First thing, don’t panic. You didn’t do anything wrong. All of it is pretty confusing and you’ll get a mix of answers on what you need to do to fix the issue that will further confuse matters.

The core when first downloaded is about 4 1/2 years behind on the block chain. Because of this, you’ll need it to sync with the current block chain to show your transactions. You will need to download the bootstrap to sort of kick start the process and allow it to sync. You can find the most recent bootstrap here. It’s a pretty large file, almost 20GBs so it’ll take a while to DL. You will want to put this in your %APPDATA% roaming folder. After copying to the directory, restart the core and it will begin syncing to the network.

The process of syncing is slow. It can take anywhere from five days to a week to complete depending on your computer usage and data speeds. You’ll have to be patient with it. It’ll seem like it takes forever but it will finish. If for some reason it says there is nothing to sync to, restart the core and it will reconnect.

After it finishes, it will show all of your transactions. It will automatically update the block chain every time you restart so it’s only a one time thing. Any future transactions will show up instantly if using Shapeshift once it’s confirmed on their end.

I had to figure it out myself and felt like I had messed up everything and lost about $500 in the process. Luckily I was able to look up enough to feel confident things would work and eventually they did.

Hopefully this helps out.