Whats wrong with my client/wallet?

[ATC777]

I was playing SatoshiDice for the first time yesterday and having fun. Won a nice little bit of coin. But I noticed at one point a transaction of 0.15 BTC was sent to the 24% SatoshiDice address... a transaction I didn't send myself. And I was sent a winning payout for this "ghost" transaction from SatoshiDice. At first I didn't think anything of it -- chalked it up as lag. But later I started having problems and realized something wasn't right.

I looked into the blockchain.info for my transactions and that 0.15 ghost transaction was marked as a double-spend. I definitely didn't do a double-spend... I was just playing dice with the regular Satoshi client from bitcoin.org. For a while my client/wallet was working fine, but then it stopped working. My last two bets sent to SatoshiDice got no response transaction. I waited hours and hours and hours to see if it would break loose when I got to 1/6 confirms. But that never came. I tried a payment-to-self to see if I could move all my coins to one address, but the transaction didn't even show up in blockchain.info. It's still shown as an unconfirmed transaction in my wallet.

I also tried sending 0.25 btc to BTC4Amazon to see if it would work. My client deducted 0.25 btc from my wallet balance, but no transaction ever reached him nor did it show up in blockchain.info for his wallet address.

What the hell is going on here?



These transactions from yesterday are still sitting at 0/6 confirmations, and I still have an unconfirmed balance of 0.00025 BTC from SatoshiDice. Am I going to need to try to purge my wallet or strip out my private keys and redeem them?

Thanks,

--ATC--

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[prezbo]

You (or satoshidice) somehow managed to make a double spend, be it by accident or a sw bug, and so every transaction after it tied to it's outputs is considered invalid and will never confirm. You could try restoring your wallet from a recent backup (one before the doubly spent transaction) - that is if you haven't exhausted the key pool after that (judging by the time stamps you play sd a lot and that just might be the case).

[DannyHamilton]

Perhaps someone successfully perpetrated a double spend attack against SatoshiDice, and before the double spend attack completed SatoshiDice had already paid your winnings from the funds that were lost in the attack?

[ATC777]

Perhaps someone successfully perpetrated a double spend attack against SatoshiDice, and before the double spend attack completed SatoshiDice had already paid your winnings from the funds that were lost in the attack?

I thought about that... sounds like a possibility.

[ThickAsThieves]

There is a known effort for people to attempt double spends on OTHER people's bets. There's a thread somewhere about it... I don't think it actually works though.

[ATC777]

uhhhh... I checked all my wallet addresses on blockchain.info and it appears I have no coin left... How can this be? I had just under 10.00 btc in this wallet... And I don't see any transactions or have any idea where they could've gone! 

[DannyHamilton]

uhhhh... I checked all my wallet addresses on blockchain.info and it appears I have no coin left... How can this be? I had just under 10.00 btc in this wallet... And I don't see any transactions or have any idea where they could've gone! 

Probably in "change" addresses. Does your wallet still show a balance?

To see a list of transaction ID of all unspent outputs in your wallet:

• Click on the "Help" menu
• Select (click on) "Debug window"
• In the debug window, click "Console"
• Enter the following into the Console:

Code:

listunspent

Wait while the client scans for all unspent outputs.

You should eventually get a list of items that look like this:
 

Code:

{
"txid" : "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
"vout" : 1,
"scriptPubKey" : "ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff",
"amount" : #.########,
"confirmations" : #
},

The txid is the transaction hash where the output was created
The vout indicates which output from that transaction (the first output is output 0, the second output is output 1, etc).
The scriptPubKey is the Hex representation of the bitcoin address
The amount is the value of the output expressed in bitcoins
The confirmations is the number of confirmations the output transaction has received

[ATC777]

Yes, my wallet still shows a balance of 9.5XXXX BTC

[ATC777]

When I check my unspent outputs all of the amounts are very small... like < 0.001 small, and only a few addresses have any... Definitely not enough to account for nearly 10.00 BTC... And yet my wallet still shows a balance of 9.50+ BTC? And I can't see how the coins ever went anywhere or got lost in the first place?

 

I'm totally confused and frustrated... that money is very important and I seriously need to get to it...   

Regards,

--ATC--

[deepceleron]

uhhhh... I checked all my wallet addresses on blockchain.info and it appears I have no coin left... How can this be? I had just under 10.00 btc in this wallet... And I don't see any transactions or have any idea where they could've gone!  

You have many addresses in your wallet. Blockchain.info does not know about all your wallet addresses, and cannot tell you your balance. Every time you send a payment, you are likely sending some of your balance back to another of perhaps hundreds of address you own (not shown to you in Bitcoin). This is change.

A. I just received a 1 BTC payment to address 1aaaa, now my wallet has 1 BTC.
B. I send .5 BTC to SatoshiRockPaperScissors, but the entire 1 BTC payment (input) must be sent, so a second hidden payment (output) is sent back to me at address 1bbbb in my wallet,
C. My Bitcoin client now shows my balance is 0.5 BTC, but it doesn't tell me the actual addresses behind-the-scenes that contains what amounts.
D. I look up my 1aaaa address balance on some website, and it says 0 BTC.

The unconfirmed coins shown in your screen shot add up to about 2BTC. Until these payments confirm by being included in a block, your actual Bitcoin balance is 2 BTC more than what is shown. Your local Bitcoin considers sent coins as reserved and spent even if unconfirmed though, and doesn't have a mechanism to cancel out a sent payment nor transmit a message to other Bitcoins to cancel the payment. This prevents you from double-spending yourself, because a miner might finally include the long chain of payments that funded all these, even after many days later. BTC4Amazon might eventually get the original payment, so re-sending another payment is not wise.

You should not send money without the Bitcoin client completely sync'd to the current network block, that is one way to cause a double spend.

There is one straightforward way to clean up all the unconfirming payments. You double-spend them yourself:

1. use a tool like pywallet to remove the exact transaction numbers of any unconfirmed payments to and from you from your wallet,
2. relaunch Bitcoin with the -resync command line option to correct your balance, verify all the unconfirmed transactions are gone,
3. in Bitcoin options, add some voluntary fee to all payments, like 0.01,
4. create a new receiving address in your wallet, and send your entire balance to this new address, only after the blocks are updated and you have several network connections.
5. voila, all those unconfirmed payments on the network you sent are "cancelled" and will never complete, as your good transaction has spent all your existing payments inputs.

You can't make other people's unconfirmed payments to you go any faster. They may never complete if they didn't include a fee or are attempting to double-spend-attack you.