Convert Bitcoin-Qt wallet to Multibit

Wetseals planned to use the wallet to help sell multiple Starbucks gift cards to chatroom users of the online power site SealsWithClubs, and set up 550 separate bitcoin addresses for that purpose, he said. He then tested the wallet by sending 0.024 bitcoins to his Seals With Clubs account.

The wallet sent the output from the initial address to the Seals With Clubs bitcoin address, and then – as is normal with bitcoin – sent the ‘change’ back. That went to one of the 550 addresses in his wallet.

But when wetseals went to send bitcoins from that address, they did not send. And when he tried to export the private keys from the wallet, he said all but the change address private key exported.

Wetseals gave his wallet files to a contact on Seals With Club who works as a senior software analyst (he asked CoinDesk not to reveal his identity and job, but proved his identity).

Said the analyst, identified as ’Dave23′:

“I exported the private keys and then imported them to a new wallet, and that address was missing.”

MultiBit’s response

Wetseals accused MultiBit’s main developer Jim Burton of responding generically to the request, and not addressing the issue.

Later, Burton commented on Reddit:

“In the life of MultiBit (i.e from 2011) there’s probably a handful of cases like these. If there is damage to the private key bytes (for whatever reason) and there is no other copy available/backed up then you’ve lost access to the bitcoins.”

MultiBit uses code from the BitcoinJ project, headed by bitcoin developer Mike Hearn (there is no suggestion that there is a bug in BitcoinJ). Hearn asked wetseals to send him the files for review, but told CoinDesk that he hadn’t seen them yet.

He was skeptical that it was a bug, arguing that until he had seen the files directly, he could think of several possibilities, including incorrect manual editing.