HELP! Transactions not confirming ;( - 4 btc bounty

[Jeremy West spendbitcoins.com]

I'm getting some understandably upset customers at the moment.

I have five send transactions dating back as far as 21 hours that have 0 confirmations on my client, and don't even show up at http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/txlist/ as unconfirmed transactions.

I have 84 other send transactions that confirmed as normal during the same time period.

I am using the official bitcoin client, version 0.6.2-beta. I have scanned the forums and haven't seen that anyone else is having the same problem over the last 24 hours. If anyone else has seen a related thread, please direct me to it.

The transactions are as follows (times are AEST):

Status: 0/unconfirmed
Date: 5/06/2012 13:32
To: 19rWnQxBtXUUxqs9CytG4xnUoQXTUqRKao
Debit: -39.67 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.0005 BTC
Net amount: -39.6705 BTC
Transaction ID: ccf585bcfed1283d11b5012c5f3f3429c5695a8d2280287c44e605223b6318b5

Status: 0/unconfirmed
Date: 5/06/2012 17:13
To: 1LMFpG2ho7bWfndFpgf2L7Le6XghjRiXpQ
Debit: -39.74 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.0005 BTC
Net amount: -39.7405 BTC
Transaction ID: ee188b9e048d4889d7adcafc2216346878197af798e96ae9ade30c85bee47e43

Status: 0/unconfirmed
Date: 5/06/2012 17:21
To: 1FYrSH6Fcqme2AyewkMpzTbszuxKLjzVXt
Debit: -164.99 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.0005 BTC
Net amount: -164.9905 BTC
Transaction ID: b1f331143fbf75f0e8ce402df64019bed7fe4f0bb02bcea31f907dcd8bf3019e

Status: 0/unconfirmed
Date: 5/06/2012 17:21
To: 1EKQxT88b3FqppUzUi6spa1q4bHj7tPFyq
Debit: -49.59 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.0005 BTC
Net amount: -49.5905 BTC
Transaction ID: 11fd5b6aed10e545136a91bcb2e3dd50eb34345896c30896c5abca3c9a304e1b

Status: 0/unconfirmed
Date: 5/06/2012 17:23
To: 1LXuMiKB1kHpLt5wXSxi2uT93LYybuebsS
Debit: -66.12 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.0005 BTC
Net amount: -66.1205 BTC
Transaction ID: 4b87953accada36255e87b2d0562473fe66838d6820dd78aa37265c0b2c5fc1c

Any help would be greatly appreciated by both myself and my customers.

Highest Regards,
Jeremy

[Jeremy West spendbitcoins.com]

bump

4 btc bounty for successfully helping me resolve this.

[CIYAM]

Is it possible that your internet connection/firewall is/was somehow stopping the tx's from being broadcast?

[Jeremy West spendbitcoins.com]

Is it possible that your internet connection/firewall is/was somehow stopping the tx's from being broadcast?

I don't know. 84 other transactions sent just fine yesterday during the same time period and 35 have sent as normal today.

If for some reason they were blocked from being broadcast, why would they not have broadcast when I came back online? If that is the case, is there any way to cancel these transactions so I have access to those coins again to resend?

[CIYAM]

I did have (just the one) tx that didn't send due to not having internet connectivity and am pretty sure I had to actually restart the Bitcoin client to get it to re-send (although maybe I was just impatient).

[Jeremy West spendbitcoins.com]

I did have (just the one) tx that didn't send due to not having internet connectivity and am pretty sure I had to actually restart the Bitcoin client to get it to re-send (although maybe I was just impatient).

Hmmmm... WHen you say restart the bitcoin client do you mean starting the download of the blockchain from scratch or just closing the client and opening it again?

I have already closed and reopened the client several times and even uninstalled and reinstalled it (but with the blockchain folder still intact so it started where it left off).

