Requesting help with lost unconfirmed transaction

[TJXMB]

Hi,

Thanks all for the excellent advice on this forum. i have a really stupid, desperate question which may have no answer. Absolutely any help would be much appreciated. So: about a week ago (not longer, i don't think), i was multitasking and very distracted and therefore i accidentally deleted an unconfirmed transaction that i had failed to memorise ANY component parts of. i mean, i was meant to be receiving the BTC, and of course it never made its way into my wallet, but that's all i know - except that i would really like to find some way to recover that money. i'm using an Electrum 4.1.5 on a mac. The transaction is not to be found under the "addresses" tab; i'm almost certain of that. Unless it's one of the totally empty ones that go nowhere on the blockchain? Does anyone have any idea how it might be possible to retrieve an unconfirmed transaction that you just clicked "delete" on in history but which must still exist somewhere?

Thanks for any advice. Go ahead and depress me.

[Charles-Tim]

Your question is not clear and very confusing. You can not delete confirmed or uncomfirmed transaction, Bitcoin is stored on blockchain and deletion can never be done. Your coin is intact if no one compromised your wallet.

It is not about clicking on address tab, check your wallet history tab, you will see your confirmated and unconfirmed transaction history there. Maybe this is what is confusing you.

Hope you downloaded the wallet from https://electrum.org and verified its signature.

[jackg]

Did it confirm? Can you try to restore your wallet from its mnemonic phrase and see if that helps witb anything (if restarting it hasn't already worked).

You can't delete an unconfirmed transaction from the blockchain, it just gets deleted from your wallet. There's a chance the person that sent you the funds double spent them and replaced the destination of the funds.

[Charles-Tim]

Did it confirm? Can you try to restore your wallet from its mnemonic phrase and see if that helps witb anything (if restarting it hasn't already worked).

That is true, this will be a good idea.

You can't delete an unconfirmed transaction from the blockchain, it just gets deleted from your wallet. There's a chance the person that sent you the funds double spent them and replaced the destination of the funds.

@TJXMB, this is very true.

If you have just downloaded the wallet, and someone sent you bitcoin, the unconfirmed transaction will appear on your Electrum wallet balance. It is possible the sender to double-spend the unconfirmed transaction with a higher fee in a way he will send back the coin into another address which can even be his. If so, I guess the transaction will no more appear on the history tab.

This will also occur regardless of it being a newly downloaded wallet or not. I just used new downloaded wallet to explained it because no transaction will be found in the history no more as it is the first transaction (which was later double-spent). But for old wallet, the history is intact, only the unconfirmed transaction that was double-spent wod also be the one not seen again.

[HCP]

I'm a little confused. How exactly did you delete an unconfirmed transaction? Are you just talking about an "unconfirmed" invoice that is showing in the "Receive Queue" on the "Receive" tab?

I can see a "delete" option here:



Which will remove the "request", but any unconfirmed transaction that has been broadcast by the sender will still reflect in your wallet (on the "History" tab):



There is no "delete" option for actual unconfirmed transactions:



If this is the case, it would seem that you generated a request for payment, but no transaction was ever actually broadcast to the network. Consequently, you'd need to follow up with the person who was meant to be sending you BTC and ask them why they haven't sent it... or to provide a transaction ID/details for the payment they made.

[TJXMB]

Hi,

Thanks, everyone. To clarify: i deleted the unconfirmed transaction under the "History" tab. Sure of that. There were zero confirmations, and the transaction was made many hours before. Probably just a low-fee issue. Thing is, i don't have that many transactions in my history. That's why i was able to look at ALL my addresses under the "Addresses" tab, and find that none of them had any detectable relationship to the unconfirmed transaction. i downloaded the wallet from Electrum.org, the real site almost certainly, and i don't THINK i've had money stolen via the wallet before (or until now). All advice welcome!

[khaled0111]

Thanks, everyone. To clarify: i deleted the unconfirmed transaction under the "History" tab. Sure of that. There were zero confirmations, and the transaction was made many hours before. Probably just a low-fee issue. Thing is, i don't have that many transactions in my history.

As HCP said, there is no option on Electrum that lets you delete an incoming transaction from the History tab even if it's still unconfirmed. And even if , somehow, you found a way to do it, the transaction will reappear as soon as you restart the wallet because transactions are saved on the blockchain (not locally) with which your wallet synchronize each time it starts.
You can only delete invoices/requests from the Receive/Send tabs.

