I Nearly had a Heart Attack
I opened one of my Electrum wallets to find that it had no transactions listed and no coins.
I was calm.
I can't say how much Bitcoin I believed had been in this wallet (for obvious reasons). Let it suffice that it was a significant amount that I could not easily replace.
I was calm.
I checked my other wallets. I checked old wallets that I had abandoned (but had kept the files around for record keeping purposes). I checked Electrum's default wallet.
Nothing.
I started to lose my calm.
But as I began frantically opening and closing Electrum wallets, it eventually got confused enough that it had to open the REAL default wallet (the "default_wallet" I had already checked actually belonged to an older version of Electrum, and I hadn't realized that).
And there it was. When I had made my last transaction, I ended up sending it to Electrum's default wallet instead of the wallet I had set up specifically for that amount of Bitcoin.
But it was too late to calm down. My heart is still fluttering with the thought of what I almost lost. In this state, I was reminded of the parable of the woman and the piece of silver. So I decided to come here and declare my good fortune.
I have since transferred the private key containing that amount of Bitcoin to one of my known wallets, and then deleted the default wallet.
Celebrate with me, for that which was lost is found.
I join your celebration! Next time it wont be an issue (lets hope hehe)
I can tell you I'm going to be MUCH more careful in the future.
Those miniheart attacks are a good way to be cautious next time hehe
I use exodus wallet and track the balance in Coinigy. Last week I sent some BTC from that wallet and the next day on Coinigy it showed it as empty. It was in the tens of thousands of dollars missing. I very nearly threw up.
As it turns out, Exodus created a new address and put the remaining balance there at the time I sent the smaller amount out - Coinigy didn't know that, of course.
I have never felt so anxious in my life.
So it put the unspent amount in a change address, but then in the main display it said that the wallet was empty?
Wow, that's nuts.
Not exactly - the key was that I was monitoring the wallet from Coinigy - so later Exodus showed the full balance - but since it resided in a different address Coinigy just saw a zero balance in the original address.
Okay, that makes more sense. Your Coinigy was only monitoring the original address, and wasn't aware of where the leftover change was going. But your Exodus wallet had access to both the original address and the change address, so it knew.
I guess that's one of the disadvantages of a watch wallet---you need to make sure it watches ALL your addresses, including the ones you've never used before.
Sorry I didn't pick up on that in your first comment.
You got it! I nearly had a heart attack. And yes - major limitation of a watch wallet. It's like I say, the best thing about cryptocurrency is the decentralization and the worst thing about cryptocurrency is the decentralization.