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Upon discovering the meteoric rise in value for Bitcoin Cash, I decided to actually claim the little Bitcoin Cash that I had from after the August 1st 2017 fork. I had sold most of my crypto holdings awhile ago but retained about 17 mBTC. My last valid transaction was a Send of 0.4 BTC to my Coinbase on July 15th which was prefork and left me with the remaining 17 mBTC balance.

I am using Bitcoin Core on a Windows 7 machine with a password protected wallet that is kept in a KeePass database that is protected with a private key I keep on a USB thumb drive. I decided to install Electron Cash and the install asked if I wanted to import private keys from a Bitcoin wallet. I decided to do this and got the private keys from the Debug Console in Bitcoin Core for all of my receiving addresses.

I can see the correct amount of transactions in the History tab in Electron Cash after importing my private keys, however the amounts are wrong and the dates seem slightly off. What is most concerning is that the final transaction shows my balance being sent out but the transaction id on Blockchair doesn't seem to match up with what I am seeing in my wallet. Electron Cash wallet shows my balance as 0 which is incorrect.

BTW, I verified the ElectronCash 3.0 executable against the sig and checksum and my download is legit.

I am incredibly confused and wondering if I did something wrong on the import or if my money was pilfered. Could this be a bug in ElectronCash 3.0? Should I try a different wallet?

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  • Where did you get your download from? electroncash.org ? There seems to be quite an issue with illegit sites. And they will provide their matching signatures and checksums of course.
    – hitchhiker
    Dec 20, 2017 at 20:25

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I figured out what was going on... sort of. At the very least I found where my Bitcoin Cash was and was able to sweep it into another wallet.

It is probably that I fundamentally misunderstood how Bitcoin Core works. I started investigating all of my Send transactions and Receive transactions on Blockchair and found that when I was sending a payment to another address, it would grab the funds from a receive address that had sufficient funds to cover the payment. I naively assumed that the remaining balance in my receive address would stay there, however I discovered that what Bitcoin Core was doing was liquidating the remaining balance from the receive address and sending it to a new address that was also in my wallet.

When I would do tge export of Receive Addresses from Bitcoin Core it would only list addresses that I received funds to, not addresses that still contained unspent Bitcoin. This was why Electron Cash and other BCH wallets showed a zero balance when I brought in the private keys for those addresses. Sure enough when i dumped the private keys for these hidden addresses listed in Blockchair, I was finally able to get the unspent balance and sweep the funds.

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  • Yeah I had the same surprise as you. In the end, I ran dumpwallet and took all keys prior to the snapshot.
    – Felipe
    Feb 24, 2018 at 5:12

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