Topic: Watch only wallet with Private key - page 5. (Read 831 times)

Is it a "wallet.dat" file or "electrum.dat" file?
If it's wallet.dat, post a new thread in Bitcoin Technical Support board and follow the sticky thread "Tech Support Help Request Format".
Otherwise, post it here in Electrum board.

For starters, if it's electrum.dat, you can just load a copy of it using the latest version of Electrum and it will open without issues.
For further concerns, please add it to the thread that you'll create.

1. Make your own topic with your questions.
2a. Easiest is to install Bitcoin core (and place the .dat file to correct location) to at least extract the relevant private keys from that wallet. Or sync if you can.
2b. Or use Pywallet to extract the private keys: https://notatether.com/bitcoin/how-to-use-pywallet-to-extract-bitcoin-private-keys/

I forget private key and seed pharse
I have only dat file
How to recover my wallet with only dat file?

I don't think that it will find the root of your problems. Sorry to say, but you seem to be doing something wrong and you seem to misunderstand something related to wallet, private keys and/or what you've been doing there. I don't know what though.

However: if you go to the page I've linked, you'll see that in one direction (source) you can have 16AZ9BZpSGEufpacYcwYv9Y8Jp6L5KoCuT and its parents,
and in the spending direction (aside of the 1dice gambling site you've been playing at) 1BNGRgo31K3AbxdVSZs9ErBP1sz8GPGL87 (which was probably the change address when you've been depositing/playing)
Both may or may not be yours.

From there you can go in all directions and find a plethora of addresses and transactions, with higher or lower chance to be yours.
You can basically take into account all the change addresses from your transactions (just going upstream the chances to go wrong increase) and probably ignore other addresses from the transactions sourced from 1dice.

This was by hand. You can use specialized websites too, like walletexplorer.com, which may or may not do a better job (or may just gather info from you for others' use).

Wallets cannot switch from a standard wallet to a watch only wallet. This functionality simply does not exist. You are misremembering what happened in the past.

So every time you import the private key, it gives you the same address which has no funds. And the only time you have seen funds is when you have imported the address in to a watch only wallet. It sounds like the address you have written down is not related to the private key you have written down.

Yes true there is only 0.00000001 coins in it and that's why I call it dust which cant be moved. Only reason I posted that specific one is because it is doin the same thing but at least I don't play with my other wallets on the forum. I don't intent to move anything from there. How do you see which other addresses are linked to it? I need to find the source of my problems.

Thanks in advance

Thanks for the advise.

When I start to import the Privacy key it gives me another address which I am not sure at this point where it is coming from but the moment it showed me the coins it switches to watching only and gives the correct address and correct coins. That was the previous time I tried. But now it again show a different address but still not showing me coins and also not showing watching only like with the previous attempt. Although this is a fresh start and fresh app installation.

Still Oeloe I really didn't make a mistake with the privacy keys. If I attempt importing it into blockchain.com I get a different address like I said in my above messages. An address wont start with a K or L. That is all I am working with.

My firewalls are disabled and I dont use a VPN.

Regards

It shouldn't do this and there is no point leaving it longer. There is obviously something stopping it from syncing properly. Try the following:

• Ensure Electrum version is 4.1.5.
• Click on Tools -> Network, find any new server, right click on it, and click "Use as server".
• Then click on the Proxy tab in the same window, and ensure it is turned off.
• Check that Electrum isn't being block by a firewall or antivirus.
• Check that Electrum isn't being blocked by a VPN if you use one.
• Try deleting the blockchain_headers file and reopening the wallet.

Although it is not syncing, is it showing you the correct address in the Addresses tab?

Just a small remark, since you wrote "coins are in there": if this is indeed the address you want to recover, it has no funds. I mean, it has one satoshi, which you cannot move. And I've found a lot of linked addresses that are empty.

An idea would be to stop the internet connection (so it doesn't sync at all) and get from the console again the relevant private keys. I think that you may have been mixing up something - from the wallet for which you've saved the things, to - I don't know - some attempts to encrypt your saved data which now returns something different. Bitcoin core should have the keys though.

Of course, before doing anything you should make a safe copy of the correct wallet.dat

Thanks for the reply. Much appreciated. I however did not make a mistake with mixing up the keys. None of my wallets starts with a 14........  All are old legacy wallets

I cant help to feel there must be another explanation for the difference.

Point taken

Thanks for the advice. I am just so frustrated with my situation that I would risk something to achieve something.

Thank you again

In all due respect Hosseinimr93, it is 100% correct what I said. I did not have the addresses at hand when I copied it. I have 8 wallets and all of them are legacy wallets starting with 1 and private keys starting with K and L. If I made a mistake with 1 or 2 it is still unlikely that I made a mistake with all. It is now 3 months that I am busy with it and by now I will know not to be mistaken.

