Missing transaction from wallet

[3phase]

I would be grateful if someone would help explain to me this:

I gave the address 13RVBjpo3xLeDBkB2NM64N8sWK4fariZUu as a receive address and got 7.17 BTC:
http://blockexplorer.sytes.net/tx/c863f35e7cf66f61dd39d289a0a50d29c71505718f7f1681c50ca8a468bb0ec2#o1

I thought this address was mine, from the output of getaddressesbyaccount (it was included in the list).

However, the transaction does not appear in my wallet.

I downloaded pywallet and checked the "dump wallet" output. The address does not appear in the "keys" list, but it appears in the "names" list.

I am running Bitcoin 0.5 (version 50000).

Was it wrong to use one of the addresses in the "getaddressesbyaccount" output?

I had done it before in the past, and I thought there would be no problem.

I do know that I should normally get a new address, but I didn't this time.

Any help would be appreciated.

[deepceleron]

pywallet hasn't been updated since 0.3.23, and I wouldn't trust it not to mangle or misread the new wallet database introduced in 0.4.0.

Note, also, there are some funky things that an upgrade does to pool keys (namely creating new ones). It's worth reading more in the 0.5.0 testing thread to see what the pool key rewriting does on an upgrade. Glancing at some comments, it seems that if you had a never-used private key/address, it may have been discarded during the upgrade.

If you have the private key for the bitcoin address in any form, it is still redeemable. If you backed up your wallet six months ago or such and can find the matching key pair, you can restore that (or export/import the pool key) into a fresh 0.3.24 installation (perhaps in a VirtualBox VM), and rescan for transactions and send the money.

[3phase]

pywallet hasn't been updated since 0.3.23, and I wouldn't trust it not to mangle or misread the new wallet database introduced in 0.4.0.

Note, also, there are some funky things that an upgrade does to pool keys (namely creating new ones). It's worth reading more in the 0.5.0 testing thread to see what the pool key rewriting does on an upgrade. Glancing at some comments, it seems that if you had a never-used private key/address, it may have been discarded during the upgrade.

If you have the private key for the bitcoin address in any form, it is still redeemable. If you backed up your wallet six months ago or such and can find the matching key pair, you can restore that (or export/import the pool key) into a fresh 0.3.24 installation (perhaps in a VirtualBox VM), and rescan for transactions and send the money.

Thanks very much for the reply, unfortunately the key is gone (I couldn't find it in any backups) and the Bitcoins with it.

There is something else very strange however, I just found out. According to blockexplorer:
http://blockexplorer.com/address/13RVBjpo3xLeDBkB2NM64N8sWK4fariZUu

The 7.17 bitcoins which I sent to this address on December 1st, were SPENT yesterday, obviously not by me. Also, I never recall having small transactions like the ones in this addresses' transaction list above. It also looks very much like a small-donation address (receiving lots of 0.02 BTC transactions) which does not look like me either, I never had a donation address.

Could anyone clarify what the output of "getaddressesbyaccount" produces? Are these addresses usable as receive addresses or not? If not what on earth are they? I could not make sense out of the Bitcoin code, as I'm far from being a cpp expert.

How is it possible that someone else has the private key for 13RVBjpo3xLeDBkB2NM64N8sWK4fariZUu and I have this address appear in my list of addresses? I suppose I am missing something really important here, so could someone help?

I consider the bitcoins gone, but I want to know what is going on, in order to avoid such mistakes in the future.

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

It has been proven that a collision of addresses would require billions of years, but like finding blocks, it was possible someone generated the same address as you.

[3phase]

It has been proven that a collision of addresses would require billions of years, but like finding blocks, it was possible someone generated the same address as you.

Yes, indeed, but I am looking for an answer which might be a few hundred orders of magnitude more probable than that.

[BookLover]

Is it possible that you computer was hyjacked and are there any other odd transactions?

Try starting up your bitcoin client with the -rescan and -checkblocks parameters and see if your transaction shows up.

[3phase]

No, my computer was not hijacked. It's an Ubuntu server on a private network, running only cryptocoin clients, with no ports forwarded.

If you would look at blockexplorer in the link I provided, you would see that this address (13RVBjpo3xLeDBkB2NM64N8sWK4fariZUu) had its last transaction back in August, and then the 7.17 BTC appeared last week. It is obviously (to me at least) someone else's address.

Having googled and read a lot these days, I still cannot get a definitive answer about the output of the "getaddressesbyaccount" method. What are the addresses that it returns? And how is it possible that it returns someone else's address? Isn't that a bug or mistake?