Weird issue I’m encountering today with a PPC wallet. To give you an idea of my expertise…I’ve been playing with bitcoin since the single digits. I’ve worked for a major exchange. My systems are well thought out and have been in place for years.
I hold many alts on a cold machine offline. Many of these coins with a staking feature were brought online and onto a clean staking machine. The private keys were exported from the cold wallet and imported into the new CLEAN online wallet. Upon creating the new PPC online wallet, I create new send to addresses and copy/paste them to a spreadsheet.
Here’s where it gets weird…
I buy more PPC from Cryptsy and try to withdraw to a PPC address on my spreadsheet. The withdrawal is stuck at Cryptsy so I contact support. Cryptsy support releases my withdrawal a few days later. When I open my new online PPC wallet (where the funds should be going) I get nothing. I open up the Receive Coins section of the wallet and I notice that the send to addresses don’t match the original addresses I had copied and pasted into my spreadsheet. Strange. I assume it’s just human error on my end. I then check the old PPC cold wallet and find that the addresses are not there either. I had just done this same procedure with over 5 other alt coins with no problems during this same day. I still am unable to figure out where these addresses came from which I thought I owned in addition to the new PPC addresses that appear to have taken their place. My old PPC transaction (private key imported from cold PPC wallet) is still available in my new online wallet. However, my new Cryptsy transaction (although explorer shows it’s arrival) and the send to addresses that I had originally copied into my spreadsheet are no where to be found. They all seem to be valid PPC addresses however and I have no other “P” coins on the machine where the copying was done. When I open up the new online wallet I instead see PPC addresses which were never copied and pasted by me that I have never seen. Any ideas on what might be happening here? Am I running a malicious PPC wallet? How would I know? :’(
I’ve showed this to another friend in person and he’s also stumped. As much as I’d like to continue investing in PPC. I will need to understand what happened here before I put my confidence back in this coin and it’s wallet. As much as I’d like this to be a case of human error on my part, I believe it is not. I literally used this same procedure during the same day with 7 other alt coins and no issues were encountered.
For anyone that has read this…thank you. If you can offer any advice or have any questions/comments I would love to hear them.
your topic mentions a Mac wallet, in your post i can’t find anything about Mac/OSX. Only about online wallets, my question: how can you be sure the online wallet is “clean”?
when i went to cryptocollege on the first day they thought me to never trust web/online wallets.
From your story it looks that the web wallet got corrupted,atacked (?) somehow. I guess some things got lost in translation, think you might use online wallet (the term) for wallet-client possibly? Cant help without more info anyway
fyi, backup wallet.dat (from the menu), reinstall your system, and you have a clean(er) system, you can never be 100% sure ,
You can use the following commands (help -> debug window -> console) to investigate the situation:
validateaddress
listtransactions
The way to use validateaddress is to look at the ‘ismine’ field of validateaddress output. A true value means the address belongs to this wallet (wallet contains its corresponding private key).
When you say you ‘create new send to addresses and copy/paste them to a spreadsheet’, do you generate the new address on the cold wallet or hot wallet? Do you mean you generate a new address in the ‘receive coins’ tab view of the client UI? Are you saying it disappeared a few days later from the ‘receive coins’ tab view?
This is a special type of hot wallet which is essentially treated like a cold wallet. It has a clean OS, nothing gets plugged into it or installed on it, keys are imported and encrypted before the machine ever goes online, and it is used in a private space ONLY for staking of coins. When I say online wallet I am discussing the Mac QT wallet on both the hot and cold sides.
[quote=“Sunny King, post:3, topic:2742”]You can use the following commands (help -> debug window -> console) to investigate the situation:
validateaddress
listtransactions
The way to use validateaddress is to look at the ‘ismine’ field of validateaddress output. A true value means the address belongs to this wallet (wallet contains its corresponding private key).
When you say you ‘create new send to addresses and copy/paste them to a spreadsheet’, do you generate the new address on the cold wallet or hot wallet? Do you mean you generate a new address in the ‘receive coins’ tab view of the client UI? Are you saying it disappeared a few days later from the ‘receive coins’ tab view?[/quote]
Thanks for your reply. Your awesome!
I’ve tinkered throughout the day with no success. Presently the wallet.dat on the hot machine looks to be the same as the wallet.dat that was on the cold machine. The hot machine SHOULD have a newly created set of addresses generated by the “Receive coins” button in QT with an imported private key from the cold wallet. I’ve also pulled up a CD backup which SHOULD have the new addresses. Again it appears to be the OLD COLD wallet.dat and not the NEWER HOT wallet with imported private key from the cold wallet. If I had time I’d test but unfortunately I don’t. It’s not that I didn’t lose a decent amount of money but there are other pressing matters that need my time.
My concern is that my importing of the cold private key into the newer hot wallet may of somehow have transferred the OLDER 10 created addresses (older wallet.dat) into the NEWLY created wallet with 10 addresses like they swapped places. I know that sounds ridiculous and it probably is but I don’t understand how the other alt wallets turned out fine that I did at the same time. These routines are regular. It’s unlikely that my strict procedures would have changed from one alt coin to the next. Regardless, I still have 1/3 of my holdings and I also have some XPM. I tend to get frustrated when I lose funds and I can’t get a full handle on what exactly happened. Sorry to come off so harsh in my initial post and keep up the great work.
Are your wallet the latest version and sync’ed to the network?
Are you sure your machine is clean so that it doesn’t have the virus/worm that replaces your crypto address in the clipboard?
