A bunch of addresses in red all of a sudden

[adaseb]

I've sent a payment to my 20th BTC address and then another payment to my 21st address. It appeared and confirmed and all was well until I restart Electrum. And now those 2 transactions to the 20th and 21st address don't appear in my transaction history (they appear on the blockchain however) And there is a whole bunch of BTC addresses in red.

Is this some network issue?

[HCP]

The addresses in red indicate that they are beyond the so-called "Gap Limit" of your wallet.

Is your Electrum wallet an HD "seeded" wallet... or was it an old style keystore that just generates random private/public keypairs?

Is the dot in the bottom right corner of the Electrum window green or red or do you see two blue arrows?


Green is connected and synced
Red indicates network problems
Blue arrows indicate syncing in progress

[adaseb]

The addresses in red indicate that they are beyond the so-called "Gap Limit" of your wallet.

Is your Electrum wallet an HD "seeded" wallet... or was it an old style keystore that just generates random private/public keypairs?

Is the dot in the bottom right corner of the Electrum window green or red or do you see two blue arrows?


Green is connected and synced
Red indicates network problems
Blue arrows indicate syncing in progress

It green.

However I shut down the program, restarted and it was synced properly.

Restarted the program again, and same issue.

Both instances the light was GREEN.

So it seems like its some network error, like one of the chains got forked off or something.

[HCP]

So you're saying that you shutdown, restarted and then it was OK?

If so, it could be that the "random" Electrum server you are connecting to when it comes up with red addresses is having some issues and is not fully synced. It will have nothing to do with "chains being forked" or anything like that.

Click the green light and check which server you are connected to when it isn't working properly... also check the number of blocks... the current block height is 473795, so if it isn't showing at least this number, then the server is having problems:

[adaseb]

So you're saying that you shutdown, restarted and then it was OK?

If so, it could be that the "random" Electrum server you are connecting to when it comes up with red addresses is having some issues and is not fully synced. It will have nothing to do with "chains being forked" or anything like that.

Click the green light and check which server you are connected to when it isn't working properly... also check the number of blocks... the current block height is 473795, so if it isn't showing at least this number, then the server is having problems:

I checked and the number of blocks was correct and light was green but it still wasn't synced properly. I think it was the Electrum.hsmith server.

Basically I would quit the program, when I run it again, and then it would say its lagging 200 blocks, this time light was yellow.

If I restarted a few times, it eventually correctly synced and the transactions would show up.

So I guess the gap-limit means its show many addresses to check balance on after the last address with a balance, correct?

[HI-TEC99]

...So I guess the gap-limit means its show many addresses to check balance on after the last address with a balance, correct?

The electrum documentation explains the gap limit. After setup electrum has a default number of addresses it shows, that default number is the gap limit. You can make electrum show more new unused addresses using console commands, but any it shows will have a red background until the gap is filled.

http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html#how-can-i-pre-generate-new-addresses

Electrum will generate new addresses as you use them, until it hits the gap limit

If you need to pre-generate more addresses, you can do so by typing wallet.create_new_address(False) in the console. This command will generate one new address. Note that the address will be shown with a red background in the address tab, to indicate that it is beyond the gap limit. The red color will remain until the gap is filled.

[HCP]

So I guess the gap-limit means its show many addresses to check balance on after the last address with a balance, correct?

Close... more correctly it is X number of "unused" addresses, before it stops looking for coins. This means that an address that might be empty now but did at some time contain coins would still be counted, so the gap limit count would be reset and Electrum would continue searching.

So, the "danger" here with the "red" addresses... is that should you choose or need to restore your wallet for any reason, it will not automatically find the addresses in red... until you have used addresses in the gap which forces Electrum to then look X more addresses along the derivation path.

What is confusing is that it seems to occasionally marking them as red and sometimes not? is that correct? If so, it would seem that you must be hitting a malfunctioning server that is lagging... and not detecting a transaction in an earlier address, so it makes it seem like those addresses are beyond the gap limit... when in fact, due to this "missing" transaction, they are within the gap limit.

[Abdussamad]

The addresses in red indicate that they are beyond the so-called "Gap Limit" of your wallet.

Is your Electrum wallet an HD "seeded" wallet... or was it an old style keystore that just generates random private/public keypairs?

Electrum has always been deterministic. IT has never generated unrelated key pairs. You could only create such a wallet by importing private keys and then there would be no question of new keys being generated.

[Abdussamad]

The addresses in red aren't really a problem. They are only a UI annoyance that should clear up soon enough as you start receiving more payments. You won't lose money or anything like that. I'm guessing that some transactions to older addresses were dropped from mempools and didn't confirm so addresses generated past the gap limit are showing as red.

You can confirm that your gap limit is indeed 20 by running this command on the console tab:

Code:

wallet.storage.get("gap_limit", 20)