Recover sent money

[eurekafag]

As we know from some point clients start to refuse transactions without fee. A friend of mine sent me 0.1 BTC as a donation using old client (0.3.20 or so) which doesn't include fee. So that transaction was never confirmed but money can't be lost either because it wasn't included in any block. How can we recover it back to spend using the newer version? Or maybe I'm wrong somewhere because I have transactions with no fee but I use -addnode=173.242.112.53 and he obviously doesn't because he's not so good in bitcoin even having an older client.

P.S. there is a little possibility that he had fooled me and sent nothing but let's think of it as it really happened.

[jackjack]

Tell him to download pywallet and delete that transaction from his wallet

[eurekafag]

Thanks, I've downloaded this first: https://github.com/joric/pywallet since it's first in google. There was no option to delete txs so I've tried this: https://github.com/jackjack-jj/pywallet Still no options! And then I've found this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34028.0 with explanation about web-interface. I guess web shouldn't be the only way for some operations, CLI is much simpler and more flexible. Please, make CLI versions of those commands such as deleting!

Thanks for your efforts! We'll try to remove that tx.

[Stephen Gornick]

As we know from some point clients start to refuse transactions without fee. A friend of mine sent me 0.1 BTC as a donation using old client (0.3.20 or so) which doesn't include fee. So that transaction was never confirmed

Even without a fee that transaction would likely have made it into a block right away, and even if not right away (i.e., deemed as a very low priority transaction) that might been just a matter of hours delay before ending up in a block.

P.S. there is a little possibility that he had fooled me and sent nothing but let's think of it as it really happened.

Firstly, check the address in BlockExplorer:
 - http://www.blockexplorer.com

If it was only recently sent and you don't yet see it in BlockExplorer, check for it in:
 - http://www.bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin

If you don't see it in either, perhaps when sent the client did not remain connected long enough to announce the transaction to the network.  Simply starting the client back up and leaving it running will cause the transaction to eventually get re-announced, and then it can become included in a block.

[jackjack]

Thanks, I've downloaded this first: https://github.com/joric/pywallet since it's first in google. There was no option to delete txs so I've tried this: https://github.com/jackjack-jj/pywallet Still no options! And then I've found this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34028.0 with explanation about web-interface. I guess web shouldn't be the only way for some operations, CLI is much simpler and more flexible. Please, make CLI versions of those commands such as deleting!

Thanks for your efforts! We'll try to remove that tx.

You're right, I just put it on the top of the todo list