I had this happen once on the android client and it cancelled the transaction when I actually deleted the blockchain files and redownloaded from scratch. I was hoping to avoid this as last time it took over 12 hours to download the blockchain from scratch, but this is the solution I am going to try if no one can come up with a quicker solution within the next few hours.

Thanks Ian!

[Garr255]

Have you tried running it with a --rescan ?

[CIYAM]

Hmmmm... WHen you say restart the bitcoin client do you mean starting the download of the blockchain from scratch or just closing the client and opening it again?

For the tx I had trouble with all I did was exit the program and then restarted it (I think it still took a while for the tx to be re-sent from memory).

Have you tried running it with a --rescan ?

Indeed you should certainly do this before resorting to downloading the whole block chain again.

[Jeremy West spendbitcoins.com]

Have you tried running it with a --rescan ?

No. Can anyone explain to me how to do this? I'm on Windows 7.

[Garr255]

Or open up a command prompt and cd to the directory with bitcoin-qt.exe and type:

bitcoin-qt --rescan

And away it goes!

[Fuzzy]

Or open up a command prompt and cd to the directory with bitcoin-qt.exe and type:

bitcoin-qt --rescan

And away it goes!

Does this essentially update the balance that the app sees according to the block chain transaction history?

[Jeremy West spendbitcoins.com]

Thanks for that guys. I'll be trying this as soon as I get home in half an hour and doling out bounties accordingly if it works!

[Jeremy West spendbitcoins.com]

Hi all,

Unfortunately these solutions didn't work. I'll be redownloading the blockchain scratch tonight, it seems.

[CIYAM]

Unfortunately these solutions didn't work. I'll be redownloading the blockchain scratch tonight, it seems.

Sorry to hear that - and from a bit of searching it seems that if the issue is actually within your wallet then even reloading the entire blockchain may not fix the problem.

I found the following that might be of help in this case:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=printpage%3btopic=11331.0

[Maged]

Well, the easiest solution at this point would be to revert to a recent backup of your wallet (you have one, right?) and double-spend these coins by sending the entire contents of the wallet to another of your addresses.

Otherwise, you can set-up pywallet and delete the individual transactions from your wallet. It's easy to do this, luckily, but setup is a pain (lots of sitting and clicking until everything is installed).

[ThomasV]

I have 84 other send transactions that confirmed as normal during the same time period.

this suggests that your client is OK.

if you reload the blockchain from scratch it will interrupt your service, and you'll get more angry customers.

just stop your bitcoind and restart it, and check if these transactions are still displayed by your client;
they might have been rejected by the network (eg double spend)

[CIYAM]

If you do end up deciding you need to reload the blockchain you might also be interested in the following (at least for testing before you end up wasting too much time):

http://eu1.bitcoincharts.com/blockchain/

(these are snapshots of the blockchain taken daily)

[Jeremy West spendbitcoins.com]

Well, the easiest solution at this point would be to revert to a recent backup of your wallet (you have one, right?) and double-spend these coins by sending the entire contents of the wallet to another of your addresses.

If I do this will it mess up the 120 or so transactions I've done since the corrupted transactions?

[Jeremy West spendbitcoins.com]

I have 84 other send transactions that confirmed as normal during the same time period.

this suggests that your client is OK.

if you reload the blockchain from scratch it will interrupt your service, and you'll get more angry customers.

just stop your bitcoind and restart it, and check if these transactions are still displayed by your client;
they might have been rejected by the network (eg double spend)

I've restarted it several times, to no avail.

I use a separate wallet for spend transactions and there will be no buy transactions due for 19 hours now which should be enough time to reload the blockchain, plus I have a backup in case I do need to get in earlier.

[ThomasV]

Note:

I searched for the 5 transactions you reported in the debug.log of my Electrum server  (it is always up).
My server has not seen these transactions; I guess they were not propagated by the network.
It could be a double spend attack, or a problem with the bitcoin client used by your customers.

why don't you ask your angry customers to provide details on the transactions they did?
are they really 5 separate customers?