What Happened to My Bitcoin Funds?

I discovered an old wallet from 7 years ago on Bitcoin Core. Threw in $40, now it’s worth over £136. I found the root key I used to recover it, downloaded the whole blockchain, but it shows a 0 balance. I pulled the BIP39 into Electrum, still 0 balance, but I saw some movement of funds after I set up the wallet. They’re in another wallet now, so not stolen. What gives?

That sounds kinda weird. You can't really extract a BIP39 seed from Bitcoin Core. If it was a BIP39 wallet, you could've used Electrum to get the private key from a specific address, then import it back to Core. Or use an extended key from Core to get an HD wallet into Electrum. But that’s not BIP39... Do you have a 12-word seed phrase? Is it really BIP39?

Root key? What do you mean? As far as I know, only Armory uses "root key" for backups. Are you talking about a series of meaningful words? If yes, you should know that Bitcoin Core doesn’t support seed phrases.

Yeah, I was thinking the same. From what I keep on record...

Hey, I mean the root key, like efkj abhr xxxx xxxx xxxx (changed digits). It's 18 blocks of those 4 digits. I needed it to get into my Armory wallet. I exported the keys to get the PrivBase58 address for Electrum and Blue Wallet. Shows a transfer I never made. So, could funds have slipped into another wallet by mistake? It hasn’t moved since 2018, so it wasn’t stolen. What can I do?

Have you checked if the address is in Armory? If you find your address, grab the key in front of "PrivBase58" and import that into Electrum. If it’s not showing, try checking "Include unused (Address Pool)." Armory might not recognize an address if it’s not synced.

Totally. I’d assume Armory’s root key should restore all addresses ever used. What’s the address you have in your wallet? Is it 1A56jABzc62Nchh7JSkU9zW9H2BDXHvmiG or 1Cvoe4whXCKB7hL9KJEZHvT22Hdiitz26H?

Armory can't know what addresses have funds unless it’s synced. If the OP’s wallet isn’t synced, they might have an unused address that Armory doesn’t know about. Check "Include unused (Address Pool)" when exporting the private keys.

According to Armory, my receiving address is 1SvoeQUWoEEgyiPmTmj8eXjWTWzfzXNtX. But doesn't "unused wallet" mean it’s empty? I found an Electrum seed phrase from 7 years ago, but it showed 0 balance again. I don’t remember if it was the PrivBase58 or seed phrase that showed that. Would a 2018 seed still work on a 2024 Electrum download? I didn’t send the funds anywhere, it’s not a fortune but would be nice to access.

Just so you know, Electrum keeps backwards compatibility with seed versions. An old seed from 2011 will work on the latest version, so yes, your 2018 seed phrase should work fine on Electrum 4.5.8.

I finally accessed my funds through Electrum using a seed on a flash drive. But now I’m getting warnings about high gas fees when I try to move my funds. Like, 40% or something insane. Is that normal? Can I lower it?

As I write this, transaction fees are around 3 sat/vbyte. You shouldn’t have to pay crazy high fees for transactions unless you have a bunch of UTXOs in your wallet. Did you receive your funds in multiple transactions? More inputs mean higher fees. What fee rate were you setting for your transaction?

Did you change the default amount from mBTC to BTC? If you're sending in "mBTC" but thought it was in "BTC", you might be sending way less than you intended. For example, if you meant to send 0.01 BTC but typed that in mBTC, you’d only be sending 0.00001 BTC. A small fee of 400 sats could be 40% of that.

Just to clarify, there's no "gas" in Bitcoin. Makes it sound like you’re dealing with a centralized shitcoin. It's all about transaction fees here. If you have a bunch of small inputs, check my post on consolidating small inputs. Right now, around 1.8 sat/vbyte should get you confirmed.