The only two possibilities to delete a transaction from the history tab are if it is an incoming transaction and has been dropped from the mempool (or the sender canceled it) but then it's status will appear as "local" not "unconfirmed". Or it's an outgoing transaction (you are the sender) and you chose to cancel it while it's still unconfirmed.

[BitMaxz]

If you believe that you deleted the unconfirmed transaction then why not follow the jackg suggestion above?

Make a new wallet and restore your wallet with a backup seed phrase to resync all of your transaction histories it should show up after you restore it.
If not then HCP is right and maybe you generated a request payment and then you just deleted it.

Do you remember exactly the address that you expected to receive BTC? The BTC address that you sent to someone to receive BTC?

If yes then you can directly check them through block explorer like blockchain.com or blockchair.com

[TJXMB]

Thank you for ongoing advice. Yeah, i must be misremembering. Now it seems clear that i had to have deleted the transaction on the "Receive" tab. It was certainly an actual implemented transaction, and not just a request to receive BTC. BUT there were of course no confirmations. I just have this inexplicable memory blank about who the actual sender was.

So, if there's no other way to find out (or to find the transaction), i should "make a new wallet and restore [my] wallet with a backup seed phrase"? Can anyone spare the time to give me a link about executing this. I've read it before but i really need to be assured that i won't lose my coinage. My mnemonic is stored on paper, but i've never used it before and i'm very nervous about this process! Thanks for any further help.

[Maus0728]

@TJXMB

You can restore your existing wallet by creating another wallet using the same seed phrase.

Go to File --> New/Restore --> Enter the wallet filename --> Select "Standard Wallet" --> Select "I already have a seed" --> Enter your seed phrase --> Enter your password(if you are not using hardware wallet)

Afterwhich, you can see the same details including your addresses, balance and transactions of your wallet.

If you prefer watching video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRCpavIdbjQ
Have you tried @BitMaxz recommendation to look for your transaction on the explorer^[1] using the recipient or your btc address?

[1] https://blockchair.com/

[khaled0111]

My mnemonic is stored on paper, but i've never used it before and i'm very nervous about this process! Thanks for any further help.

There is no reason to be nervous as long as you have the wallet seed. Besides, it's possible to create more than one wallet on Electrum and creating a new wallet or restoring an old one will not erase the existing ones. So your wallet will not be affected, if this is what you are afraid of.

To restore your wallet just follow Maus0728' guide above. But, if Electrum is fully synced (green circle at the bottom left), restoring the wallet is nothing but a waste of time as it won't change anything.

[TJXMB]

Thanks so much for the info about restoring my wallet. But is it true that if it's synced there will still be no record of my lost transaction if i do so? Is there any other way to find old Electrum files on a Mac? Or to access an earlier version of my wallet, if all else fails? Sorry, but i really cannot believe i did such an incredibly stupid thing and i would like to remedy it in any way possible!

[pooya87]

Thanks so much for the info about restoring my wallet. But is it true that if it's synced there will still be no record of my lost transaction if i do so? Is there any other way to find old Electrum files on a Mac? Or to access an earlier version of my wallet, if all else fails? Sorry, but i really cannot believe i did such an incredibly stupid thing and i would like to remedy it in any way possible!

You can't "delete" a receiving transaction, not to mention that they are only seen in your history tab and they don't have a delete option anyways. The only thing you can delete is a transaction you are sending (haven't broadcast yet, or it is local) from your history tab or a payment request in the request tab. You can remake both of them again though, since you haven't lost anything.

[nc50lc]

Thank you for ongoing advice. Yeah, i must be misremembering. Now it seems clear that i had to have deleted the transaction on the "Receive" tab. It was certainly an actual implemented transaction, and not just a request to receive BTC. BUT there were of course no confirmations. I just have this inexplicable memory blank about who the actual sender was.
-snip-

For the record, the delete option in the receive tab is labeled "delete", while the one in the history (only for local transactions) is labeled "Remove".
So since you've mentioned that you clicked "delete" in the OP, it's the receive tab which is only an invoice.

That also explains the "blank memory" of the sender because there wont be a sender if you haven't sent the invoice to anyone.

[Pmalek]

This is a very confusing thread to be honest.
You are supposed to receive Bitcoin from someone. In that case, that person needs a receiving address to send you the coins. How would they know where to send the coins otherwise!? Did you send that person a receiving address? What medium did you use to send the person your address?

I just have this inexplicable memory blank about who the actual sender was.

I can't understand how you don't know who is sending you money. You stated previously that there isn't a lot of activity in your history, meaning you aren't dealing with that many people.
How do you even know that someone is supposed to send you money if you don't know who, why, or how they know where to send the Bitcoin?