This message is being sent to the people impacted by the address-change issue :
Dear Instawallet owner,
You're receiving this message because you are part of the users that got impacted by an unexpected side-effect of our recent maintenance.
- What was this maintenance about ?
This maintenance was about making Instawallet usable again, as you might have noticed Instawallet was until recently becoming extremely slow and sluggish.
The reason was that Instawallet is very popular, our users create a lot of wallets which ended up putting a lot of continuous strain on the Bitcoin daemon running behind the scenes. As a result it crashed often, and even if it was promptly resurrected by our monitoring tools it took a very long time to restart. To be precise it was taking more than an hour to simply load the wallet.
So this maintenance was about performance and availability, as you might have noticed Instawallet is now much faster and responsive.
- How was the maintenance conducted ?
The maintenance simply consisted in removing all wallets with a zero balance and importing all the remaining private keys into a brand new wallet file in order to reduce the load on the Bitcoin client.
- Why did the maintenance take so long ?
The maintenance took a very long time because all the private keys being imported into the new wallet had to be imported with a blank blockchain, the reason for that is that after importing a private key the client rescans the whole chain to find relevant transactions to add to the wallet, in our case it was not possible since it would have meant waiting for tens of thousands of rescans.
Instead we imported all the keys in a blank wallet, with a blank blockchain and then let the client download the blockchain from the network, this was the part that took a long time.
- I patiently waited until the end of the maintenance and tried to access my wallet, now my address has changed and my funds are gone ! What the hell ?
Fear not, your funds are safe.
You are among the unlucky that had their wallet pruned too aggressively, it was pruned because at the moment the migration started it had a zero balance. We could have done much better and save the wallets that were recently created instead of just the funded wallets.
Sorry about that, it's our fault, we'll learn from that mistake and hope you'll forgive us.
- Now how can this be fixed ?
We won't be able to give you the same wallet with the same address, because that would mean importing the relevant private key into the currently running Bitcoin daemon, which, as explained would take a very long time and block the whole daemon.
There are two options here :
- Either you only care about your funds, in which case we will send them to an address you will give us,
- or you care about your funds AND keeping your Instawallet address, in this case we will send you your funds and the private key for the address you wish to keep
In order for us to either send your funds, and optionally the private key we need you to send us three things :
- Your public wallet address (what it used to be),
- Whether you wish to only keep your funds or if you want to keep the address too,
- The first five characters of your private URL (we will be sending funds out so we need to ensure you are in control of the URL)
Again, we apologize for pruning your wallet and hope you'll concur that Instawallet needs to actually be "instant" to best serve the Bitcoin community.
Sincerely,
David (aka davout)
Paymium team
