Topic: Bitcoin Wallet for Android stopped synchronizing with the blockchain (Read 235 times)

I am coming back on this thread as I have a small information which may help other users, in case they'll need assistance from the developer of Bitcoin Wallet for Android. So regarding my line from above -- I did not receive any reply to my email even until today, so more than 9 months later.

In any case, I found, by chance, an email of Andreas Schildbach, which appears inside a text file located inside the folder containing the package of Bitcoin Wallet, if it is downloaded from GitHub. The email is [email protected] -- and he answers to emails sent at this address. The replies come from another address though -- [email protected] -- which is very similar with the email posted on Google Play, but the email from Google Play is [email protected], and nobody responds to it.

So in case anyone will need Andreas' assistance, feel free to use the email I provided above. If you will need though to reply to his reply, make sure you will email him at his address and you will not reply to his reply, which will appear as coming from [email protected]. If you'll reply at this email, you'll get an automatic response, which contains frequently asked questions about Bitcoin Wallet. So make sure you always use the email [email protected].

Among other things, I kindly asked Andreas if he can become active again on the forum, but he said that he does not have time to be active on the forum again and he is also not planning to do it. Therefore this email is the only way to contact him, in case you need assistance.

As far as I know, everything is done through GitHub pull requests. For example, when I remade the Romanian translation of Bitcoin white paper, NeuroticFish helped with the pull request. Once the request is done, you need some supporters to grant that what you present is better than what already exists on the website. If you have enough supporters, Cøbra may grant the pull request (meaning the change you propose).

There's some activity in the past few months, but not as much as it was midway this year. It might be worth a short opening an issue there.
Maybe it's because not, so many people use the wallet?

Is there a place where a suggestion can be made Bitcoin.org regarding the wallets, or they just choose what to put there and what not to put?

The main problem is that the developer seems to be completely inactive. I still did not receive any reply to my emails. He is also not active on the forum anymore. And on GitHub I see some features / issues planned for years to be implemented but which are still not implemented.

Yet the wallet is still functional, it is still used and it is still recommended on bitcoin.org. All these are very weird...

I have never used this wallet before, but I see it as one of those wallets listed on Bitcoin.org - https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet?step=5&platform=android
If that bug involving delayed synchronization shows up next time, then it could be worth opening up an issue on their GitHub since the source code is there for the public. I do see similar issues there, which might be suggesting that those users had the same problems at different times https://github.com/bitcoin-wallet/bitcoin-wallet/issues

Congrats 

You should try some other wallets to check all other kind of features, like more privacy and coin control, lightning network

For android.
- Samourai wallet
- Electrum

For PC
- Sparrow
- Electrum

In all those you only need your seed: 12 words for electrum or 24 works for BIP39

I come back to this thread as I have some news.

I did not have time at all since I created the thread for properly investigating the instructions I found about extracting private keys from Bitcoin Wallet for Android.

As a side note, these are the instructions I found:
I just downloaded a bitcoin android mobile wallet. Where is my private key?
[HOW-TO] Export seed and private keys from your Bitcoin Wallet for Android
Got my recovery seed for android bitcoin wallet, but electron cash says 0 BCH
Recovering Bitcoins (provided by LoyceV -- thanks LoyceV!)

However, I managed to recover almost all the funds I had in the wallet.

Yesterday I decided to try to restore the wallet once more, although last time when I did it (at beginning of the year) it took me 3 weeks until the wallet synchronized with the blockchain. I started this operation yesterday morning and, by a miracle, this morning the wallet was synchronized. So it took me only ~24h.

I don't know how this happened. I have a guess though: during summer I got rid of almost all the funds from the wallet (I had only 0.29 BTC remaining -- I know, it's a very big amount) and, when I got rid of the funds from the wallet I also sent a lot of dust transactions which were compiled in a single transaction. For example, I remember I sent a transaction of ~0.1 or 0.2 BTC which had 147 inputs. So the funds which remained in the wallet were not composed only from dust transactions, but also from larger amounts.

So this is the only difference compared with my earlier try of restoring the wallet: this time it had a substantially lower amount inside it and that amount had also substantially less dust transactions. However, I don't know if this is the cause or not. I also made one more back-up of the wallet before proceeding and I noticed that its size was 6.5MB. In March its size was 6.1MB. So my problems started after the wallet size became greater than 6MB but, however, the problems were also influenced by the amount inside the wallet, which is very weird.

