Unconfirmed transaction for 2 days despite network fees, rescans and redownload I made a transaction 2 days ago, (using BitcoinQT 0.8.1-beta on MacOS X) that didn't propagate. I can't find the transaction on blockexplorer or blockchain.info (or anywhere else for that matter) yet. The transaction just sits there in the client, unconfirmed and gobbled up my Bitcoins. The transfer required me to pay a tx fee that I gladly paid.

Status: 0/unconfirmed
Date: 06.04.13 22:01
To: Satoshi Dice 78% 1dicec9k7KpmQaA8Uc8aCCxfWnwEWzpXE
Debit: -0.40 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.0005 BTC
Net amount: -0.4005 BTC
Transaction ID: 10cfa399f5c0a3c6a36e9678ae7c87af95f38899cfe21c7bd76caebd11a2919b


What I did thus far


I let the client sit on the network for a couple of hours, hoping for it to re-send the transaction.
I found this debug thread that suggested to use -rescan, which I did to no avail. 
Then I backed up and deleted all data except the wallet to redownload the blockchain - which also failed to change anything.
I used the gui console to do a lookup and resend of the transaction using getrawtransaction / sendrawtransaction that resulted in the error below


Error:

getrawtransaction 10cfa399f5c0a3c6a36e9678ae7c87af95f38899cfe21c7bd76caebd11a2919b 1
No information available about transaction (code -5)

sendrawtransaction 10cfa399f5c0a3c6a36e9678ae7c87af95f38899cfe21c7bd76caebd11a2919b
TX decode failed (code -22)


Now I am wondering what went wrong and what steps to take next.

I am aware that similar questions have been posted before, but I think this instance is different because I feel I already exhausted the debug instructions provided in the debug thread. I apologize if I missed anything.
There's a sort of hatred against satoshi dice lately.  The feeling is that satoshi dice clogs up the transaction record with lots of small transactions.  Some of the bigger mining pools have started to refuse the transactions.

Rescan and your other steps should have fixed everything, though.

Without including the sending address in your question, it's difficult to track the bitcoins.  My only thought is that you can try to re-spend the coins on yourself and maybe they'll return.  The easiest way to do this might be to extract the public and private key of the address that sent the coins and put those in a wallet in blockchain.info .  

To do this, go to the console of your bitcoin client and type

walletpassphrase &lt;your password&gt; 20
dumpprivkey &lt;the address that sent the coins&gt;
walletlock


Open a new wallet at blockchain.info and use the Import/Export function to import that private key.  blockchain.info will show your new balance.

That private key is your coins.  Don't tell it to anyone.  The address, however, isn't a big secret.