Electrum doesn't show rewarded coins

[BlackHatCoiner]

I wanted to check something on the rewarded address of the genesis block, so I imported it as a watch-only wallet. There were too many transactions and it took a while until it was fully synced. While it has around 68.3 BTC, it only showed me those that he/she had received after the block reward (~18.3 BTC). I then thought that it could be an exception, only for the genesis block, because the coins cannot be spent or maybe because there was no proof of work on that block and thus, they excluded it from the others.

But then I tried importing a rewarded address from a random block. For example, I imported this one: 1M311YjWBuHbZhLDynBKFCTXosJe7d2Boi (rewarded address for block 23231)

Its balance is 50.00001094 BTC (3 unspent outputs including the block reward). This is what it'll show you if you import it on electrum:

[1713873356]

1713873356

[1713873356]

1713873356

[1713873356]

1713873356

[1713873356]

1713873356

[1713873356]

1713873356

[mocacinno]

IIRC, this is something that goes back to very early versions... I noticed the same years ago with the electrum clone for LTC (back when you could still mine LTC @ home). IIRC, i did open a ticket for this issue, but it never got fixed.

[ranochigo]

-snip-
But then I tried importing a rewarded address from a random block. For example, I imported this one: 1M311YjWBuHbZhLDynBKFCTXosJe7d2Boi (rewarded address for block 23231)

Its balance is 50.00001094 BTC (3 unspent outputs including the block reward). This is what it'll show you if you import it on electrum:
-snip-

Electrum doesn't display P2PK transactions, and the earlier coinbase transactions are all P2PK transactions.

When you're importing a watch-only address, Electrum looks for the transactions which is related to you through it's script hash derived from the address. P2PK transactions are thus not related to that scripthash and not shown.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Electrum doesn't display P2PK transactions, and the earlier coinbase transactions are all P2PK transactions.

By P2PK transactions you mean the input AND the ouput? They both (or more) must be p2pk addresses in order to not show it? Because I can see that two out of the three transactions above are normally shown on electrum and since the address is P2PKH, all of its outputs are P2PK. You probably mean something different, that I'll kindly ask you to explain it more.

Are both of the following transactions P2PK?

1) P2PKH Address A ---> 1 BTC ---> P2PKH Address B.
2) Non-P2PKH Address A ---> 1 BTC ---> P2PKH Address B.

[ranochigo]

By P2PK transactions you mean the input AND the ouput? They both (or more) must be p2pk addresses in order to not show it? Because I can see that two out of the three transactions above are normally shown on electrum and since the address is P2PKH, all of its outputs are P2PK. You probably mean something different, that I'll kindly ask you to explain it more.

Public keys are not technically addresses as addresses are the hash of the public key.

Let's establish some things first for clarity. 1M311YjWBuHbZhLDynBKFCTXosJe7d2Boi did not exist in 2009; Satoshi (or whichever miner who mined that block) did not send the Bitcoins to a Bitcoin address but to a public key. Blockexplorers tend to oversimplify this and associate public keys with the corresponding addresses had it been expressed as an address. You can check it yourself by decoding the raw transaction and see that it is infact a P2PK transaction.

Blockexplorers will associate P2PK transactions to the corresponding addresses and that is fine. But, in the case of Electrum, your query to the server would be your watch-only address which is not a public key. Since Electrum nodes only fetch the transactions related to that script hash (ie. the two transactions shown) as they do not do what blockexplorers usually do, you would only see the transactions that are sent to and from that address, not public key.

Are both of the following transactions P2PK?

1) P2PKH Address A ---> 1 BTC ---> P2PKH Address B.
2) Non-P2PKH Address A ---> 1 BTC ---> P2PKH Address B.

No. P2PK is Pay-to-Public-Key which means you're not specifying the outputs as an address but rather an ECDSA public key.

[BlackHatCoiner]

No. P2PK is Pay-to-Public-Key which means you're not specifying the outputs as an address but rather an ECDSA public key.

All that time, I thought that these addresses hadn't exposed their ECDSA public key and they weren't in danger of quantum computers. I thought that the only possible way to steal the funds was by brute forcing a RIPEMD-160 hash. That's why they say that satoshi's addresses are in danger...

Thank you ranochigo! For once more, I learnt a new thing today on this forum.

[o_e_l_e_o]

I thought that the only possible way to steal the funds was by brute forcing a RIPEMD-160 hash.

Note that you cannot reverse a RIPEMD-160 function (or SHA256 followed by RIPEMD-160, for that matter) and find the original user's public key. It would be possible (although incredibly unlikely) to find a collision with another random public key, but there would only be a roughly 1 in 2⁹⁶ chance that the public key you found was the same public key as the user in question used when generating that address.

That's why they say that satoshi's addresses are in danger...

According to this article, there are a fairly static number of bitcoin, around 2 million, in P2PK addresses, and this hasn't really changed since 2014. These are mostly early coins which have never moved since being mined, some of which will belong to Satoshi.

[pooya87]

I wanted to check something on the rewarded address of the genesis block, so I imported it as a watch-only wallet.

You should also keep in mind that the reward of genesis block is not spendable so the actual balance of the receiving key in that block is minus that 50BTC reward. In other words that particular UTXO was never entered into the UTXO database.
However, some broken block explorers have been showing the wrong balance for it.