Samourai wallet - my balance disappeared

Question

I am/was using Samourai wallet to hold bitcoin until recently when I found out that it has been seized by the US government. I restored my wallet in Sparrow where I see much less BTC than I had in Samourai. Back in 2021 I sent 0.03 BTC, but in Sparrow it shows that I actually sent 0.11065577, the remaining 0.08059097 went to a different address, see here: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/036f6a03e8cba687256fbc2633dd218296918ff80725b0fae7154e7c39fe55e9

Could some explain why 0.08059097 disappeared and not showing up in my other wallet, although I originally only sent 0.03? Can it be revoreved? Samourai was showing the amount correctly and didn't have this problem.

Answer 1

What's strange is that the output, which is supposed to represent the change, uses a different script type from the input. Have you tried recovering the wallet on Sparrow with other script types, specifically Nested-Segwit? If you haven't tried this yet, you need to restart the recovery process from scratch and select a different "Script Type" when creating the wallet.

If you have already tried this, on the wallet that derives from the Nested SegWit script type, try increasing the gap limit in the "Settings" tab.

If you're unsure how to do all this, I recommend an article I wrote on recovering a Samourai Wallet on Sparrow Wallet: https://planb.network/en/tutorials/wallet/samourai-recover

If you still have access to your Samourai wallet, do you see the change UTXO on it? If yes, you can also try sending the funds directly to an address you own on another wallet, but you will need to connect to a Dojo, as Samourai's servers are no longer operational.

Answer 2

Your link shows

Inputs

address	amount
bc1q8w6cm5ckwen4yuc79nz8lpp0hu47evj2ky7clv	0.11065577

Outputs

address	amount	deduced purpose
3GcMjPrZCv7LNShG8tnAaYa3yTE9y4gwbr	0.03000000	Payment
3CWXMX9ryvybhEec9pFpHHBfkHjy5SefRR	0.08059097	Change returned to payer
Total	0.11059097	-

The fee paid to miners was the difference between sum of inputs and sum of outputs, 0.11065577 - 0.11059097 = 0.0000648

Everything looks normal.

An anonymous comment to another answer points out that a Samouri wallet configured to generate Segwit/Bech32 addresses for receiving money will, for example, generate P2WPKH change addresses when paying a P2WPKH address. It does this so that onlookers cannot deduce the purpose of each output from its address prefix. If the second output had a bc1 prefix, its purpose would be more obvious. Matching output address types improves privacy. This has no bearing on your problem.

---

in Sparrow it shows that I actually sent 0.11065577

Sparrow doesn't recognize the change address as being under its control. This typically means it doesn't have the private key for that address.

Could some explain why 0.08059097 disappeared

That 0.08059097 is change being returned to you. Since your Samouri wallet generated the address it would know that the money is returned.

If the keys for that address were not imported into Sparrow, it would not know the second output was your money.

This suggests that either the Samouri wallet backup that was imported into Sparrow was non-HD and predated the transaction or was HD but had a very large gap between seed and change address - too many generated but unused keys. Most likely it suggests that your process for "I restored my wallet in Sparrow" was incorrect or faulty.

Either way, Sparrow lacks the key generated by Samouri for the change address. Or maybe somewhere the key is associated with a descriptor for the wrong address type.

This might be evidence to support the notion that, in aggregate, sweeping is more reliable than importing?

Can it be revoreved?

Confirmed transactions are irreversible. This is a necessary feature of Bitcoin.

You don't need to reverse it, I believe you need to copy some keys from Samouri into Sparrow that were omitted in your previous work.