Topic: History of transactions and balance don't match after switching to Electrum (Read 278 times)

As has been explained to you, the private keys don't change. The addresses that hold your coins change when you send Bitcoin to someone. Since an address is emptied of all its coins no matter how much you send, importing the private key of the old address will show you a zero balance. Maybe that's the confusion. If there are no coins on the address, it makes no sense importing its private key.

Let's explain it this way.

Your Gorilla22 address #1 holds 1 BTC.
You have the private key of that address. Let's call it Gorilla22 address #1 private key.   
 
You buy some gear from me for 0.3 BTC. The transaction is made from Gorilla22 address #1.
I receive 0.3 BTC, some of your sats are used for network fees, and the rest gets sent to Gorilla22 change address #1.

A year from now, you decide to use a different wallet. You remember that you had bitcoin in Gorilla22 address #1 because that's the only funded address you used in your wallet. You also find Gorilla22 address #1 private key in your personal notes. You import the private key only to see that the wallet is empty and you have no bitcoin in it. But you are forgetting that the address has to be empty because you purchased some items from me and your change went elsewhere. The private keys never changed. They still recover your old address, but it's just an address that is empty now. What you need is the correct change address and it's private key, which you found already.

Thank you! This explains a lot about private keys!

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hosseinimr93,

It worked with change addresses!
Balance on Electrum got updated!
0.0006 btc, just like it is on Core!

Thank you!!!!

For each of your addresses, you have a private key and that never change.
Take note that we don't deal with a centralized party that changes your private key. Each private key is derived from a random number through mathematical calculations.
All your private keys and all associated addresses are always valid and can be used as many as times you want.

Your confusion may come from generation of a new address every time you receive bitcoin.
Due to privacy reasons, it's always recommended to use new addresses and not reuse addresses and that's why some wallets generate new addresses. That doesn't mean old addresses and their private keys become invalid. They will work forever.

Many thanks for useful info and great advices!

Btw, there is one thing about setting up new wallets with the same private keys, which is may be a myth or prejudice. But I have heard this several times.
As an unexperienced newbie I cannot evaluate if it is true or false.
It is the following: private keys change every time when one makes a transaction or receives btc, or even just launches a wallet online. Therefore, only "the last" private keys are valid. So if there are for example 2 wallets with the same private keys, and you launch one of them, you authomatically make another wallet useless because its private keys became not valid anymore.
Is it a kind (at least partially) of a true thing?
I heard this several times from several different people.

You can use listreceivedbyaddress command to see balance of all your receiving addresses.
You can also use listunspent command to know which addresses contain unspent outputs.

The problem is that you have to sync your wallet before using these commands.

Not sure if there is a command which returns only funded addresses but based on the information you provided, it looks like only the change address from the most recent outgoing transaction still has a balance (0.0006btc).
Look up that transaction ID on any block explorer, copy the address which received 0.0006btc,dump its private key from core then import it into Electrum.

So, it's possible that you have bitcoin in your change address(es).
In one of your previous posts, you said that you imported private keys of your receiving addresses. That's probably why you didn't get the correct balance on electrum. You missed change addresses.


Yes, you can create as many as wallets you want. Nothing stops you from doing that.

hosseinimr93,

Yes I was making transactions from Core.
Actually, I understand now it is not a good way to switch to Electrum.
But now, after I have tried this, I want to experiment further to see how it all works :-)
Btw, will it work if I delete this Electrum and set up a new one, importing all necessary private keys into it?

If you don't know which of them are funded and which of them are empty, you can import all the private keys.


You didn't answer the question I asked in my previous post.

Have you ever made any transaction with your wallet?
If no, there is no need to import private key of change addresses. All of them are empty.
If yes, you can check those transactions in a block explorer, find the change address and import their private keys into electrum.

Is there a way to find out which addresses from that list are worth to import? :-)

Is it necessary to import the whole list to Electrum?
Or just to choose only change addresses?

Wow!
It's a huge list!

This is a great idea with dumpwallet!

But what file name must be a "filename"?
Is it wallet.dat file with full path?

