Three blocks paid 9.39 BTC to our Ledger address overnight. Ledger Live will not show them. Sparrow, pointed at the address, would not either. Open mempool.guide and there it all is. Nothing is wrong, and if you are mining this chain you will hit the same thing, so here is the picture.
The coins are in the chain, not in a wallet
A coin is a line in the chain: block 961,994 pays 3.13203659 BTC to this address. Every node running rc4 holds that line. A wallet holds keys, and keys are what let you spend the line later. The wallet is a viewer with a signing pen. The coins sit where the block put them, whether or not anything of yours can see them.
Why the viewers are blind
A wallet learns about your coins by asking a server. Ledger Live asks Ledger’s servers, which follow the chain that kept SHA-256d. From where they stand, block 961,994 does not exist. Sparrow and Electrum ask an Electrum server, and today’s Electrum servers cannot follow this chain: a BLAKE2b block header is 164 bytes, the protocol carries 80, and the client checks the proof-of-work itself. That is also why the Electrum server on our own Umbrel stopped answering the day the node moved to rc4.
Mining does not go through any of that. The box talks to DATUM, DATUM talks to Knots, and the three blocks arrived while our Electrum server was down.
What can see them today
- A block explorer running rc4, such as mempool.guide. This is our record.
- Your own rc4 node, if you enable its wallet and give it the address to watch. Ours runs without a wallet, so we read the explorer.
What is being built
Paul Lamb’s patched electrs and Sparrow carry the longer header and followed testnet4; nothing you can install yet. Chris Guida points to a Sparrow fork by @kwsantiago “that seems to be working.” Someone in the Knots Discord reports fulcrum syncing against rc4 unmodified; we have not tried it. When one of these is installable, we will run it and write it up.
What to do meanwhile
Nothing. The coins do not need you until you spend them, and a coinbase output cannot move for 100 blocks anyway. Keep the seed backed up and check the address on an rc4 explorer when you want the balance. If the rehearsal resets, the lines vanish and none of this applies. If the final ships clean on 1 September, they stay.