Balance in bitcoin-qt suddenly significantly diminished after a small transaction? I had my wallet stored on a storage provider for a while, and recently got a new computer and installed bitcoin-qt and imported my wallet.
It said I had about 2 BTC and showed INGOING transactions from 2013, which I had not touched since.
I recently then transferred 0.33 BTC to another recipient, and then immediately the bitcoin balance dropped to 0.07 BTC.
I have no recollection if I have used my wallet on other computers in the time between 2013 and now, but I thought the blockchain had a perfect copy of all transactions from my wallet.
Any idea what could have happend? Can I have spend bitcoin on my wallet on another computer in say, 2015, that never got relayed to my wallet stored on cloud storage? Are the transactions stored in the wallet.dat and not on the blockchain only?
Sorry, I am confused.
The balance that you see is the confirmed balance. This is the sum of the unspent transaction outputs controlled by your wallet that are in transactions that have been confirmed. The confirmed balance can temporarily decrease more than the amount that you actually want to send due to change outputs. However once the transactions confirm, it should be what you expect it to be.
When you make a Bitcoin transaction, it has to spend transaction outputs that were created previously. Because an output can only be spent in full, the transactions that your wallet makes typically create another output called a change output. This is a transaction output that your wallet can spend; it is sending the change back to itself.
When this happens, because the change output is a new output in an unconfirmed transaction, the value in that change output no longer counts towards the confirmed balance. It counts as part of the unconfirmed balance which is shown in the GUI as the Pending Balance. Once the transaction confirms, it will be counted as the confirmed balance.