This is a special type of hot wallet which is essentially treated like a cold wallet. It has a clean OS, nothing gets plugged into it or installed on it, keys are imported and encrypted before the machine ever goes online, and it is used in a private space ONLY for staking of coins. When I say online wallet I am discussing the Mac QT wallet on both the hot and cold sides.
[quote=“Sunny King, post:3, topic:2742”]You can use the following commands (help -> debug window -> console) to investigate the situation:
validateaddress
listtransactions
The way to use validateaddress is to look at the ‘ismine’ field of validateaddress output. A true value means the address belongs to this wallet (wallet contains its corresponding private key).
When you say you ‘create new send to addresses and copy/paste them to a spreadsheet’, do you generate the new address on the cold wallet or hot wallet? Do you mean you generate a new address in the ‘receive coins’ tab view of the client UI? Are you saying it disappeared a few days later from the ‘receive coins’ tab view?[/quote]
Thanks for your reply. Your awesome!
I’ve tinkered throughout the day with no success. Presently the wallet.dat on the hot machine looks to be the same as the wallet.dat that was on the cold machine. The hot machine SHOULD have a newly created set of addresses generated by the “Receive coins” button in QT with an imported private key from the cold wallet. I’ve also pulled up a CD backup which SHOULD have the new addresses. Again it appears to be the OLD COLD wallet.dat and not the NEWER HOT wallet with imported private key from the cold wallet. If I had time I’d test but unfortunately I don’t. It’s not that I didn’t lose a decent amount of money but there are other pressing matters that need my time.
My concern is that my importing of the cold private key into the newer hot wallet may of somehow have transferred the OLDER 10 created addresses (older wallet.dat) into the NEWLY created wallet with 10 addresses like they swapped places. I know that sounds ridiculous and it probably is but I don’t understand how the other alt wallets turned out fine that I did at the same time. These routines are regular. It’s unlikely that my strict procedures would have changed from one alt coin to the next. Regardless, I still have 1/3 of my holdings and I also have some XPM. I tend to get frustrated when I lose funds and I can’t get a full handle on what exactly happened. Sorry to come off so harsh in my initial post and keep up the great work. :)[/quote]
Did you run these commands as SK told you and what did you see at the ‘ismine’ field of validateaddress output?
validateaddress
listtransactions
Yes and yes (covered in post above yours)
“This is a special type of hot wallet which is essentially treated like a cold wallet. It has a clean OS, nothing gets plugged into it or installed on it, keys are imported and encrypted before the machine ever goes online, and it is used in a private space ONLY for staking of coins.”
Yes, these commands were run before I came to this forum. Unfortunately I didn’t get any leads from these actions. Yes, I understand the commands and what they return.
Thanks again for your help guys. My last resort is considering some sort of disc recovery program to see if I can find any random wallet.dat files. However, I don’t know if I will have time. I’m not thrilled about running such software on this “close to cold” hot machine. It could require moving everything to a new “close to cold” hot machine afterwards when considering security.
do you think you can still find the wallet from when it had the addresses? maybe you can still recover them, have you thought about increasing your keypool size? it is strange, it sounds like you lost some addresses you used , but they should be in the keypool still , maybe they just don’t show up in the gui? , idk
Pre-generated new keys are aged in a queue before use, so that backups of wallet.dat hold keys you'll use in the future.
Yes and yes (covered in post above yours)
“This is a special type of hot wallet which is essentially treated like a cold wallet. It has a clean OS, nothing gets plugged into it or installed on it, keys are imported and encrypted before the machine ever goes online, and it is used in a private space ONLY for staking of coins.”[/quote]
Yes I had seen that part. What I meant was that your clean OS and wallet might have been installed from compromized download. The probability is small but the error you see also seems rare.
[quote=“PrimeRib, post:4, topic:2742”]Thanks for your reply. Your awesome!
I’ve tinkered throughout the day with no success. Presently the wallet.dat on the hot machine looks to be the same as the wallet.dat that was on the cold machine. The hot machine SHOULD have a newly created set of addresses generated by the “Receive coins” button in QT with an imported private key from the cold wallet. I’ve also pulled up a CD backup which SHOULD have the new addresses. Again it appears to be the OLD COLD wallet.dat and not the NEWER HOT wallet with imported private key from the cold wallet. If I had time I’d test but unfortunately I don’t. It’s not that I didn’t lose a decent amount of money but there are other pressing matters that need my time.
My concern is that my importing of the cold private key into the newer hot wallet may of somehow have transferred the OLDER 10 created addresses (older wallet.dat) into the NEWLY created wallet with 10 addresses like they swapped places. I know that sounds ridiculous and it probably is but I don’t understand how the other alt wallets turned out fine that I did at the same time. These routines are regular. It’s unlikely that my strict procedures would have changed from one alt coin to the next. Regardless, I still have 1/3 of my holdings and I also have some XPM. I tend to get frustrated when I lose funds and I can’t get a full handle on what exactly happened. Sorry to come off so harsh in my initial post and keep up the great work. :)[/quote]
Not sure I understand your situation, you said the address was recorded in a spreadsheet before it’s gone, is this the address which should have your lost coins? If so you can look up on a block chain explorer for the balance on the address. And run validateaddress on all your wallets to see if any of the wallets still has this address.
Also you said you were running multiple altcoins, check whether any other altcoin uses addresses beginning with ‘P’. If so you should again use validateaddress to confirm whether this lost address was from other altcoin’s wallets.
