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I have never been able to successfully send BTC from my wallet in Bitcoin Core. I'm sure this question has been asked before, but I could not find a sufficient match to my problem, due to most problems involving the TX fees being too low, folks mixing up TX fee rates with static TX fee amount, etc.

In my case I have tried to send various amounts to various different wallets. I have not only used the recommended 2 block rate that Bitcoin Core recommends, but I have also significantly increased that rate even to 10X the amount of BTC/kB that the UI recommends. Even with extreme high rates, the transactions never get confirmed even after a few hours.

Note that I have successfully sent BTC between various other wallets (coinbase, coinme, exodus) at normal TX fee rates, including during the periods where the aforementioned high free transactions in Bitcoin Core were sitting unconfirmed. Therefore, I believe the problem is not related to transaction fees (but if you have some specific test related to fees you think I should try, I'll do it).

Additional notes: I can receive funds in the wallet without issue, and those appear correctly in Bitcoin Core along with their confirmations. The network indicator icon at the bottom of the window indicates a good connection to the Bitcoin network, with all four "arms" highlighted.

Some information about the system:

  • This is running on a Raspberry Pi 4B (2GB RAM model).
  • The OS is Raspbian 11 "Bullseye", armv7l (32 bit).
  • The version of Bitcoin Core is 24.0.1 (installed via snap).
  • The datadir is on an external SSD connected via one of the highspeed USB ports.
  • Connection to the internet is through Tor proxy (also running on the same system)

Let me know in the comments if you need any additional information or if there are some specific tests that I can try to help with troubleshooting the problem. If this is a duplicate, I apologize (please link me to the solution if it is already answered)

EDIT #1: Some additional information from the comments:

  • None of the transactions sent from the wallet ever confirm, no matter how long I wait
  • Searching for the transaction IDs on a block explorer, they are not found
  • The node has been running since around December (never off more than a couple days at a time)
  • The block index stays up to date
  • I originally was only running it as a full node to contribute to decentralizing the network, and only in the last week have I started looking at using it for the wallet features

EDIT #2: Most recent attempted transaction:

  • 98ec002df20d8a743d3c7288721b4c95941b7a51b5ef78d9b24dd1e84fd90918

  • Amount: 0.00200000 BTC

  • Tx fee (Custom): 0.00250000 BTC per kilobyte

  • Transaction fee (0.141 kB): 0.00035250 BTC

  • Total Amount: 0.00235250 BTC

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  • Do the transactions confirm eventually or are they always unconfirmed? Are you able to find the transactions in a block explorer such as mempool.space or blockstream.info? How long had your node been running before you made the transactions?
    – Andrew Chow ♦
    Feb 14 at 23:08
  • @AndrewChow Thanks for the reply! No, the transactions never confirm. If I search the transaction IDs on a block explorer, they are not found. The node has been running since around December (not continuously, but never off more than a couple days at a time), and the block index stays up to date. The latest transaction that I put on there was around 24 hours ago, and it is unconfirmed still. For all of the previous transactions, I went ahead and ran the "Abandon transaction" option (just in case having too many unconfirmed transactions in the queue might be a problem).
    – Paul Lamb
    Feb 15 at 2:32
  • Also, forgot to mention, I originally was just running it as a full node, just to help with decentralizing the network. I only recently, in the last week, have started looking at using it for the wallet features, so I wasn't aware of the problem prior to that.
    – Paul Lamb
    Feb 15 at 2:37
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    Do incoming transactions show up as unconfirmed first? It sounds like your transactions are not propagating which could be caused by having few or no connections that relay transactions. Could you also post the contents of your bitcoin.conf?
    – Andrew Chow ♦
    Feb 15 at 4:44

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I resolved the problem. Thanks @AndrewChow for reminding me in the comments about the bitcoin.conf file. I forgot that I had made some changes to that and never went back to revert them.

The problem turns out that I had set "walletbroadcast=0"

In case anyone is wondering why I had that option in there and forgot about it, I had originally fumbled around with trying to get EPS running when I first stood up the system. My goal was to enable secure transactions from my Trezor cold wallet via the Electrum Wallet application through my own Electrum server and Bitcoin full node. Disabling walletbroadcast came from the EPS readme on Github: https://github.com/chris-belcher/electrum-personal-server (according to "Pro Tip2", disabling that setting would prevent the node from rebroadcasting transactions without Tor)

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