So I am fairly new to the cryptocurrency world and I wanted to make a payment with bitcoin. I purchased the bitcoins through the exchange and I then downloaded Armory to send my bitcoins to my wallet. I created the wallet and sent the bitcoins. After a couple of minutes of not seeing my balance change I tried closing and opening Armory and a message would come up saying "failed to spawn the DB". So after reading through forums I found out that I my wallet was offline and I needed to download Bitcoin Core. I downloaded Bitcoin Core and for the last couple of hours it's been synchronizing and that it still needs to synch for another year and 46 weeks. I am afraid that I may have lost my bitcoins or that I fucked up. Could someone explain what is going on and if I lost my bitcoins? Thank you!
First up, they're not lost - don't worry. Keep your Armory wallet files safe - keep your password for that and the seed words (paper backup) safe too. You can check the wallet address's balance on a blockchain explorer like
blockchair.
1 year and 46 weeks to sync? Are you sure Bitcoin Core isn't saying it is a year and 46 weeks
behind? Is your internet slow?
Do you have
190GB of free disk space? You'll need it for the full download of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Don't panic if the answers to these questions aren't great, just let us know and we can provide some advice on how you should proceed.
While you're waiting, make sure you have
Armory 0.96.4