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I have a Sparrow wallet with previous transactions that was connected to an Electrum server. I installed Bitcoin Core v25, downloaded entire blockchain (no pruning) and switched my Sparrow settings from Electrum to Bitcoin Core. After the rescanning completed, the balance in Bitcoin Core is off by the amount in a change address (Sparrow has the correct balance). But the transactions tab in Core does show all of my transactions (including the outgoing one that created the change address). I ran a rescanblockchain command but that didn’t work.

I also have another computer with a similar setup (Sparrow connected to Bitcoin Core) but it does not have this problem - although the version of Bitcoin Core is older. Could it be something with v25 or another setting I need to add? Thank you.

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  • There are similar questions (such as this) which don't have answers, so it might be an occasional problem with this combination?
    – RedGrittyBrick
    Commented Oct 11, 2023 at 12:45
  • I removed the Sparrow wallet and imported a native Bitcoin Core wallet directly, which finally showed the correct balance. I agree that it might be a bug with v25 and current Sparrow version (as it works with v23).
    – Leo
    Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 23:18

1 Answer 1

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I found the reason for the unexpected balance - it was because apparently when importing a Sparrow wallet, it does so with "avoid_reuse" being set to true. This is evident when running "getbalances" command and seeing the "used" amount separately from the "trusted" amount. To rectify, simply open the console and run "setwalletflag avoid_reuse false". This updates the balance as expected. See this site for reference: bitcoincore.org/en/doc/0.19.0/rpc/wallet/getbalances

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  • Thanks for returning to share your learnings! While it is generally safe to reuse addresses, it is recommended to use new addresses for every payment due to privacy. You can read more about that for example here: bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/20621/5406
    – Murch ♦
    Commented Nov 30, 2023 at 18:34
  • Leo, thank you for coming back to document your successful solution. You finally solved it for me! I tried so many different approaches. I even got close recently by running "getbalances" and finding the discrep between used and trusted. However, I was setting "avoid_reuse" in settings and config files rather than as a flag on the wallet itself. I agree with Murch that address reuse isn't recommended, but to have wallets default to not showing a reused address as spendable is a bit maddening. Thanks again for your help.
    – jackrugile
    Commented Mar 20 at 1:34

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