoshiDICE, here's the explanation:
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77870.msg1191732#msg1191732

[Ascholten]

stephen no it wasnt from the dice place and I have closed and restarted my wallet a few times and it still is hanging in there.

It makes me wonder,  what is going to happen over time as these errors start happening on the system.   Are they going to figure a way to clear them.
What happens if it is for say several coins, and someone is out a lot of cash?  Then what?

How does a 'double spend' happen a nyways, and you'd think that theyd have something in place to prevent that given the issues it can cause.

Aaron

[Stephen Gornick]

I have closed and restarted my wallet a few times and it still is hanging in there.

Is this for a transaction you are receiving or for one that you sent?

Ok, try this.  Run Bitcoin-Qt with the -rescan paramater.

It makes me wonder,  what is going to happen over time as these errors start happening on the system.

Well, it doesn't happen accidentally very easily.  In SatoshiDICE's instance, they have custom code that did that.  The Bitcoin.org client can possibly do that also if you are spending at the same time from the same copy of a wallet in two different places. 

So that's why even though this is a known problem, there aren't many reports of this problem occurring.  There is a fix ... you can perform wallet surgery using pywallet to remove ALL the transactions, and then rescan and it should be gone.  Just make sure you have made a backup of your wallet.dat first.