[SOLVED] MyCelium Gear and Electrum Misconfiguration 0.1 BTC Reward for Recovery

[fast11]

Hello,

Few days ago a created a Mycelium Gear widget with an Electrum 2.4.4 xpub key and inadvertently picked Mycelium iOS instead of Electrum as my wallet of choice. My customers have already made their payments but nothing is showing up in my wallet. Moreover no payments are shown under my xpub pulled from Electrum.

I wrote to Mycelium Gear support and I was instructed with the following:
1) Backup your Electrum wallet.
2) Restore your wallet backup in Mycelium iOS wallet.
3) Send BTC from Mycelium iOS wallet to Electrum.

But here's my problem: I have been trying to migrate to a different wallet since then but my seed of 13 words from Electrum 2.4.4 seems to be incompatible with other wallets like Mycelium, MultiBit and Trezor.

Is there a way to recoup the BTC sent to me despite the initial Mycelium Gear misconfig? I am offering a 0.1 BTC reward for successful recovery.

Thanks for your time!

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[torusJKL]

I understand you correct that Mycelium Gear derived different addresses from the Electrum xpub key than Electrum did?
Which addresses to you get when you use this homepage: https://bitcore.io/playground/#/hdkeys ? Elecrum or Mycelium Gear?

Electrum only supports the first/default wallet/account of the in BIP32 described HD wallets.
See here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki

Could it be that Mycelium Gear used another wallet than the default one, thus you don't see the addresses in Electrum?

Edit:
I found https://github.com/vbuterin/pybitcointools.
Maybe you could use this tool to get the private keys of the addresses your customers have paid to and import them individually.

From what I understand Electrum is not BIP39 compatible that is why the Electrum seed phrase does not work in MyCelium.
But because Electrum is BIP32 compatible once you have the master seed (which is derived from the seed phrase) it should be compatible with any BIP32 wallet app, as long as they support the import of this master seed.
In the following BIP32 picture the master seed is described as master node and the seed phrase as master seed: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032/derivation.png

There are also some commits that have not been merged to the master yet that might be interesting to you:
https://github.com/vbuterin/pybitcointools/pull/84/commits

[fast11]

From what I understand Electrum is not BIP39 compatible that is why the Electrum seed phrase does not work in MyCelium.
But because Electrum is BIP32 compatible once you have the master seed (which is derived from the seed phrase) it should be compatible with any BIP32 wallet app, as long as they support the import of this master seed.

Solved it by using http://bip32.org/ . All I had to do was to paste my BIP32 Extended Key in order to get the private key for my specific BTC address. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. The reward of 0.1 BTC is going your way.

[torusJKL]

Great to hear!
The bitcoin eco system needs users like you and it would have been a shame if we had lost you over this mistake.

If you used bip32.org while being online (or going online afterwards) I recommend that you create a new wallet to be on the safe side as your extended key might have leaked.

I also recommend you look into hardware wallets.
They are kind of a cold storage but easy to use.

Electrum supports Trezor and Ledger.
I personally use the Ledger Wallet and can recommend it.
(as an added bonus if you use ledger in Electrum you use BIP39 seeds so you can switch between Electrum and MyCelium with the same seed)

[oudirks]

Hi,

That is great that you could fix it.

I have same issue, i've tried both electrum wallet and mycelium wallet, the first 2 days all transactions came to my wallet with no issue, but after that all transactions went to unknown addresses that are not mine, would you please help me recover my bitcoins?

I could not follow fast11 steps, would you help me please ??

[oudirks]

Please any help ?

How do you get a specific public key of a bitcoin address using bip32 extended key ? i'm desperate any help please? i offer 0.1 btc too

[Evangard]

Hi, i have had the same problem and can help you!