Missing transactions! Rescan broken on Mac OS in Bitcoin-QT??

[mgio]

This has happened to me twice so far. Here are the details:

- I've tried to send some bitcoins from my wallet (using bitcoinqt) to an address. The transaction appears to go through, but I don't leave bitcoinqt open to wait for confirmations.
- Some point later I load bitcoinqt back up and I see that the transaction is "unconfirmed" with 0 of 6 confirmations. This is the case even though many blocks have been found.
- Looking at the transaction ID on blockchain.info shows no transaction with that id!
- The coins are gone from my wallet and I can't spend them

So it seems like the transaction was created but never sent out to the network for some reason. But bitcoinqt and my wallet still thinks that the transaction took place so I can access that money anymore.

How do I fix this??

Here is an example of a transaction id, which should be 100 coins sent to 1BQoA9BJHTgFTHSYWKzJmhLfsGxReEsE8A. The transaction id is: 64076b4bc091a61d080bd504339ac130bef45fb7d659df24f4a6b2bab53062a9
It also included a 0.005 fee.
I've had another transaction "stuck" like this for over a week.
What can I do?

[mgio]

Try a "-rescan" and it should get your back coins if it didn't hit the network.

I'm going to try that, but I'm on a Mac, trying to figure out how to pass command line options to a GUI app right now. I didn't even know you could do that!

Thanks

[mgio]

Try a "-rescan" and it should get your back coins if it didn't hit the network.

I'm going to try that, but I'm on a Mac, trying to figure out how to pass command line options to a GUI app right now. I didn't even know you could do that!

Thanks

here shutdown bitcoin-qt then run this in terminal

Code:

/Applications/Bitcoin-Qt.app/Contents/MacOS/Bitcoin-Qt -rescan &

Didn't work. The coins are still missing.

This is really scary. What other options do I have??

[mgio]

Perhaps this is a bug in the Mac bitcoin-qt client. Someone else has had this problem here:

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/9333/unconfirmed-transaction-for-2-days-despite-network-fees-rescans-and-redownload


This is really, really bad. That transaction had 100 coins!! I can not lose it!

[mgio]

Try a "-rescan" and it should get your back coins if it didn't hit the network.

I'm going to try that, but I'm on a Mac, trying to figure out how to pass command line options to a GUI app right now. I didn't even know you could do that!

Thanks

here shutdown bitcoin-qt then run this in terminal

Code:

/Applications/Bitcoin-Qt.app/Contents/MacOS/Bitcoin-Qt -rescan &

Didn't work. The coins are still missing.

This is really scary. What other options do I have??

Just have to wait it out, nothing really else to do, it should automatically broadcast it again at some point so just leave your bitcoin-qt open.

Are you sure? I had a bitcoin transaction to foodler from over a week ago that still hasn't gone out :-/. I think my wallet thinks it's been sent out already.

[mgio]

ok, I found an old backup of my wallet that was made before these transactions were sent and it seems to fine. Fortunately, I don't seem to have generated any new addresses in the new wallet because all my coins were still there.

Its not the best solution, but I'm simply to going to delete the new wallet and go back to using that one.

It really bothers me that -rescan doesn't work on the mac though. I think it might have worked had I imported my wallet onto a PC or Linux box. I'll work on filing a bug report tomorrow (not sure where to do that).

[DannyHamilton]

ok, I found an old backup of my wallet that was made before these transactions were sent and it seems to fine. Fortunately, I don't seem to have generated any new addresses in the new wallet because all my coins were still there.

Its not the best solution, but I'm simply to going to delete the new wallet and go back to using that one.

It really bothers me that -rescan doesn't work on the mac though. I think it might have worked had I imported my wallet onto a PC or Linux box. I'll work on filing a bug report tomorrow (not sure where to do that).

I don't think rescan tells the wallet to forget about transactions that aren't confirmed yet, so you would have seen identical rescan behavior regardless of OS.

The issue here appears to be that your wallet is not re-broadcasting a transaction that is old and hasn't confirmed yet.

It would be nice if there was a list of unconfirmed transactions that QT knows about and a button you could use to re-broadcast them.

[TierNolan]

It would be nice if there was a list of unconfirmed transactions that QT knows about and a button you could use to re-broadcast them.

I think there is concern that it would lead to people hammering the re-send button.

It should definitely send them on connecting to a new client.

[mgio]

It would be nice if there was a list of unconfirmed transactions that QT knows about and a button you could use to re-broadcast them.

I think there is concern that it would lead to people hammering the re-send button.

It should definitely send them on connecting to a new client.

It didn't seem to do that at all. I even copied the wallet to a different computer with a new copy of bitcoin-qt hoping that it would decide to resend the transaction but it never happened. As I mentioned before, I had a transaction stuck there for over a week that was never sent. Rebuilding the wallet from scratch by extracting the keys or going back to an older wallet isn't really a viable solution to recovering lost coins.

[DannyHamilton]

It would be nice if there was a list of unconfirmed transactions that QT knows about and a button you could use to re-broadcast them.

I think there is concern that it would lead to people hammering the re-send button.

It should definitely send them on connecting to a new client.

Whatever timing mechanism is used to keep the wallet from blasting the network with too many "re-broadcasts" could be included in the "re-broadcast transaction button".  Push it before the timer has expired and you get a message that pops up and says: "This transaction was recently broadcast, to prevent broadcast flooding please wait X minutes before attempting to broadcast again".  Even a countdown timer of some sort indicating when the wallet will attempt to broadcast the transaction again would be helpful.

[TierNolan]

Even a countdown timer of some sort indicating when the wallet will attempt to broadcast the transaction again would be helpful.

The rule is generally that nodes will only forward "new" transactions.  When a node receives an unknown transaction, it will forward it to all peers.

If you send a transaction to a node that it knows about, then it won't forward.

The client could remember which peers it has already sent to and not bother to re-send.

[lepko]

I tried -rescan with windows version it didn't work either but with blockchain wallet import I could read my wallet.

Isn't there a general bug ?