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I'm trying to move my bitcoins from Bitcoin Core to Electrum in order to not have to store the blockchain. My starting position is a fully synced Bitcoin Core and a newly created standard Electrum wallet (without any imports).

I'm using the debug console in Bitcoin Core to execute walletpassphrase to unlock my wallet, and dumpprivkey together with the address obtained from File > Receiving addresses...

Once Bitcoin Core spits out a private key I'm following the instructions here http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html#can-i-sweep-private-keys-from-other-bitcoin-clients and pasting into the sweep input box and leaving the default address intact.

The exact error message I receive is:

No inputs found. (Note that inputs need to be confirmed)

Am I doing something stupid here? Is this even the best migration procedure?

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  • The process looks okay. Not all receiving the addresses will necessarily have a current balance if that is what Electrum means to tell you. It is not necessarily necessary to use Sweep if your Bitcoin Core wallet addresses are not compromised (and your private keys continue to be protected in the future) then you can just use Import which will save paying transaction fees, although, if you do use sweep it is better to put all private keys in the box, one per line with enter in between, so that only one transaction is necessary. – Willtech Mar 12 '18 at 12:25
  • what version of bitcoin core are you using? can you share the address and transaction? – Adam Mar 12 '18 at 21:30
  • @willtech sweeping is better because you can easily backup your wallet by writing down the seed. – Abdussamad Mar 14 '18 at 12:02
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Your coins are likely in a change address. You could do a dumpwallet in bitcoin core and then sweep all the private keys. But this is going to be slow going in electrum and you're going to have to do it in batches. Instead I suggest extracting the addresses which have unspent outputs in them by using the listunspent command in bitcoin core and then sweeping only those addresses' private keys. You can also do this via the cli and then use standard text processing commands to extract the addresses (jq, grep). To get it via the cli run bitcoind -daemon and then use bitcoin-cli listunspent

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