0 confirmations after over a month, WTF?

[AtlasONo]

Why would he need a fee to send 5 & 7 BTC?!?!?

edit: sent 1 BTC and it has 4 conformations already. Stop spouting shit.

[Vod]

Same thing happened to me Wednesday.  I had corruption in my block chain.

I shut down Bitcoin
Made a copy of the entire bitcoin directory for safety
Deleted everything in the bitcoin directory
Copied over a wallet.dat from before the corruption started
Restarted Bitcoin
Bitcoin downloaded the block chain and rebuilt my missing transactions.

My corruption was the result of my Bitcoin client crashing.  Pay attention to any error messages you see.

[CydeWeys]

First of all, are you now, or were you ever, running a modified client that messed with the required minimum transaction fees?  If so, there's your problem.

If not, then your problem is that you have an unconfirmed transaction that the network no longer sees, and that will thus never be confirmed, tying up your coins in your wallet indefinitely.  You need to remove that transaction from your wallet file.  I don't specifically know how to accomplish this, but as the wallet file is just unencrypted binary data, and the client that reads and writes the wallet file is entirely open source, it is definitely possible.  Somewhere out there should be a wallet munger program that lets you import/export private keys, modify transactions, etc.  Obviously make a wallet backup before trying anything like that.

[proudhon]

Why would he need a fee to send 5 & 7 BTC?!?!?

edit: sent 1 BTC and it has 4 conformations already. Stop spouting shit.

So, thankfully I backup my wallet frequently.  I found a backup that I made on 6/24, the day before the first bad transaction on 6/25, and restored that wallet.dat and the bad 0/confirmations transactions were gone and my balance reflected what it should be had I never initiated those transaction.  I still don't understand why, even if I didn't include a fee, those transactions essentially never got off the ground.  Later I'm going to cross my fingers and try to send a coin or two with a transaction fee and see if everything's back to normal.

Moral of the story, make frequent backups people!

[OgNasty]

I never pay a fee and have yet to ever see a transaction take longer than 20 minutes to confirm. FWIW.

[jackjack]

For those who didn't make any backup, I made a script that cancels those tx's: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=31418.0

[kookiekrak]

you can use jack's script, or download your own berkeleydb tools and rebuild the db following this guide

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=31415.0

[defxor]

Moral of the story, make frequent backups people!

Yeah I stopped waiting as well now. I have a new automatic & encrypted backup made whenever the wallet file changes so it was easy to roll back (complete version history available).

I'm still interested in exactly what the Bitcoin client is doing writing 1MB/s to disk with no actual file getting any larger though.

For those who didn't make any backup, I made a script that cancels those tx's: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=31418.0

Ah I've missed that, although I do use the excellent pywallet script for wallet manipulation

[MemoryDealers]

I think you should change the title of your thread from " bitcoin client is eating my bitcoins, WTF?"  to  bitcoin client is not confirming my transactions, WTF?

I came to the forums and saw this thread title, and instantly had a horrible fear that there was a major bug with the client.

If you like bitcoins,  there is no reason to cause unneeded alarm with sensational message subjects that are not accurate.

[jgarzik]

I think you should change the title of your thread from " bitcoin client is eating my bitcoins, WTF?"  to  bitcoin client is not confirming my transactions, WTF?

+1, the devs monitor for threads like this, and the title is definitely misleading

[2112]

I'm still interested in exactly what the Bitcoin client is doing writing 1MB/s to disk with no actual file getting any larger though.

I think it is updating the database of peer IP addresses in a stupid way. I never got up to 500 peers but I've noticed that the more connections you have the more frequent the updates.

[defxor]

I'm still interested in exactly what the Bitcoin client is doing writing 1MB/s to disk with no actual file getting any larger though.

I think it is updating the database of peer IP addresses in a stupid way. I never got up to 500 peers but I've noticed that the more connections you have the more frequent the updates.

Hmm. The code must be extremely bad if it can reach 1MB/s doing that.

I've actually given up on getting this client installation to perform any send transactions. With the new fixed wallet I again tried sending coins and just like last time they stayed at "0/unconfirmed". I even got to see "0/offline?" - this on a client with 8 peer connections and receiving updates to the block chain without issues.

(I don't consider the title to be misleading - if we ever want to get non-techies to feel comfortable using Bitcoin with the official client)

[proudhon]

I think you should change the title of your thread from " bitcoin client is eating my bitcoins, WTF?"  to  bitcoin client is not confirming my transactions, WTF?

I came to the forums and saw this thread title, and instantly had a horrible fear that there was a major bug with the client.

If you like bitcoins,  there is no reason to cause unneeded alarm with sensational message subjects that are not accurate.

Fair enough.  Title changed.

Also, I tried to resend 5 BTCs with a 0.1 transaction fee (10x more than the minimum) and after almost 2 hours the transaction still says 0/unconfirmed.

[jackjack]

For those who didn't make any backup, I made a script that cancels those tx's: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=31418.0

Ah I've missed that, although I do use the excellent pywallet script for wallet manipulation

I'm glad it's useful

[MemoryDealers]

Fair enough.  Title changed.

Also, I tried to resend 5 BTCs with a 0.1 transaction fee (10x more than the minimum) and after almost 2 hours the transaction still says 0/unconfirmed.

Thanks for changing the title.
The transaction fee is not the problem.
You are just throwing money away with that.

[the founder]

Also, I tried to resend 5 BTCs with a 0.1 transaction fee (10x more than the minimum) and after almost 2 hours the transaction still says 0/unconfirmed.

how many connections is it showing and are you using the latest client?   what you did should have worked.

[the founder]

The transaction fee is not the problem.
You are just throwing money away with that.

In most cases I agree with you, but I told him to do that just to see what it was... I was trying to rule out everything I could think of...  my next line of thought was that he's possibly using an older version of the client.

[defxor]

how many connections is it showing and are you using the latest client?   what you did should have worked.

Both him and me are using the latest client on OS X - and at least mine has 8 connections and is getting block chain updates.

I still believe there's a bug that shows up on some system configurations. I'd be interested to hear if others on Mac are seeing the 1MB/s constant writing to disk as well. It could be a tx-thread gone into a loop.

("Some", since my other client has no issues performing transactions)

edit: Possibly related thread about the Mac client and hard drives on the newbie forum: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33237.msg415894#msg415894

[proudhon]

how many connections is it showing and are you using the latest client?   what you did should have worked.

Both him and me are using the latest client on OS X - and at least mine has 8 connections and is getting block chain updates.

I still believe there's a bug that shows up on some system configurations. I'd be interested to hear if others on Mac are seeing the 1MB/s constant writing to disk as well. It could be a tx-thread gone into a loop.

("Some", since my other client has no issues performing transactions)

edit: Possibly related thread about the Mac client and hard drives on the newbie forum: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33237.msg415894#msg415894

A while back I seem to remember somebody saying something about problems with the bitcoin client running from an encrypted home directory on OS X.  I do notice that it runs much more responsively from a non-encrypted account.  On my encrypted account sending bitcoins can take up to 10 minutes, and usually during that time the CPU is being used a lot and Activity Monitor reports bitcoin as "not responding".

Edit:  Oh, and my latest transaction shows 1 confirmation now, so it looks like it worked...after over 2 hours.  Is this how this whole thing scales?  In another year I can imagine it being no faster than the present banking system for international transactions.

[2112]

Hmm. The code must be extremely bad if it can reach 1MB/s doing that.

Well, yes the "satoshi client" code is really bad. On Mac it shuld be very easy to debug; just do:

sudo dtruss -n bitcoin

and it will show you what's it doing while grinding the disk.