Newbie can't use my Electrum wallet

[fredsgarden]

Help please, I'm getting an error message and unable to get my BTC with Electrum.
"Server returned an error when broadcasting the transaction. Consider trying to connect to a different server or updating Electrum. bad-trans-inputs-missingorspent

[1714170774]

1714170774

[o_e_l_e_o]

This error usually shows up when you are trying to broadcast a transaction which uses inputs the network knows nothing about. This is usually because one of two things has happened:

• You are attempting to spend the outputs from a transaction which is only saved locally and has not actually been broadcast
• You are attempting to spend the outputs from a transaction which has been broadcast, but remains unconfirmed and has been dropped by most nodes' mempools

It can also happen when you try to double spend an input (either intentionally or by mistake), but with the fees what they are I suspect one of the two scenarios above is more likely. When you click on the "History" tab of Electrum, can you see transactions there which are either unconfirmed or titled "Local"?

[groepler]

Hey fredsgarden;

I'm back at "what's an Electrum wallet" so cannot be of much help to you. Can you suggest a good resource to find out more about that at least?

pg

[NotATether]

Did you by any chance make a payment request, saved it, created and saved another payment request that uses one of the same inputs as the first one, and then attempt to finalize/sign/broadcast both of them?

Because that's the easiest way I can think of for someone to get that error message. One of the payments will go through, while the other's transaction will be rejected for spending inputs twice.

[khaled0111]

Connecting to a different server or updating your wallet won't help here. Your transaction is invalid and any server will reject it.
As explained by o_e_l_e_o, your transaction is being rejected because it's trying to spend utxo(s) that has been already spent (double spending) or doesn't exist in first place.

What you have to do is to open the history tab and remove all transactions labeled as local, restart Electrum, recreate the transaction, sing then broadcast it. This should be enough to solve your problem.

[fredsgarden]

Hey fredsgarden;

I'm back at "what's an Electrum wallet" so cannot be of much help to you. Can you suggest a good resource to find out more about that at least?

pg

   Yes -- this may or may not be quite what you're looking for, but I know the source: you can trust Jameson Lopp on anything related to Bitcoin tech. He's a great source.  https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information/recommended-wallets.html

[fredsgarden]

Connecting to a different server or updating your wallet won't help here. Your transaction is invalid and any server will reject it.
As explained by o_e_l_e_o, your transaction is being rejected because it's trying to spend utxo(s) that has been already spent (double spending) or doesn't exist in first place.

What you have to do is to open the history tab and remove all transactions labeled as local, restart Electrum, recreate the transaction, sing then broadcast it. This should be enough to solve your problem.

This worked!   Thank you so much.   I'll say more later, but for now----THANKS!