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I made a transaction 2 days ago, (using BitcoinQT 0.8.1-beta on MacOS X) that didn't propagate. I can't find the transaction on blockexplorer or blockchain.info (or anywhere else for that matter) yet. The transaction just sits there in the client, unconfirmed and gobbled up my Bitcoins. The transfer required me to pay a tx fee that I gladly paid.

Status: 0/unconfirmed
Date: 06.04.13 22:01
To: Satoshi Dice 78% 1dicec9k7KpmQaA8Uc8aCCxfWnwEWzpXE
Debit: -0.40 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.0005 BTC
Net amount: -0.4005 BTC
Transaction ID: 10cfa399f5c0a3c6a36e9678ae7c87af95f38899cfe21c7bd76caebd11a2919b

What I did thus far

  • I let the client sit on the network for a couple of hours, hoping for it to re-send the transaction.
  • I found this debug thread that suggested to use -rescan, which I did to no avail.
  • Then I backed up and deleted all data except the wallet to redownload the blockchain - which also failed to change anything.
  • I used the gui console to do a lookup and resend of the transaction using getrawtransaction / sendrawtransaction that resulted in the error below

Error:

getrawtransaction 10cfa399f5c0a3c6a36e9678ae7c87af95f38899cfe21c7bd76caebd11a2919b 1
No information available about transaction (code -5)

sendrawtransaction 10cfa399f5c0a3c6a36e9678ae7c87af95f38899cfe21c7bd76caebd11a2919b
TX decode failed (code -22)

Now I am wondering what went wrong and what steps to take next.

I am aware that similar questions have been posted before, but I think this instance is different because I feel I already exhausted the debug instructions provided in the debug thread. I apologize if I missed anything.

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1 Answer 1

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There's a sort of hatred against satoshi dice lately. The feeling is that satoshi dice clogs up the transaction record with lots of small transactions. Some of the bigger mining pools have started to refuse the transactions.

Rescan and your other steps should have fixed everything, though.

Without including the sending address in your question, it's difficult to track the bitcoins. My only thought is that you can try to re-spend the coins on yourself and maybe they'll return. The easiest way to do this might be to extract the public and private key of the address that sent the coins and put those in a wallet in blockchain.info .

To do this, go to the console of your bitcoin client and type

walletpassphrase <your password> 20
dumpprivkey <the address that sent the coins>
walletlock

Open a new wallet at blockchain.info and use the Import/Export function to import that private key. blockchain.info will show your new balance.

That private key is your coins. Don't tell it to anyone. The address, however, isn't a big secret.

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  • Thank you for the advice. I just went through the suggested steps, but the new wallet at blockchain.info shows a balance of 0 BTC after importing my private key (which isn't true). My sending address for this transaction was 1EczFVtHbPmEUXPHEHrZYUp4T5dDxbvhU6 by the way. If you have a suggestion what else I could do, I would be delighted. Update I sent all my leftover bitcoins to the new Blockchain address and they vanished unpropagated, telling me: Status: 0/unconfirmed, broadcast through 30 nodes. Maybe Bitcoin isn't for me.
    – DentalFloss
    Commented Apr 9, 2013 at 10:04
  • Looking here: blockchain.info/address/1EczFVtHbPmEUXPHEHrZYUp4T5dDxbvhU6 I see that you played satoshi dice most recently and the money was sent to this address: 13a3h9eCFm5uUyPQv7dmxUAwscfo231Xiw . That should be one of your addresses and there's money in there. See if you can find that private address using the same technique that I showed you before.
    – Eyal
    Commented Apr 9, 2013 at 11:36
  • Also get the private key of these addresses using the same process: 1NNra1wt5p9ai1Qye7Tq3xgV7yjDWFRvDi and 14D1nGhEzuG8UVcfCQVL6TB9jyS7Qwf61p . Everytime you spend bitcoins, the money in the wallet that you don't spend goes to a new address, so your wallet file has tons of addresses. You can list them all with this command: listaddressgroupings. This is a python script to extract all your address private keys for import to blockchain.info: bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4469/…
    – Eyal
    Commented Apr 9, 2013 at 11:47
  • pywallet.py and importing the dump on blockchain.info did the job. Thank you so, so much. I got all my bitcoin back. I have to say though, I lost a good amount of faith in this system after this whole ordeal.
    – DentalFloss
    Commented Apr 9, 2013 at 13:47
  • I'm still surprised that -rescan didn't solve the problem. If you want, open a wallet at blockchain.info and transfer there. They did a good job on making bitcoin painless.
    – Eyal
    Commented Apr 9, 2013 at 22:12

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