Topic: Electrum showing differnt balance from Multibit wallet (Read 1134 times)

Thank you for the explanation, it all makes sense now, I will stick to one wallet only from now on.
Eventually all my coins sorted themselves out, I manged to move everything away from Multibit wallet whenit let me in.
I will not be using one of their wallets again after the problems I have had with it.

Thank you again for all your replies and help. I learnt quite a bit on my own trying to recover all my coins through Electrum, and had used that link you gave (offline) to genrate my private keys.

I still have 100% faith in the bitcoin system it is well constructed, and it is the users who seem to make the problems.

The seed is the "starting point" for creating addresses/private keys... it is the private keys that control the coins. The idea being that as long as you have the seed, you can regenerate the same addresses/keys should your wallet be lost/destroyed/corrupted (older non-HD wallets just randomly created addresses/keys so if you lost your wallet, you couldn't recover addresses generated after last backup), so you can get access to your coins (via the private keys)

Anyway, the problem is that wallets can use different "derivation paths" from one another... which means that the addresses/keys being generated from a seed will differ.

Think of it like a long hallway which has a large number of doors labelled: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. and behind each door is a room with a large number of addresses/keys, all different from the addresses/keys in other rooms... The long hallway is your "seed"... the doors are the "derivation path"...

MultiBit HD is using Door #1... and so you get all the keys from Room #1.... however, Electrum (when importing BIP39 seeds) uses Door #44... and will give you all the addresses/keys from Room #44...

For the record, the actual derivation paths are m/0'/0 for MultiBit HD... and m/44'/0'/0'/0 for Electrum... You can play around with this website to get an idea of how changing the path changes the addresses: https://iancoleman.github.io/bip39/ (IMPORTANT: use an offline copy!!)

IF the coins are returned to you and the transaction is cancelled then you will get your coins back that you sent.
The private key holds the balance and controls the balance and bitcoins. You can get your public key also which'll show you how much you have and you can share the PUBLIC key without any riskk of people getting your Bitcoins.
I'm unsure of how the change thing works but if you want to post the PUBLIC KEY here (NOT PRIVATE KEYS) then we can see what the problem is in more detail?

Thanks for your replies.
I thought the seed holds the final balance etc no matter what wallet I use it in?
I was not sure if the original spend from Electrum would eventually get returned to my balance in my Multibit wallet or not, or can it be returned to my elctrum balance. I read somewhere about Electrum not getting change, I do not know if that means receiving payments?  This is where I am getting too technical for myself   If Electrum can get the payment I sent returned (eventually) I will have my coins saved?

Electrum and MultiBit HD use different Mnemonic systems (and different derivation paths if you try to restore a BIP39 seed into Electrum).

There is no way that these wallets will be in sync... ever... they'll be generating different keys/addresses from the seed.

The only wallet software that is currently compatible with MultiBit HD seed is Breadwallet (Android or iOS app)

You could try this to speed up the transaction: https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/

Quickseller and macbook-air have access to speedy transaction accelerators however, as I understand it, the transactions have to have no double spends involved with them.

If you get really stuck then I can try to help by importing the private keys into my Bitcoin wallet (though if it's a large amount I may not be trusted enough on this forum to do that).

It should return eventually once one of the double spend transactions gets confirmed or they both are dropped by mempool. Try exporting the seed from electrum into for example mycelium and see if you can see the unconfirmed transactions there. If you need help with the unconfirmed transactions, please post the txid's here so we can take look at them.

My multibit wallet was playing up so I set up an Electrum wallet to clea rmy funds out of it. Now my Multibit wallet is not syncing with my Electrum wallet which has an unconfirmed transaction from when I was trying to empty my Electrum wallet/account.  The electrum wallet is not showing recent payments I done from my Mulitbit wallet (yesterday) since the unconfirmed transaction was sent from it.  When I try to restore my Multibit wallet it refuses to accept my password, so I have reinstalled it several times.  I did not add any fees while hastily moving my coins from Electrum to another (not multibit) wallet.  Will this unconfirmed transaction, which is also a double spend ever be returned to my electrum wallet or Multibit wallet if I cannot get them to sync?  I tried to export private keys from Electrum but it gets stuck at 4%.  All wallets have been set up using same wallet words and password. It has been 4 days since I sent out the payment which is unconfirmed in Electrum and not showing in my Multibit wallet when I can get it open. 

Thanks