Can no longer use my wallet and upgraded wallet does not show my addresses

[Elliander]

So I went to spend money from my Electrum wallet - 1.9.8 - which I intentionally did NOT want to upgrade because I wanted to keep it safe with all the settings intact -  and had a rude awakening with the notification that all my money is essentially locked until I upgrade.

I read up on some issue with addresses being related to some vulnerability with the addresses themselves, but this explanation makes no sense to me because in order to recover my Bitcoins it has to be transferred from my address.

In any case, I was forced to upgrade so I downloaded the latest Electrum Wallet, imported my Wallet and my Labels, checked that the seeds match up, but none of my History (which I need for accounting purposes) or lists of addresses used and unused (which I had labelled to keep track of what Bitcoin wallet was being used for what) is showing up at all. On the bottom left corner my old wallet shows the balance just fine, but the new wallet is just "synchronizing" (and has been for like an hour). I can restore to another Electrum 1.9.8 install just fine, but 2.5.4 just doesn't work which means that my money is frozen.

The main selling point of Electrum was the idea that my Bitcoin would be SAFE from external threats. That if a website went down, or any number of other problems happened, it would all be SAFE. This is obviously not true. I can no longer touch my money and to say that it bothers me is an understatement. I hate forced upgrades, but even more so, I hate the idea of a third party having the power to lock me out of all of my money.

So how do I recover my money so that I can move it onto a safe wallet?

EDIT: It has been synchronizing for 2 hours now and still will not show that I have any money at all. If Electrum can't even recover from the actual wallet and label files how am I supposed to believe that it can be recovered from seed? This is exactly why I did not want to upgrade!

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[Elliander]

After restarting a few times the history loaded up, and it shows what change address my Bitcoins went into and now that comes up immediately when I start it with the labels on the history intact, but it still does not show my list of addresses - used or unused - and still does not show me any balance. It just hangs on "synchronizing".

[Elliander]

OK, I think I figured it out: When upgrading Electrum it automatically resets the gap limit - which is ridiculously stupid considering that anyone who has used Electrum for any length of time with change addresses in use will have gone through 20 addresses in no time. When upgrading it really should actually CHECK to see what the gap limit is set to and set it to that in the upgraded version and there really needs to be a setting to change this considering how important this setting is to actually finding your Bitcoin.

In the console I typed in:

wallet.storage.put('gap_limit',100)

And my money appeared. So now I can see about finding a Bitcoin Wallet that doesn't force users to upgrade since doing so can literally ruin me if anything goes wrong.

EDIT: and talk about a downgrade! You guys REMOVED the ability to set my own transaction fee! If I don't care about how fast it arrives, I should be able to set it to .0001 BTC and not have it automatically adjust on me. (the only setting is to set how much per kb, rather than how much per transaction)

[ThomasV]

With a little bit of Googling, you would have seen that the forced upgrade is not imposed by Electrum, but by the Bitoin network.
Early versions of Electrum used to sign transactions with high-S values; such transactions are now rejected by the Bitcoin network.

The ability to set your own fee has not been removed; it is an option in your preferences.
Before whining about that, exploring the menus a little bit would have saved you some time.

[torusJKL]

OK, I think I figured it out: When upgrading Electrum it automatically resets the gap limit - which is ridiculously stupid considering that anyone who has used Electrum for any length of time with change addresses in use will have gone through 20 addresses in no time.

The gap limit does not limit the number of addresses you can use.
But the number of addresses without any transaction.

Meaning by default Electrum will create new addresses until 20 addresses without any transaction have been found.

It looks that over the years you have been using Electrum you skiped some addresses.
You can leave them as they are and increase the gap limit (what you did).
Or you could use them and they will not be counted towards the gap limit anymore.

The second option is the better one in the long run because next time you'll recovering your wallet from the seed it will just work.

P.S. not upgrading Electrum is the opposite of keeping your bitcoins safe. What if an older version has an exploit that is fixed in newer ones?

[japerry]

With a little bit of Googling, you would have seen that the forced upgrade is not imposed by Electrum, but by the Bitoin network.
Early versions of Electrum used to sign transactions with high-S values; such transactions are now rejected by the Bitcoin network.

The ability to set your own fee has not been removed; it is an option in your preferences.
Before whining about that, exploring the menus a little bit would have saved you some time.

+1

Exactly! It's like blaming your car for potholes in the road.