Where did my Eth go??

[Pachuca]

Hi,

 

A while ago I was playing around with mining eth for the first time. I made a ethereum wallet to hold the eth and I mined about 0.6 then I stopped mining and left that wallet alone. So I recently looked back at the account thinking I could transfer that 0.6 to a new wallet, but it's not there. It was recorded on the block chain here https://www.etherchain.org/tx/0xbc74fc74910c1ba3a3c3201e5888fd4ef878bf4efe2133d8ca8c3bed498704c2 and when I check my ethereum wallet I don't see anything in there. I'm not sure why it's not showing up. Do I need to finish mining 1 eth to get the full balance or something? A little help would be appreciated, thank you.

[RadiatingLight]

Try recrating the wallet?

[Pachuca]

7 minutes ago, RadiatingLight said:

Try recrating the wallet?

what do you mean? reinstall it?

[knightslugger]

14 minutes ago, Pachuca said:

what do you mean? reinstall it?

you saved the private keys, right?

[mariushm]

Your money is there, but mist (ethereum wallet) needs to synchronize with the network by downloading all the blocks until the current one.  Depending on your internet connection and your hard drive, it will take a few hours and you will need up to around 60 GB of disk space.

 

On SSD it will take up to 4 hours to start from nothing, with a mechanical drive it may take even 6-10 hours.

 

So just leave Ethereum Wallet open and let it catch up (it shows at the top of the interface how many blocks are left to download)

 

At the moment, there's a sort of quirk with how geth ( geth is a sort of "ethereum server" or service which connects to the ethereum network, and then programs like Ethereum Wallet / mist and others can connect to it to make transactions, create wallets, and so on) works :  when it starts it downloads all the data needed in a fast way and which takes less this space, but after a computer restart it will resume downloading and synchronizing to the network but in a slower way and which uses more disk space.

So if you want to reduce the amount of disk space it uses, you can remove all the data it downloaded so far and start from nothing, and this process will be faster.

 

If you want to do this, find geth.exe on your computer, go in the folder where it's located and open a command prompt window there.  (right click on some unused space in Windows Explorer while pressing Shift key, select "Open command window here" ) and then do this:

 

geth.exe removedb

 

It will show you a path ending with "chaindata" , press Y to remove that (that's where the blocks are downloaded, which contain the transaction information users made)

 

After it's done, type this:

 

geth --syncmode fast --cache 2048 --nousb

 

where

--syncmode fast tells geth to download the blocks in a faster way without some extra information you don't need as a regular user

--cache 2048  tells geth how much ram it can use to cache disk reads and writes while it downloads this data and processes it. You may want to use 1024 or a value lower than 2048, with 2048 geth will actually use up to 7-8 GB of memory at some moments! (I have 16 GB but if you have only 8GB or less, use less memory)

--nousb tells geth to not search your usb ports for hardware wallets like ledger nano s, trezor etc ... if you have one of these don't use this parameter

 

Now leave the window open and let geth download all that's required , in total there's around 4.850.000 blocks, you'll see as it downloads it will constantly show you at which block it's at.

 

You can open Ethereum Wallet while geth runs in background and you will see Ethereum Wallet will also show exactly what geth shows you in the command window (what block it's downloading, how many blocks are in total etc).

 

There's also a "light mode" which can be used to connect to the Ethereum network, where geth doesn't need to download 40-60 GB of data to connect, and only needs to download around 1 GB and then only 50-100 MB per month or something like that.

You can enable this mode from mist / Ethereum wallet from the menu  Develop  > Sync with Light client (beta)  but note that it's beta and there's very few nodes online making it harder to sync so again, you may see your total amount as 0 until you're synchronized.

So it's best to just suck it up for the moment and let it use gigabytes of data until the next version of geth and ethereum wallet is released, when maybe the "light mode" will come out of beta.

 

// also be careful, Ethereum wallet also has a sort of bug ... if you're not connected to any peers (which can happen especially if you use the light mode where there's fewer nodes online), the software will use some default values when it calculates transaction fees. 

For example, the default will be something like 0.5 ETH for a transaction, when in reality the cost is something like less 0.0003 ETH for a transaction smaller than around 2-300$ worth of ETH.

Again, mist / Ethereum wallet needs to sync with the network (catch up with the latest blocks made) and be connected to peers in order to estimate how much should you pay for transaction in order to have your transaction processed in a reasonable amount of time so just let it catch up and those values will be corrected

 

 

 

 

[Pachuca]

2 hours ago, knightslugger said:

you saved the private keys, right?

This was one of the problems originally for me. I didn't know how to find the private key when I setup the mist wallet. I made another wallet and have the public and private key for it. Is the private key available in the mist wallet? I only see the public key. How would I get that information?

