Armory Not Scanning Transactions (Mac 10.15.7, Armory 0.96.5)

[Cryptomonium]

Hello everyone,

I have been attempting to troubleshoot my current setup for the last few days/weeks. I was previously on an earlier Armory build as I couldn't get 0.96.5 to work, but ultimately was able to followed droark's suggestions in other posts and am now running 0.96.5.


Where things are at currently:

I restored a back-up paper wallet, and when I start up Armory, it will take a few hours to build and "Organize Blockchain". The bar will be full blue, the spinning green/grey wheel will freeze, and then nothing will happen. The lower right of the Armory window is green, says Connected (0 blocks).
BitcoinCore is running and is fully synced.

Looking at the logs, I don't see any specific errors at present.
There are hundreds of Scanning mode lines and hundreds of parsed block lines.

The last few lines of the log are:
-INFO  - 14:43:06: (DatabaseBuilder.cpp:281) parsed block file #2445
-INFO  - 14:43:51: (Blockchain.cpp:248) Organizing chain
-INFO  - 18:20:45: (Blockchain.cpp:370) Organized chain in 13013s
-INFO  - 18:20:48: (DatabaseBuilder.cpp:76) updated HEADERS db in 19858s
-INFO  - 18:20:48: (lmdb_wrapper.cpp:388) Opening databases...
-INFO  - 18:20:48: (DatabaseBuilder.cpp:1231) verifying txfilters integrity
-INFO  - 18:20:49: (DatabaseBuilder.cpp:1314) done checking txfilters
-INFO  - 18:20:49: (BDM_supportClasses.cpp:1891) Enabling zero-conf tracking

Then it just sits there. Each time I restart Armory, it takes hours to get to the same point with no change beyond this.
Looking at Activity Monitor, ArmoryDB is running ~99% on one of my computer's cores.

Since the transactions don't scan/complete, I am unable to send anything from the wallet.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[bob123]

Since the transactions don't scan/complete, I am unable to send anything from the wallet.

What exactly do you want to achieve? Do you just 1) want to access your BTC to send them somewhere else or do you want to 2) get armory up and running properly ?

For 1), you can just export the private key(s) of the address(es) which contain your BTC and import them into another SPV wallet (e.g. electrum):

To export your private keys from armory: Click on Wallet properties -> Backup Wallet -> Export Key List -> Check "Address String", "Private Key" and "Include unused addresses".
Feel free to check the balance of these address in a block explorer before continuing to import them into another wallet like electrum.
If you decide to use electrum -> Create a new wallet -> "Import Bitcoin addresses or private keys". Then enter your private key(s) (without the address string).

Regarding 2), please upload the complete log file to pastebin (or any other similar service) and provide us the URL.

[Cryptomonium]

Thank you for your response bob123.

I purposefully waited a bit longer to reply, as I had seen some other user reports that the step I was stuck on just took extra time.
As such I gave it a couple of extra days, and the ArmoryDB continues to be at 99% of one of my cores, and has progressed to "Parsing Tx Hashes" but has been stuck there for days now.

The log is pasted here:
https://pastebin.com/jDqwppm4

At this point, I have decided to transition to a different wallet. I have previously attempted to export my private keys, but the process included 100 'unused' addresses after restoring my wallet. I checked many of the initial addresses and they were empty.

Thanks for your help.

[HCP]

Looking at your logs, Armory seems to be running quite slow... 2 hours to process all the blocks and like 4 hours to create the Armory DBs...

Not sure why it's "stuck", but until Armory is able to properly scan all the blocks and parse all the transaction history... it will likely show all your addresses as "unused"... because as far as it knows, they all are!

Once it is able to parse the transaction history, your addresses will be marked as used etc.

When you checked the initial addresses shown during export... did any of them show any transaction history (regardless of current balance)? If they didn't, then it's possible that the addresses you used previously were not simple P2PKH addresses


I'd recommend exporting all your keys and then bulk importing them into Electrum... check to see if there is any transaction history showing (don't worry about the balance at this point). If you don't see any history, then you wallet was either not using P2PKH addresses, or you've restored an "unused" wallet

[Cryptomonium]

Yes, it seems to be running incredibly slow. I have let it run for the last couple of days and it does seem to be progressing, but at a glacial pace. The last entry on the log is now "running 100 zc parser threads" but nothing after that for the last 24 hours. The computer is a 3.8Ghz Quad Core i5 with 32GB of ram, so I would imagine it should be more than fine to run Armory.

I have imported all of the "unused" addresses listed in the back-up into Electrum and there are no visible transactions. This would have been the only wallet I used on Armory, as I sent BTC to it specifically for its paper wallet function.

[HCP]

What do you see in the dbLog.txt file? Is there anything being added to that? I suspect it might be ArmoryDB that is not working correctly.

[Cryptomonium]

No, nothing is being added at this point.
It has stalled at "running 100 zc parser threads".

[Cryptomonium]

As a follow-up I shutdown Armory and ArmoryDB, and manually opened ArmoryDB and Armory again from there.
I am now back to "running 100 zc parser threads" but it only took about 6 hours this time instead of multiple days.

[HCP]

And whereabouts is the Armory GUI "stuck"? Is it still "parsing tx hashes"? or has it finished and is showing "connected (XXXXXX blocks)"?