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After the wallet was synchronized with the blockchain I made a transaction of 0.1 BTC, then a second one of 0.1 BTC, then a third one of ~0.008 BTC. I decided to work with small steps here, to make sure that the transactions are broadcasted by the wallet. Fortunately, all the funds arrived successfully at the new destination.

I had 0.00334 BTC remaining, which represented ~97$ and, when I tried to empty the wallet I saw that I can send only 76000 sats. Now I still have 262598 sats but I can not send them anymore. Probably the amount is composed only from dust transactions and this is why it can not be sent anymore.

This is what I see:



I may try in the future to extract the private keys and try to import them in Electrum to see if I can recover the remaining 262598 sats, although I am not sure if I'll ever be able to follow the steps from the above links. But, most important now, I feel relieved after I managed to recover 0.29 BTC from that wallet!

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All in all, I can say that this wallet is very curious. It works fine until it reaches a size of 6MB, then... issues appear. I am also very sure that the hundreds (thousands) of very low transactions I had also contributed to this problem (I mean transactions under 0.001 BTC and, in many cases, even under 0.0005 BTC).

At same time, although I managed to solve this problem, I am still disappointed by the dev, which did not reply to my email even until now. This is not a professional approach, especially when their app is on Google Play and it's downloaded by thousands and thousands of users.

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Later edit: things became even more curious as, after I left the wallet to "rest" for about 30 min, I could also send the remaining 262000 sats Oo It did not give me that error message anymore. So all funds were recovered! Hooray!

At same time, I backed-up also another Bitcoin Wallet for Android, from a different device, which has only a few transactions (probably under 300). The size of this wallet is 95KB. So it's 600 times smaller than my wallet  
In any case, I also observed that now the wallet with the problem synchronizes instantly with the blockchain, so it's certain the delay in synchronizing was determined by the huge amount of dust transactions it contained, although I see no logical explanation for this behavior. After all, it still has to parse all the blockchain blocks since November 2015, when I created it. Why is this parsing slowed down by the funds from the wallet will remain a mystery to me.

The last time I checked an old (empty) backup, it took days to sync on an old phone. After that, I never used it again.

This is all I have on recovering Bitcoin Wallet:
I haven't tried this myself.

Indeed, you can only download an encrypted backup of the wallet...


No, I did not try this yet, as last time I did it it took me almost a month until it synchronized with the blockchain and I did not want to spend another month to see if it will ever sync again...

Thank you for this topic and I hope your questions will be answered.

I have downloaded the wallet before. The reason I did not use the wallet is because I was not able to see the seed phrase so that I can do the  backup.

Because I thought it is a good wallet, I look for the backup file to know if I can backup the wallet file not encrypted in a way I can be able to see my seed phrase or my master private key but you have to backup the file encrypted. That means it will require hard way if the wallet has a problem in a way I will have to depend on another wallet. That can happen, you may have to export your seed phrase or private key from one wallet to another to spend your bitcoin, but Bitcoin wallet for Android is not made like that and I did not use it.

Have you deleted the wallet app, download it back and import the wallet file again?

I am starting this thread as I encountered a severe issue with my Bitcoin Wallet for Android. I mean this wallet.

I have this wallet installed for a long time now (since December 2015) and I liked it a lot, as it was very user friendly and easy to use.

Unlike other wallets, which connect to synchronized nodes, this wallet is synchronizing itself with the blockchain. This is happening when the app is running but it can also happen while the app is closed. You can see the last parsed block from Network Settings menu. And, usually, even if it is not used for weeks / months, it synchronizes very fast with the blockchain (it parses all the blocks from a month within minutes).

However, after performing many transactions, I noticed that it started to slow down very much. For example, in March this year I restored the wallet after I reset my phone to factory settings and it took 3 weeks until the wallet fully synchronized with the blockchain. At same time, I noticed that it parsed the blocks from years ago very fast and, the more up to date it was becoming, the slower it was parsing recent blocks. Block parsing became so slow, that from all those 3 weeks, in last week it parsed the blocks from last 2 years ago, while in first two weeks it parsed blocks from 6 years!

