Topic: Diving into an old BTC wallet from ~2014 and found a nice surprise - what next? - page 2. (Read 484 times)

That's good advice, reason why I added the question mark. Some users do not know how to properly read information contained in txids, so it's sometimes helpful to give them pointers of what to look out for or for them to post it publicly, but, only when it becomes necessary and if the user can manage their privacy well enough.

This means that the transaction has been rejected for some reason.

Depending on the fee rate used... it's possibly because of the "mempool min fee". But you should really have received an error message when attempting to send it... rather than it just showing as "not in memory pool".

You can attempt to rebroadcast it... right click the transaction, select "Copy Transaction ID":



Then goto the "console" in Bitcoin Core (Window -> Console):



Then enter the command:


That should give you a big long string of random looking "hex" characters... 0-9A-F... copy paste that string and use the command:

If it all goes well, you should receive the "TransactionID" as output...



However, if, instead of the TransactionID being returned, you get some other error message, post the error message here.

This

Do NOT post any unnecessary personal data here

Indeed, if the fee is not equal to the min fee (but meets 1/sat/b) it might still not be relayed by your connected nodes.

Anyway, please make a backup & then slowly think about what the problem might be.

You have lots of options; first, to check if there's actually 1 BTC in your account, open the wallet address in a blockexplorer.

If so, you can do a number of things; export the private key, abandon your current transaction & rebroadcast, etc.

I'm not that great with the GUI, but if you try to list your transactions, (listtransactions), can you find it? If so, try to abandon it and resend.

I don't see why that would necessarily be necessary right now.

Can you post the txid here on the forum?

The only way to be sure is to check on a block explorer like https://blockchair.com/
Check the original address to know if there are any funds on it, also check the test address for any incoming or confirmed transactions. If the funds are not in any of these, then it could well be a phantom vestige as you say, probably a canceled transaction (through a double spend) which was received some years back.

First: make a new backup of your wallet.dat!
Then: check your addresses on for instance Blockchair.com to see what the current balance is.

What fee did you use for your transaction? And what "tiny" amount did you send: if it was less than 0.00000546 BTC, it's under the dust limit.

A warning: ignore all "help" you get offered through PM, people have been scammed that way.

Hi all, I'll keep this as simple as possible for brevity's sake - please ask questions if I've left any gaps in explaining my situation, as follows

I bought and traded Bitcoin from approx 2012 to 2014, using Bitcoin-qt as my wallet until I learned about Electrum and began to use it instead

I haven't bought or sold BTC since about 2015, but given the recent price spikes, curiousity has gotten the better of me. I'm fairly sure my old wallets were completely emptied of any BTC, but better safe than stupid, right?

This week I downloaded Bitcoin Core, synced the blockchain to the network (took 5-6 days) and opened the oldest wallet.dat file I had backed up

It contains my transaction history from 2012 to 2014. Even better, the wallet itself seems to contain a non-trivial amount (ie greater than 1BTC), with that amount displayed as "available" and zero BTC under pending. Great!

Yet more joy: when I went to send a test transfer (tiny fraction of BTC) to an Electrum wallet, I was able to remember my years-old password and send the transaction through

Or so I thought... That test transfer has the status of "0/unconfirmed, not in memory pool" within Bitcoin Core. I have done some reading on this (other forum posts across the years) and I'm not clear on why is occurring

Bitcoin Core itself notes in bottom right corner that it's up to date with 669,000+ blocks of transaction history. And the client has 10 active connections to BTC network

So I'm a little confused, and wondering whether the "available" balance amount shown in the wallet is a phantom vestige of many years ago, and not real... or whether there's some other way to salvage what appears to be a functioning wallet?

If you were in my situation, what would you try next?

Thanks in advance