upgraded electrum, refund sent to old address

[snkcoiorg]

Hi all,

my situation is as follows: I spent some BTC via bitpay. the transaction then remained unconfirmed for a few weeks or so.
Upgraded electrum, hoping to make use of dynamic fees.
Got the merchant to initiate a refund via bitPay once the transaction finally got confirmed. But they refunded it to the address that I used to send the initial transaction, before I upgraded Electrum.
This address appearantly is not mine anymore?

When I use the isMine command with the address it returns false.
and when I search the address on blockchain.info I see some transactions I dont recognise and it says the balance is 0.

Hope somebody can help to clear this up for me.

[kolloh]

Did you recreate your wallet when you upgraded Electrum? Your addresses shouldn't have changed unless you created a new wallet.

If you did, you'll need to restore your old wallet in order to access the funds.

[Abdussamad]

you don't have to recreate your wallet when upgrading electrum. it automatically upgrades your wallet if required. you don't lose addresses or funds.

maybe you sent the money from some website's shared wallet? like an exchange's? in that case that originating address doesn't belong to you. perhaps the exchange will credit your account if you contact them about it but I wouldn't hold my breath.

[snkcoiorg]

The seed words are exactly the same among versions. I have all the transactions from before the upgrade in my history tab.
I did not use an exchange to send the original transaction.

There's no mention of the address to which the funds were refunded to other than in the details of the original transaction.

[Abdussamad]

The seed words are exactly the same among versions. I have all the transactions from before the upgrade in my history tab.
I did not use an exchange to send the original transaction.

There's no mention of the address to which the funds were refunded to other than in the details of the original transaction.

If the address doesn't belong to your wallet how could you have sent from it?

[snkcoiorg]

I suspect the way I upgraded might have something to do with it.

The orginal version I installed via pip as described at https://electrum.org/#download

for the upgrade I decided to uninstall via pip. checkout the latest version via github and run:
sudo python setup.py install

I kind of expected to have to regenerate my wallet via the seed, but this wasn't needed.

[HCP]

Uninstalling doesn't delete the wallet file in the default wallet directory... so it would still have been there after you upgraded.

So you still have all the transaction history... which means you also have the original transaction showing correct? If you don't see the original transaction, then you didn't send from this wallet... and whatever address the transaction came from (and was refunded to) is most likely not contained within the wallet.

If you do see the transaction, then the address is most likely contained within the wallet. The private key may or may not be contained within the wallet... it depends if it is a watching only wallet or not.

Is there any chance you can post the TXID of the original transaction or bitcoin addresses involved?

[snkcoiorg]

This is the original transaction ID. It shows up in my history tab.

c2ddb1a50b2c0ecebfcbb64f79bc30e98f8fff4ee04903dda2995d22ea194539

[Abdussamad]

This is the original transaction ID. It shows up in my history tab.

c2ddb1a50b2c0ecebfcbb64f79bc30e98f8fff4ee04903dda2995d22ea194539

I don't understand. Is this you paying bitpay or is this the refund you got from them?

btw to upgrade electrum you just run pip2 install on the new version tarball.  It'll automatically remove the old and install the new.

[HCP]

If that is the original payment you made to BitPay... Then they didn't refund the payment to your original address.

According to that transaction, you sent from address: 1LKmBfnfUkRXBAVkzmjFBBUaqikoxF78Va

There are currently NO transactions involving that address since 20th May 2017. Did they give you a transaction ID for the refund transaction? Or the address they supposedly sent it to?

[snkcoiorg]

I received the following transaction ID from the merchant. Also, they are using Coinify and not bitPay as I stated before.

7fb1ad69995b2fe5418c4b99a8d80509b11abc26c5f00b6938e522f3efd4609a

[HCP]

Ahh.... they've tried to refund to what they think is the change address... but I think they refunded it to themselves!  

In your original transaction, you created outputs:
14A9qNNXsg9ywGFPqcku1V87pVDc5tCFcR - (Spent) 0.02612337 BTC
1A4n3C7adw5dgWpbktHcMCzEC6yjvyxRzF - (Spent) 0.46608539 BTC

Now, If I'm correct, you were attempting to send 0.02612337 BTC right? and 1A4n3C7adw5dgWpbktHcMCzEC6yjvyxRzF is an address that YOU own right? (should be in your Addresses tab in Electrum or use ismine() on the console).

Well in this latest transaction... they have created these outputs:
14A9qNNXsg9ywGFPqcku1V87pVDc5tCFcR - (Spent) 0.02561027 BTC
1K8ba2SpCxX7EvdRnio9swiAFHRZGTcNE4 - (Spent) 34.48766378 BTC

They sent the "same"[1] amount to the same address!!    

You'll need to contact them and tell them they need to send that 0.02561027 BTC amount to either 1A4n3C7adw5dgWpbktHcMCzEC6yjvyxRzF or your original 1LKmBfnfUkRXBAVkzmjFBBUaqikoxF78Va address!


[1] actually slightly less, but I'm assuming they're converting USD to BTC

[Abdussamad]

They sent the money to their payment processor bitpay! Why didn't they just ask the OP for an address to send the money to instead of trying to read things off a block explorer site?

[snkcoiorg]

indeed: 1A4n3C7adw5dgWpbktHcMCzEC6yjvyxRzF is mine.

Thanks for your help in sorting this out. I have put out a request with the merchant.