[Cryptomonium]

It says "Parsing Tx Hashes", and in the bottom right corner says "Connected (0 blocks)"

Thank you for your ongoing help with this, I appreciate it.

[Cryptomonium]

Some updates:
I ended up reinstalling Armory and did NOT restore my wallet out of the gate. I was able to get Armory up and runny to the point it said it was online and up to date with blocks. I then attempted to restore my wallet from there and it immediately hung while 'mirroring' the wallet. There was nothing in the dblog or armorylog - it just hung with "Armory is not responding" in the activity monitor. When I restarted it, it seemed to be able to access multiple cores (~300% processor use) and was initially building the database much quicker than previous, but then it dropped down suddenly after about 5 minutes to the same 99% of one core and took several hours to build from there. Nothing showing up in the error logs outside of the type of lines I have posted above. When it finally finished building the database it then stuck on Scanning Transactions and made no progress and no entries in the logs for the last ~12 hours. Any additional thoughts?

[HCP]

The fact that it goes a bit haywire when you're trying to restore the wallet indicates that there might be something unusual about one of the transactions involving your wallet that is causing Armory issues... not sure how you'd go about debugging that though, as nothing obvious showing up in the debug logs.

Possibly caused by corrupt data in your Bitcoin Core block data... maybe try shutting down Armory and Bitcoin Core... and restarting Bitcoin Core using the -reindex option. That should force it to recheck it's data and redownload anything that has been corrupted.

After the reindex is complete... start Armory, "Rebuild and Rescan Databases" and then restart Armory.

[Cryptomonium]

Thanks HCP. I actually am already halfway done that process! Over this past week I went ahead and created a virtual Windows 10 machine as I kept running into roadbloacks on MacOS. I found that the Windows 10 VM was running into similar issues and it made me think that perhaps the block data was the problem. I have reindexed/downloaded everything and I'm now back on the Building Databases in Armory step and it seemed to at least initially go much faster. I'm currently on "Starting address registration process" as the last line in by dbLog and it has been staying there for some time now - this is a new line that I did not previously see in any of my past logs. Currently in Activity Monitor I only see the Armory Bitcoin Client (taking minimal resources) and ArmoryDB is notably absent. I have tried to shut things down, restart, and manually start ArmoryDB, etc. and the same thing happens - Builds the database MUCH faster than in the past, but then sits at "Starting address registration process."

[HCP]

Sorry, but I'll have to defer to @goatpig and hope that he can shed some light on what is happening at this point... I'm not 100% familiar with the very inner workings of Armory as I have not done a very in-depth inspection of the code, so I'm not exactly sure what Armory is attempting to do when the "Starting address registration process" debug is output.

[Cryptomonium]

Thanks @HCP and @goatpig for all of your help.

I have posted my most recent logs for review:

dbLog: https://pastebin.com/H1b3iDtp
The top section is me opening ArmoryDB manually and it seems to show that it is reading blocks but not seeing any addresses.
The bottom section is be restarting Armory application itself and it gets to registering addresses and gets stuck.

Armorylog: https://pastebin.com/7WpHcCq0
There seems to be a new WARNING re: Spawning the DB that I am seeing recently but no specific new errors I can see.

The UI itself just shows that it is stuck on "Build Databases" with "Scanning Transaction History" blank with no progress.

[Cryptomonium]

Soooooo...

I finally got it working after all of the above steps and troubleshooting, another armory reinstall, and then an armory database rebuild/rescan.
All told this represented several weeks of troubleshooting...

...The wallet appears empty. The transaction list is empty.

Since 2014 I have meticulously been maintaining an empty paper wallet. Confusing. Perplexing. Stressful.

There really should only be one transaction (receiving) but I don't see anything. I have rescanned the transactions and nothing.

I'm really at a total loss.

[HCP]

Was it one of the simple "single page" backups?

Do you have a record of the funding transaction? ie. the receive address etc?

[Cryptomonium]

Yes, it is the simple paper back-up.
I have been searching extensively for any possible record of addresses, but have not had any luck so far. Many of the exchanges/accounts that I had used in 2013/2014 no longer exist, so it is much harder to cross reference.

[BitMaxz]

Yes, it is the simple paper back-up.
I have been searching extensively for any possible record of addresses, but have not had any luck so far. Many of the exchanges/accounts that I had used in 2013/2014 no longer exist, so it is much harder to cross reference.

Is that your paper backup contains only the root key? A series of words?

Can you try this https://brainwalletx.github.io/#chains and select armory then download the page and run it offline and then put your root key under paper back up and let it generate private keys and public addresses.

Now try to check those addresses generated and maybe one of the addresses is your wallet with balances. You can increase the primary address to 100 or more if needed.

[HCP]

The only other thing I could suggest is exporting all the "unused" keys from Armory... and importing them into Electrum to see if it finds something that Armory is not... but I would say that the chances of that yielding different results are relatively low

Note that it is possible you may have been using one of the "Armory Specific" P2SH-P2PK addresses... and if you try and import those keys into another wallet, it won't create the same address as this address type is unique to Armory as far as I'm aware. Regardless, Armory should have found the transaction history for any of these types of addresses.

To check if that is the case, you'd need to look at the addresses generated in Armory (not the private keys), then check those addresses on a block explorer to see if they show any history/balance etc.