sum(getaccounts) != getbalance about bitcoin

[mikegogulski]

Eek!

[gavinandresen]

Before I lose them:
http://pastebin.com/evGiRVw2
and
http://pastebin.com/wxCnw5SF
... are listaccounts and gettransactions '*' output. getbalance returns 850.05, sum(accounts) is 853.05... I'll be debugging this more tomorrow.

[mikegogulski]

txid 22c1af3bc7f21a1ee74fbe63fcc58d0433ce2c574cf042a8f9129f989ebac68d has two entries associated with it, one of which is for BTC 3, and this is the only BTC 3 transaction in what you pastebinned. Maybe a place to look.

[gavinandresen]

Thanks, mike, it looks like that is the source of the bug. There is 3BTC in "change" that is being miscounted, because the 'change' address was assigned to an account (using setaccount "", I assume).

The good news is that unless you dig out change addresses from block explorer this bug won't affect you. It still needs fixing, though...

[tcatm]

I never used setaccount so something else must have caused it.

[gavinandresen]

After looking more at this, I'm puzzled. The 3BTC transaction is definitely weird, but I don't think that is the cause-- the accounts code thinks it is a multi-send-to-self, and it doesn't affect the account's total balance (it is +400 in, -400 out).

[mikegogulski]

Wishing I had the stones for c++ anymore... still, some thoughts:

• maybe that tx isn't to blame.
• does the bitcoin wallet implement a proper semblance of a double-entry ledger? If not, that's an enhancement request. (the pastebin records sure look like one, but i'm no accountant)
• is there cause here to create an in-the-field assert which would trigger a client alert and prompt to submit tx data for fault analysis, in the event of such a disagreement?

[gavinandresen]

I asked Satoshi, and he has a very good theory and what happened:

Wallet clone "A" spends some coins.

Wallet clone "B" (this is the one I'm debugging) comes online, runs ReacceptWalletTransactions, sees the spend, and marks the previous transaction (where it got the coins) as spent. HOWEVER, it does NOT add the spend transaction to the wallet. That is the bug, it should.

[gavinandresen]

Fixed.
1d23c74
d9574c2