Please help -- Bitcoins seem to be stuck in ether

[GuinnessBIT]

Hi,

I sent 73.61971604 bitcoins from one account of mine to another account in .5.2-beta.
 
When I opened up my bitcoin wallet, I had 147.23943208 bitcoins.  Exactly double the amount.
I reloaded my wallet, but they still showed up as double, so I sent them to another wallet online.

I see that 147.23943208 bitcoins were sent, it showed a successful transaction but it has been 1 day and I still have 0 confirmations and a 0 bitcoin balance.

I have deleted everything except my wallet.dat and tried to reload, but cant seem to get the bitcoins to show up anywhere.

Please help!!!

[1714152927]

1714152927

[1714152927]

1714152927

[1714152927]

1714152927

[1714152927]

1714152927

[GuinnessBIT]

Oh, forgot to mention that the address / transaction still does not show up in block explorer or blockchain after 1 day.

[koin]

Hi,

I sent 73.61971604 bitcoins from one account of mine to another account in .5.2-beta.
 
When I opened up my bitcoin wallet, I had 147.23943208 bitcoins.  Exactly double the amount.

is this before you sent to another wallet, or after?      also, not sure i can follow this.  please identify with "wallet A" and "wallet B" or something like that.

were you doing any manual importing (using pywallet or similar)?

I have deleted everything except my wallet.dat and tried to reload, but cant seem to get the bitcoins to show up anywhere.

have you tried launching bitcoin-qt -rescan ?  http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin

[GuinnessBIT]

thanks, I'll try to clear it up with the first part of the wallet names.    Hopefully this helps:

I sent 73.6xxx BTC from wallet 1Jgho... to wallet: 1Afun....   Both of these addresses live in the same Bitcoin-QT client running on linux.  Don't ask me why I was sending BTC to myself, but I'm still new to BTC and experimenting with sending and receiving and stuff.

When I opened up my bitcoin client later,  I saw a total of 147.23xx BTC.  Exactly double the amount. 

I let that sit there for a day and figured the bitcoin client would figure out my real balance was only 73.6 BTC. 

When, after 1 day, I still had 147.23 BTC, I tried to send everything to a third wallet 17Dtg... which lives online and not on my local machine. 
I was figuring that the Bitcoin client would figure out my real balance and the original 73.6 BTC would show up in wallet  17Dtg... , or maybe I might get lucky and get double my original bitcoins.

But what happened was I got a transaction that said -147.23 BTC sent, but 0 confirmations after a day and a 0 BTC balance in all three wallets.

make sense?

[koin]

thanks, I'll try to clear it up with the first part of the wallet names.

ok, there's the first problem.  you are describing bitcoin addresses.  the bitcoin client stores those addresses in a wallet (wallet.dat).  for more on these concepts: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address  http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet

But what happened was I got a transaction that said -147.23 BTC sent, but 0 confirmations after a day and a 0 BTC balance in all three wallets.

not sure why.  does the client show "up to date"? (if so, it will have a green checkmark in the bottom-right)

also, don't close your client if you have transactions pending.  leave it running so that it will eventually try to re-announce the transaction (if that is why the transaction isn't being seen on the blockchain).

you can try closing the client and then launch it with rescan: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin
  > bitcoin-qt -rescan

[GuinnessBIT]

ok,

I just finished running bitcoin-qt -rescan.  The client shows up-to-date with 167883 blocks loaded.

I still see the transaction stuck with 0 confirmations and the time is not correct.

Status: 0/unconfirmed
Date: 2/21/12 06:45
To: MTGOX_IN2 17Dtg...
Debit: -147.23943208 BTC
Net amount: -147.23943208 BTC

[koin]

Status: 0/unconfirmed

an invalid transaction (spending more than is available in the inputs) will not confirm.

how it let you create a transaction using more than your balance is not explainable.

were you doing any manual importing of keys (using pywallet or similar) or doing any custom transactions?

or are you running another copy of the same wallet anywhere else?

you probably haven't lost anything, though it is possible that to repair it you may need to do some surgery to your wallet.  but let's try to figure out what happened.

[GuinnessBIT]

I was only using the bitcoin client.  .0.5.2 - beta.   No import or anything else strange,  and I only run on one client.
In any case,  I went on blockexplorer or blockchain and checked that my balance is available under one of my local addresses.

Fortunately I had a backup from 5 days ago.   I just deleted everything,  and restored from the backup.
Now my balance shows correctly after catching up with all the transactions.

It appears normal now, but there must be some bugs in the client.  Especially if someone sends BTC to themselves at local addresses.

thanks for your help though.

-gBIT

[deepceleron]

If you send coins, your client will immediately "debit" your account and show your balance as 0. However, the balance isn't actually taken from your address until the transaction is broadcast on the P2P network and included in a block.

The bad transaction where you spend twice the bitcoins you have would not have been accepted by a mining node, your original Bitcoin balance would not be affected. However, your bitcoin client's wallet keeps track of the balance it thinks you have, and would continue to say you have a zero balance unless you went in with a third party utility and manually removed the bad transaction.