Hey guys,
Have a difficult situation on my hands and wondering if anyone can help as I am extremely new to bitcoin...
Downloaded the Bitcoin Core application as I believed it was the safest and best-encrypted method of wallet to hold bitcoin temporarily, however, didn't realise that it would try to download the whole of the blockchain data directory before allowing me to move funds using the application.
Stupidly I transferred a large amount of bitcoin to the address I had on the application before it had caught up to the current time.
Naturally my mac ran out of memory with around 10 weeks to go left in catch up and having deleted everything I could It was clear I needed an external hard drive to store the blockchain and allow me to move the funds.
You could enable pruning which can save space. It will still need to download the entire blockchain but most of it will be deleted after it has been downloaded and verified.
Having spent another sum of money on the hard drive I set about changing the default directory using this guide:
http://bitzuma.com/posts/moving-the-bitcoin-core-data-directory/However when I got to the 're-opening' the bitcoin core stage instead of assuming it was my first session and asking for either the default or custom directory, bitcoin core simply resumed the download but from the START (roughly six years left to catch-up).
The setttings for that are stored in the registry (or whatever the mac equivalent is) and once it is in there, Bitcoin Core will always know that it is no longer the first session. The solution is to use the
-datadir option. I'm not quite sure how to do this in a Mac, but what you need to do is find where the startup command is (probably in a shortcut) and add the following to the end of the command:
-datadir=<path to datadir>
where <path to datadir> is the path to the new data directory. Make sure there is a space between this option and whatever is already there for the command.
To make matters worse the application now won't even start and 'quits unexpectedly' every time I try to open.
That's a whole other problem and we will need to see the debug.log file to figure that out.
My question is what do I do now in terms of retrieving the original bitcoin if this is at all possible (I have the address it was sent to and the key of course)?
Presumably, I could delete all files and re-download the application allowing me to change the default directory to the external hard drive but this would surely result in me losing access to the original address and thus my bitcoin.
First, you must find the wallet.dat file and back it up to a safe location. That file contains your private keys that you need to spend the Bitcoin. You could export the private keys and import them to Electrum, but my solution above with the datadir should fix your problem.