I didn't see you have exported your private keys one by one by making a dumpprivkey on each address. Why haven't you made a dump of your whole wallet in one time by using dumpwallet ? It's easier, faster and you would be sure to get all the addresses of your wallet at least. I hope you have missed some addresses, it would add some extra coins to your balance even if it wouldn't explain the strange transaction from 2017 that you don't remember.

dumpwallet "filename"

Arguments:
1. filename    (string, required) The filename with path (absolute path recommended)

Result:
{                        (json object)
  "filename" : "str"     (string) The filename with full absolute path
}

Examples:
> bitcoin-cli dumpwallet "test"

https://bitcoincore.org/en/doc/22.0.0/rpc/wallet/dumpwallet/

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No it's just the name you want to give to your dump file and eventually its path if you want to create it in another directory.

hosseinimr93.

I suspected that there were some private keys which I missed to export from Core.
If so, it would explain something.

Yes I did transactions on bitcoin Core!
How can I find those change addresses in Core?

Have you ever made any transaction in bitcoin core?
If you have done so, it's possible that the missing fund is on your change address(es).

Take note that if you make a transaction in bitcoin core, the remaining balance goes to a new address called change address. If that's the case, you need to import the private key of the change address into electrum.

So it seems your bitcoin core wallet is not fully synchronized as I suspected. It must be sad for you to discover that your wallet was already empty in reality and that you have done all of this for nothing at the end. But if you didn't make that transaction, someone else has done it and five years later it will be hard to find the thief unfortunately. I recommend you to closely monitor the rest of your funds now, to fully check your computer with an anti-virus software and to not let anyone use your computer when you're not next to it.  

Yes addresses are the same on both Core and Electrum.

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The strange thing is, that Electrum is showing the last transaction as 0.07 btc sent from my wallet, thus bringing balance to zero. There is this transaction on blockchain explorer.
While Core showing the totally different amount on last transaction, and the balance after it 0.0006 btc.

I didn't experiment with Segwit then in 2017.

I checked all 3 addresses on a blockchain explorer.
Zero balance, the last transaction in 2017.
The last transaction is just like the one on Electrum.
But I remember that I didn't do that transaction......

Hi guys!
Thank you very much!
Starting answering your questions one by one!
1. How I got private keys from core:
Help ---> Debug ----> Console ----> Dumpprivkeys  [address].
2. Addresses that I used:
I used 3 addresses from the wallets, the ones that I ever used to receive btc.

Your Core wallet is obviously not synced and it can't show correct balance and transaction, but you don't really need to use both wallet.
Easy solution is to check your address on any blockchain explorer that can confirm your balance and transaction.
You can also download full bitcoin blockchain if you want to wait for days and have your computer working 24/7.

Is core fully synced (you won't see a progress bar at the bottom if it is).

Have you checked if the addresses are similar or if there are differences in that between core and electrum. There was the segwit fork back in 2017 which might've caused some addresses to be different - if you were experimenting with segwit back then you might've sent some funds to an address that needs importing separately in electrum.

How did you get the private keys out of core to put them into electrum too? Did you use a command/tool to get them all out or did you select specific addresses and their private keys.

Are you sure your Bitcoin core wallet is properly synchronized?
Have you checked all your adresses one by one in each wallet? The same addresses are displayed in both wallets? All your adresses with unspent amounts from Bitcoin Core appear in your Electrum wallet and vice versa?
If yes have you try to look at these addresses through a blockchain explorer to see what transactions/amounts they've really received?

Hi,

I have 2 old core wallets on old PC, one of them with almost zero balance, and another one with some BTC on it.
I was experimenting with the "almost empty" Core wallet.
Experiment was: importing private keys from Core to Electrum. I set up new Electrum (on new PC) and imported private keys into it during set up.
And Electrum shows very strange situation!
1. Zero balance.  While there was 0.0006 btc on Core wallet.
2. The history of transactions doesn't match. Many transactions shown on Electrum differs from the ones on Core. Time is slightly different, amounts are slightly different. Electrum shows some old transactions which are not on Core. And Core shows some old transactions which are not on Electrum. One cannot say that it is totally different history of transactions! It is similar to original one, but still different.
Btw, Electrum says the last transaction was in 2017.
That't right, the last transaction was in 2017,  but it was different last transaction and the balance was not zero.
Why? What is it? :-)
Did I wrong something or was something hacked?