I realized that all these happened because I had many transactions performed with this wallet. Or this seems to be the only explanation. A while ago I also restored this wallet on another phone, but from that wallet I made only a few transactions. In that case the restore (meaning the full sync with the blockchain) took a few hours, although it also had to parse years of blocks from the blockchain. Another aspect which made me sure that this is the reason for slow parsing of the blocks is the message which appears when you select to see a transaction which was sent to multiple recipients (e.g. a payment from a signature campaign). In this case, the wallet displays this message: "This payment pays to many wallets besides yours, which makes the app slow down over time. If you can, try receiving payments which pay directly to you.".

I did not understand exactly why the wallet would slow down in case of multiple such payments but, since I did not encounter any problem for 8 years already, I believed that this may not happen or maybe it is an obsolete message, from a period earlier than a fix solved this possible problem but the message was not eliminated from the app.

My first mixed feelings appeared this year, when it took me almost a month until the wallet fully synched with the blockchain. However, after I finished that operation it was almost all the time up to date with latest Bitcoin blocks. In case it was not synched (if I did not use it for days) I noticed though that parsing was very slow. For example, last week it parsed 200 blocks in one hour or so. I also noticed that, sometime, while parsing the blocks, the peers shown at Network Monitor section (meaning the nodes it was connecting to, in order to synchronize) were disappearing for a while. In that while no other blocks were parsed. Then, after a few minutes a few peers were reappearing and the parsing continued. However, the slow down of parsing was not determined only just by the disappearance of the peers -- even when peers were shown, blocks were parsed at a very slow pace (one block at each 20-30 seconds or so).

---

And now I came to the point to face the worst possible problem: the wallet stopped synchronizing.

During last 2-3 weeks I noticed that it was synching by itself (so without opening the app) once at ~3 days. Sunday, September 3rd, was last day when it tried to synchronize with the network. It parsed the blocks from a few days, but not all of them. Since then, when I open it I see this message: "Synchronizing with the blockchain, XXX days behind". Now it shows that it is with 6 days behind.



In all these 6 days, each time I opened it, I did not see any peer anymore at Network Options. It simply does not find any peer anymore.



And the issue is not a general issue of the app, as on another phone the wallet is always up to date. So I realized that this problem could be generated by the multiple transactions I performed with this particular wallet, although this sounds ridiculous.

Needless to mention, because of this problem I am unable to send my coins anymore. If I'm trying to send a transaction, I see a message saying there is a replay in progress and the transaction can not be performed.



Seeing the situation lasts, I started looking for similar issues inside Bitcoin Wallet for Android board. With this occasion I also noticed that the board is used very incorrectly, containing many topics not related to this app, but to various Android wallet, which determined me start this thread: Should some topics from "Bitcoin Wallet" board be moved to "Wallet software"?.

In any case, while "parsing" topics from Bitcoin Wallet for Android board (fortunately, the board is very small), I noticed a post made by the wallet developer, which intrigued me in part, but also convinced me that the ridiculous issue mentioned above is real:


I do not understand how a wallet can become "too large". And, in any case, the link provided is not working.

Then I started looking for some ways of exporting the private keys of the wallet (it does not have an option in the menu to do it) and I found these posts: [HOW-TO] Export seed and private keys from your Bitcoin Wallet for Android and Re: I just downloaded a bitcoin android mobile wallet. Where is my private key?.

Obviously, you need to be a tech-savvy to be able to perform all those manual steps.

I also tried to add some trusted peers by myself, using some nodes listed here. In this case the app says that it connected to the trusted peer(s) but still, no peer is shown at Network Monitor and no block parsing is done.



At same time, I emailed the developer, at the email stated on Google Play ([email protected]). I sent the email on Monday but I received no reply yet. Not even the automatic reply which used to be automatically sent. I discussed with the developer(s) in the past and, when I was sending an email to that address, I used to receive instantly an automatic reply. Their official reply used to arrive after days, but they were replying. Now I did not receive even the automatic reply, nor an official sign from them. I also can not contact the developer through BitcoinTalk, as he was last seen online 5 years ago.

I am still thinking about ways to retrieve the coins I have on this wallet but I feel I am at a dead point. I also thought about setting a trusted peer inside the wallet, but I do not know the information I need to add there. If anyone knows, any help would be much appreciated.

And, of course, if anyone encountered this problem or has any suggestion, it will be much appreciated!

I mention also that I have a very good Gigabit Internet connection and also a solid WiFi through a v6 router, so Internet / WiFi connection is not an issue here (besides, all my other devices connected to WiFi / Internet work perfectly).

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