6 Unconfirmed transactions with SatoshiDice since 2/28/13

[imanz]

Hi Guys,

I had posted about this about a week ago but was told that it should work it self out, this did not happen. To make a long story short I was playing SatoshiDice and had been doing fairly well, but it seemed that one or two in every couple transactions would just sit there. The money would be subtracted from my wallet, and it would sit as an unconfirmed transaction. This happened randomly, and the next transaction would go through without an issue. This kept happening on and off until I realized I had amassed six of these unconfirmed transactions that are just sitting there. I also have to note, the last transaction I made using this wallet went through without an issue, it just seemed like six random transactions just decided to not go through. I am using Bitcoin-QT on OS 10.8.2 and have kept the wallet open since 2/28/13 just incase it needed to synchronize.

I used the Transaction ID from one of the transactions on SatoshiDice's website to check for a win/lose and got this,

{
  "bets":[
   
  ],
  "polls":237,
  "starttime":1362554607.1632
}

Here are two of the transactions

ID: 7f895f7c42d41e6a3fe508d57e5ccf354b823b2e45ca18b101393452ed253055 To: 1dice7fUkz5h4z2wPc1wLMPWgB5mDwKDx 2/27/13
ID: 15a6b72a33caab01671736371d3f25ea31ac39cd9dca95f3a28bb2d2f75e9986 To: 1dicegEArYHgbwQZhvr5G9Ah2s7SFuW1y 2/27/13

If anyone could help me out, or explain what exactly happened I would greatly appreciate it. Its not the end of the wold but about 3BT basically vanished.

[Stephen Gornick]

If anyone could help me out, or explain what exactly happened I would greatly appreciate it.

Well, what happened was that someone somewhere cheated you by sending you funds that might have confirmed but then were later double spent.  During the period of time while the transaction you received had one confirmation you then unknowingly ended up propagating this cheat to some else (SatoshiDICE) by sending a payment with funds that will never confirm and included a double spent coin.

This transaction back in your history that had cheated you probably came to you from SatoshiDICE.   And if true, then prior to that the funds to them were sent by someone trying to cheat SatoshiDICE.   So SatoshiDICE had no intention to cheat, but they didn't take proper precautions from sending the "potentially bogus" payout to you.

When they do that (and it is too bad they won't take the actions that would cause their service to stop doing this to people), what they end up doing is having to fix the problem at a later time by sending out a replacement payout.  The later replacement payout confirms just fine.

Now you are affected by this negatively because the Bitcoin-Qt client does not handle this condition where a transaction has at least one confirmation and is used in a payment but then at a later time that confirmation vanishes as the result of being double spent against.

This situation where a transaction has at least one confirmation and at a later time ends up being a double spend is something that occurs rarely.  For this reason, supporting this condition in the Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind client has not been a feature that has made it into a release just yet.

Its not the end of the wold but about 3BT basically vanished.

No, they didn't vanish they simply are stuck in transactions that the client doesn't know how to handle as far as canceling after a certain period of time.

So remedies at this point are:
 1.) Use joric's fork of pywallet and remove all transactions.  Then -rescan.  

 2.) Create a hybrid EWallet from your wallet.dat.   Use  https://blockchain.info/wallet/import-wallet

3.) Export your keys, then create a new wallet and import the keys into the new wallet.

[imanz]

This is very interesting.

I had already exported my wallet to the website you pointed out, the only problem is that for some reason it is missing even more transcations that I thought had confirmed. I had done this back when the bitcoin had gotten stuck and it did not seem to update either.

Could you elaborate on your first solution? Does SatoshiDice not handle these types of problems?

EDIT: I exported my wallet to blockchain. I have not made any transfers with this wallet in a few weeks and my actual software wallet says I have made a total of 177 transactions where as blockchain says 47. For example I had previously won B3.70 and B3.44 on 2/27/13, both of the transactions show to be confirmed over 1000 but do not even exist in my exported blockchain wallet. The weird this is transactions of later dates such as 2/28/13 do show up (not all of them however).

[Stephen Gornick]

Could you elaborate on your first solution?

Er, scratch that.  Now that Bitcoin-Qt has debug mode (v0.7 and higher) the best method is to use that to export your private keys, and then import them elsewhere, either into a newly created, clean and empty wallet or to import them into another client, such as Blockchain.info/wallet.


[Edit: To export your keys:

You can use listreceivedbyaddress to print out all the addresses that you have ever received money at:

>bitcoind listreceivedbyaddress | findstr address > addresslist.txt

You can do listreceivedbyaddress in the debug window, then for each address:

dumpprivkey [address]