I'm helping a fellow member here recover his coins which appear to have been sent as change to an unspendable address...
The wallet file is filled with several Multibit generated addresses and a few which were imported. He deposited .5226 BTC in his wallet and then 11 hours later spent .0241 BTC; the balance appears correct however the change is unspendable.
The .wallet file is not password protected because adding a password delivers the following error:
The adding of the password to the wallet failed. The error was "The key pub:<long public key here> cannot be successfully decrypted after wallet encryption so aborting wallet encryption.".
I started by exporting the private keys from his original .wallet file. The key dump reports a success and confirms the balance is equal however the private key for the change address used in this transaction isn't included in the export for some reason.
I created a new .wallet file and imported the .key file; the balance reports 0 after the wallet sync is complete and the receive address which the change was sent is now missing from the list of receive addresses.
I moved the .key file into excel and used conditional formatting to highlight duplicate private keys. The results isolated 10 duplicate entries in his .key file.
I removed the duplicates and created a new wallet file. After importing the new key file the balance is still 0 and the change address is missing.
I found the private key for the original deposit address and imported the key by itself to a new wallet; the entire balance was sent to 1AdHAc4kYrMzwijP75b4qp4xqP3ZRuFqL1 leaving a 0 balance in the original address, but in the original wallet file, the .0241 BTC transaction was sent to 1NXsTsFSAvitkaRUTe9kxkLNANBRryJQeQ and the difference of .4985 BTC is still showing as available. Attempting to spend these coins results in a triangle with 0 peers accepting the transaction.
It appears as if Multibit doesn't own the private keys to the change address it returned the unspent outputs to.
Here is the wallet address where the initial deposit was made
https://blockchain.info/address/18c7UU2WsZ1khfNWrgAnbsU7UxmH24J6EjHere is the wallet address that received the coins
https://blockchain.info/address/1AdHAc4kYrMzwijP75b4qp4xqP3ZRuFqL1Any help is appreciated.