Thank you for the previous help. So here is the issue now with a bit of a timeline. Of note, this all took place within Bitcoin Core QT
1/1/2021 -
- My husband opened the wallet and it had all the BTC in it. Some of the BTC was what he mined years ago and some of it was given to him as a promotion for signing up with the software at the time. This is important in that they were at different addresses within the wallet.
- He put a password on the wallet and made copies. He sent the password to me and took pictures of it.
- He then sent a couple dollars worth of BTC to a friend to test the wallet.
- When he sent the test it came out of the address that had the smaller amount of BTC. (The larger amount he had mined was still at the other address.) When he sent the test there was change created/sent back to a new address within the wallet.
1/7/2021 -
- My husband sends one more small test to an Exodus wallet we own. In order to send this he would have had to have entered the password created on 1/1/2021.
- Change is given since he did not send the entire amount of bitcoin in the wallet. It goes to a new address within the wallet. This is where we freaked out thinking that we had been hacked as the entire amount of BTC was suddenly shown as being transferred out of the wallet. However, according to @achow101 we simply received the change back from the transaction. Now came trying to access that information
- The password that had been previously set on the wallet no longer worked for the larger amount received as change on 1/7.
1/9/2021 -
- We opened the wallet back up and were able to access the original small amount from 1/1 that had been received back as change. We were able to use the password that had been created on 1/1/2021
- We were unable to use the password created on 1/1/2021 to access the larger amount that had been received back as change on 1/7. We have tried multiple combinations of passwords since. My husband does not recall changing the password. If he had, he would have written it down, taken a picture or something. We have done the Python method, but since the password isn't working we can't access the private keys.
Any further advice on what might have happened? Is it possible that the older version of our wallet being used in Bitcoin Core QT created its own encryption when the change was received to the new address?
An additional issue we are having is that when we try to send the smaller amount to an Exodus wallet so that we can get it out of Bitcoin Core QT we get the following errors:
"Can't generate a change address key. No keys in the internal keypool and can't generate any keys.