[knightslugger]

it does not appear that the unencrypted private keys are something you can get on the mist wallet.

[Pachuca]

2 hours ago, mariushm said:

Your money is there, but mist (ethereum wallet) needs to synchronize with the network by downloading all the blocks until the current one.  Depending on your internet connection and your hard drive, it will take a few hours and you will need up to around 60 GB of disk space.

 

On SSD it will take up to 4 hours to start from nothing, with a mechanical drive it may take even 6-10 hours.

 

So just leave Ethereum Wallet open and let it catch up (it shows at the top of the interface how many blocks are left to download)

 

At the moment, there's a sort of quirk with how geth ( geth is a sort of "ethereum server" or service which connects to the ethereum network, and then programs like Ethereum Wallet / mist and others can connect to it to make transactions, create wallets, and so on) works :  when it starts it downloads all the data needed in a fast way and which takes less this space, but after a computer restart it will resume downloading and synchronizing to the network but in a slower way and which uses more disk space.

So if you want to reduce the amount of disk space it uses, you can remove all the data it downloaded so far and start from nothing, and this process will be faster.

 

If you want to do this, find geth.exe on your computer, go in the folder where it's located and open a command prompt window there.  (right click on some unused space in Windows Explorer while pressing Shift key, select "Open command window here" ) and then do this:

 

geth.exe removedb

 

It will show you a path ending with "chaindata" , press Y to remove that (that's where the blocks are downloaded, which contain the transaction information users made)

 

After it's done, type this:

 

geth --syncmode fast --cache 2048 --nousb

 

where

--syncmode fast tells geth to download the blocks in a faster way without some extra information you don't need as a regular user

--cache 2048  tells geth how much ram it can use to cache disk reads and writes while it downloads this data and processes it. You may want to use 1024 or a value lower than 2048, with 2048 geth will actually use up to 7-8 GB of memory at some moments! (I have 16 GB but if you have only 8GB or less, use less memory)

--nousb tells geth to not search your usb ports for hardware wallets like ledger nano s, trezor etc ... if you have one of these don't use this parameter

 

Now leave the window open and let geth download all that's required , in total there's around 4.850.000 blocks, you'll see as it downloads it will constantly show you at which block it's at.

 

You can open Ethereum Wallet while geth runs in background and you will see Ethereum Wallet will also show exactly what geth shows you in the command window (what block it's downloading, how many blocks are in total etc).

 

There's also a "light mode" which can be used to connect to the Ethereum network, where geth doesn't need to download 40-60 GB of data to connect, and only needs to download around 1 GB and then only 50-100 MB per month or something like that.

You can enable this mode from mist / Ethereum wallet from the menu  Develop  > Sync with Light client (beta)  but note that it's beta and there's very few nodes online making it harder to sync so again, you may see your total amount as 0 until you're synchronized.

So it's best to just suck it up for the moment and let it use gigabytes of data until the next version of geth and ethereum wallet is released, when maybe the "light mode" will come out of beta.

 

// also be careful, Ethereum wallet also has a sort of bug ... if you're not connected to any peers (which can happen especially if you use the light mode where there's fewer nodes online), the software will use some default values when it calculates transaction fees. 

For example, the default will be something like 0.5 ETH for a transaction, when in reality the cost is something like less 0.0003 ETH for a transaction smaller than around 2-300$ worth of ETH.

Again, mist / Ethereum wallet needs to sync with the network (catch up with the latest blocks made) and be connected to peers in order to estimate how much should you pay for transaction in order to have your transaction processed in a reasonable amount of time so just let it catch up and those values will be corrected

 

 

 

 

wow, thanks. you know so much about this I'm glad you saw my post and replied  

[mariushm]

@Pachuca

 

@knightslugger

 

In the Ethereum Wallet menu, you have File > Backup > Accounts

 

It should open the folder where you have the wallets, a folder called keystore.  Each file there is a wallet, file name starts with the time and at the end of the file name is your wallet address.

 

On my computer with Windows 7, the folder is  C:\ Users \ [ username ] \ AppData \ Roaming \ Ethereum \ keystore

 

In the same menu you have "Import" but you could probably just copy the files in that keystore folder and restart Ethereum Wallet and it should work (didn't try it though)

 

Note that you'll still have to remember the passwords for these, or Ethereum Wallet won't be able to use them.

And note that you probably can't import key files created by other wallet programs which use a series of words as "recovery code"

[knightslugger]

@mariushm are we talking about Mist Wallet, or Ethereum Wallet?

[mariushm]

Ethereum Wallet - sorry i know it's confusing, because it's downloaded from the same place you get mist and there's mist in the address

 https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases

 

[Pachuca]

7 minutes ago, knightslugger said:

@mariushm are we talking about Mist Wallet, or Ethereum Wallet?

ethereum wallet