However, I want to ask you, I uninstalled electrum from my Laptop and did a fresh download and checked the signatures and even deleted all in the appdata so it can start 100% fresh. Why is it taking so long (12 days)? IS there a way I can see what it is doing and how far it is? 100Gigs of data is a lot if the download is merely 57megs.
But now its not showing a watching only wallet after 2 days like before. It seems stuck in syncing.

Is there any way you can assist me?

I'd never do that if I were you.
Even if it's empty in your tests, there may still be unclaimed be "fork coins" in there or specially if the issue turns out to be the software's fault.

Anyways, you can test if the Electrum you're using is indeed deriving the correct address from the given private key
by importing a random private key (e.g: from paper wallet generators) and see it the correct address will be imported; if it does, then it's what they've said.

You are saying that you imported a private key and you didn't get the address you expected. You also imported the same private key into electrum and got a correct address but the wallet was watch-only.
And now you are asking why the electrum watch-only wallet generated the correct address while other wallets generated a wrong address.
Am I getting you right?

If so, as mentioned by pooya87, you have imported a wrong private key.
And you see a correct address on the electrum watch-only wallet, because you imported the address not the private key.

Don't say you imported a private key into electrum and it created a watch-only wallet. That's impossible.

I copy and paste my keys so I doubt it that I could have made the same mistake at more than three places. Since there is nothing in this particular private key let me post it here with screen shots. Coming up

The only possible explanation is either you imported a different key into "anywhere else" that got you the wrong address staring with 14 or the tool you used was seriously broken that created a wrong address. If I had to bet, I would say it is the former.

Your public key for "1AgV6A1vaRQ16G8sRR1VUW4r8EDnmdEBpy" is "0231454b30d68c681655c25d5f5985616c46d73ecee01a72fa2afcae82529e8138" (based on the only outgoing transaction this address has) and even if the tools use the uncompressed public key the address would still be "1CrSFKMZf3Q5xRrz6j2sMbYHFdTasNGoCh" not the one starting with "14".

Well now I am totally confused. I followed your advice and install a new Electrum from the website, checked the signature, and opened a wallet and import my private key with the prepend included. Didn't give me a watching only so far but have been syncing for 12 days already. Didn't display the coins so far. It downloaded the 57mbytes in the appdata directory which looks fine but used around 100gig of data in the past 12 days while synchronizing.

I am going to use some sample keys and addresses but it contains only dust so I am not concerned that it might fall into the wrong hands.

At first when I started off in 2012 I created Legacy wallets with their private keys (not encrypted) and had some transactions done in it. Last transactions done around 2013 to 2015. Then I stopped until November last year when I tried to access my wallets again for the first time again. That was when I imported the private keys for the first time into Electrum and it gave me a Watching only wallet as mentioned above.

I need to mention that I tried to sweep it as well once and it gave me a "no inputs found" pop up. I added my original wallet address on Cointracker and it shows my coins. Out of frustration I imported my smallest wallet (dust) in blockchain.com with the private key but it then gave me a different address. I couldnt believe it and imported my private key into a Key Compression tool and once again it gave me a different address but the same as blockchain.com.
Only Electrum showed me (and I imported only the private key) the right address and the coins in it, the way I created it back in 2013. Only the wallet was a watching only.

This is an example of my detail then and now.

In 2013 in Bitcoin Core I created and saved on a spreadsheet the following private key and address:
 Private Key: L3k1XxxxXXXXXxXxxxXxXxxxXXxXXxXXXxxXxXyxXxxxXxXXX5i
Address: 1AgV6A1vaRQ16G8sRR1VUW4r8EDnmdEBpy (coins are in here)

In 2022 the same private key shows the following address when importing it anywhere else:

Address:  14YjouC6ba7MR6WJWE7Wjsa6FdDYwjkX2p (no coins in here)

Can anyone please explain to me why this happened and more important why Electrum is showing the correct wallet address when imported the first time with same private key.

Much appreciated

Just start over via file > new/restore.

A quicker way is to open "Run" from the start menu and type in %appdata%.

The reason I suggested using the prefix here was not to make sure the address was legacy, because as you say Electrum will default to legacy address for the time being (although I suspect in the future it will default to segwit addresses just as it defaults to segwit seed phrases now). Rather, it was to make sure he really is entering a private key and not getting confused by entering an address. If he pastes either an address or a private key, it will accept either as is. If he uses the p2pkh prefix, it will only accept a private key and will not accept an address.

OP, you can easily check that by looking in your Electrum roaming folder and seeing how many wallet files are there. If you use Windows, you can find it in 'C:\Users\Your User\AppData\Roaming\Electrum\wallets'. You might need to enable hidden files to access the Roaming folder.

Is the prefix really needed when entering private keys to recover legacy addresses? Electrum should automatically default to recovering a legacy address if no prefix is specified. Only if you want to recover SegWit address, you need to specify the correct prefix. Maybe he can try with and without and see if there is a difference. Although I don't think that's the issue here.