Topic: Early Bitcoin Wallet - Help Needed - Advice Appreciated (Read 1355 times)

This guy. Loooool. 👆

Oh no my timeline is out. 😂

Just got back from holiday. No further comment.

I take it none of those brainwallet sites etc worked for ya did they ?  of course fucking not.  Why would something created in 2012 work for something ONLY YOU reckon you used back in 2010 ? LOL !!

Cant believe it has to be stated again, You cant create a btc address from pgp keys ffs.   You never created a btc wallet in 2010 with 8 words and password.  NO, no you didnt. No one did.  That came out in 2012ish. WTF are you on about hash now again, the btc protocol always used sha256, has nothing to do with anything. Stop confusing pgp keys and btc keys.

This "timeline" from you is important to work out what you think you did.   You crap on about btc pizza which happened in 2010 and wasnt mentioned in Australia till 2013, you crap on about using darknet markets from 2011 and 2013 and yet, cant even tell us what wallet you used for this or how, but you think a wallet from 2010 is yours ? 

And no, there is no hidden info/deleted info etc about this LOLOL ffs.  You just dont remember shit properly and you are dismissing what really happened as it doesn't fit your "narrative" .  You sure you used darknet markets champ ?  If you did, sounds like they cooked your brain. 

That's exactly what a brain wallet is. It takes words, SHA256 hashes them to a private key. The brainwallet page also shows you the wallet address so you can check on https://blockchain.com/explorer to see if the address is funded.

Try this.
DO NOT USE YOUR WORDS ONLINE.

Download the web page and use it offline. See offline usage at the bottom of the file.

https://iancoleman.io/bip39/

Try all the derivation paths and enter the addresses (Only) in a blockchain explorer online
Given the age of your wallet it will start with a 1 e.g 1LqfqqrPp6pASY5kNbVseawXiEnZP8QfC9

If you find one with a balance, its yours.

Good luck

Yep. Thats how i remember it. Now I need to get from a SHA256 hash to keys, a WIF or even a 64 bit hexadecimal password but could be wrong. Just need to keep follow the logic till all the pieces of the puzzle come togeather then I can attempted my theory.

BTC has obviously gone up quite a bit in value lately & it's ain't going down in the next couple of months. Have come to the conclusion that trying to rush the process like a madman isn't going to work. Need to figure out a series of steps & trust the process.

You can change only a single bit in the input of SHA256 and the resulting hash is usually completely different from the SHA256 hash of the input before the bit flip. That's the purpose of a good one-way hash function and SHA256 is so far a pretty pretty good one.

Was listening to the new Danny Jones podcast this morning on DNA The guy he's interviewing mentions turning information into a number sequence using a SHA256 hash of infomation that can then be put on the blockchain as a "timestamp" are the 41 minute mark.

My guess is the "timestamp" is irrelevant but how you would get that SHA256 hash to the next step I personally dont know right now. Might have already been mention on this thread. Cryptojohn has already mentioned SHA256 & sent some further information. I also mentioned SHA256 in the original post but had no clue what I was talking about & still had to get my head around it.

To me this sounds like where the whole seed/passphrase concept originated (my 8 words & password) could be enough to regenerate the wallet as ive also mentioned before. I had a quick try of one of the programs that's be discussed but may have had the fields mixed up. Tried it once to see what happens then left it.

Anywhoo the guy on Danny Jones then mentions if you were to change one of the letters in the sequence (or even change one of the letters to a capital) the end result changes & that is EXACTLY how I remember it. Pretty crazy when you think about it. Have a quick listen.

Do you think you can dig up some of the stuff you're talking about from some of your storage media and/or storage devices? Like the guide you remember to have read?

This may lead you to more or other clues or to some sort of source of what was used in the past.

It could also be that there's some description in this forum. It's just buried somewhere. Clever use of search keywords can do magic... (try ninjastic.space, it's friendlier to search the forum there than with the forum's own search).

Your coins don't run away, you have all the time nature grants you.

Finally back from holiday. Took an extra few days to get back into the swing of things back here in Melbourne. Was nice to give the whole wallet thing a rest for a couple of weeks.

I've got a funny feeling there was some sort of brainwallet/paperwallet program that created the keys the way I've said numerous times. I say just keys cause I'm not 100% sure if they were PGP keys or just private/public addresses. Then keys could be loaded onto the Bitcoin Client plus you could also make a paper printed copy of the wallet once you were done.

Fairly certain whoever made the guide I was reading covered backing up the coins from every possible angle. That's using the 8 words & password (like brainwallet) it's also retaining a copy of the USB (so digital wallet) & printing out a copy of the wallet (paperwallet) Pretty crazy really that's there's very few people out there that had a similar experience.

Definitely an interesting subject. Didn't really think much about it while away but that's my conclusion. On another note tried opening the old Armoury wallet just by downloading it off the internet. Got the failed to spawn DB message & it wouldnt work online. I just laughed & gave up. Will have to watch some YouTube videos before trying again. 

Finally either I'm a whole lot dumber than I was 14 years ago or I've still got ALOT of catching up to do. 😂😂😂

What web service was this? UnionJack has mentioned having a PGP key also.

This is not a safe environment to play around with private keys. On an online device or your daily driver you basically can't assess the security status of it. Turning off the internet connection and saving files with private keys and resuming online state later doesn't make anything more secure. This is UNSAFE handling! Should there be some more or less sophisticated malware on the device, it will (potentially) exfiltrate valuable data when the online status resumes.

Don't fool yourself with such unsafe practices!

You either boot a known safe system like a Live Linux or TAILS which both run only in RAM and won't store anything persistantly unless you do it intentionally e.g. on some USB thumbdrive, or you setup a clean spare offline computer which stays offline and which you treat like a cold wallet. The goal is to have safe control that potentially valuable private keys can't be leaked unintentionally.

Too many people have not much clue of computer security and especially safe practices in the context of crypto coin space.

I have a very similar story to yours, the fact is that they were testing mnemonics in early May of 2010, I logged into a web service then to be greeted with a mnemonic string.

I do differ in that this wasn't the only thing I was given as mine involves PGP..

Even with massive help, we are left trawling archives for lost concepts and code which has certainly been intentionally removed or lost, changes in op-code structure prevents recovery and the key players won't help or respond, they make out that you have likely been taken for a ride, which on study of our files cannot be the case.

Perhaps we can share findings privately? we relate to theUNIONJACK, we might not be that far away.

To check if your words are a brainwallet.

Load this page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20131031041506/http://brainwallet.org/

turn off internet.

type words,

copy words and address into text file.

repeat for whatever you think should be the right combination (8 words, 8 words plus password, etc)

save text file.

restart computer.

load text file,

check addresses at https://www.blockchain.com/explorer

If you find the address with the bitcoin.

You can start at step 1 to enter the words to get the private key.

copy private key.

You can import the private key into a bitcoin wallet  (like electrum, available from https://electrum.org) to access your bitcoin.

if you don't find any bitcoin, it's probably not a brainwallet.

I wrote him the same thing a long time ago.
There could be a program or a web page that first asks you to enter a list of words to remember.
Then a separate field for entering a password.

Individual fields could be there to make it easier for the user to understand or better remember the information.
But the logic of the code could be simple: seed = SHA256(words+password)

I was about to propose a brainwallet of those 8 words and the 13+ symbols password as BIP38 encryption of the private key, but unfortunately the BIP38 part doesn't fit into the timeline setting as BIP38 was proposed somewhere in November 2012 and thus too far into the future with respect to Bitcoin's pizza day inception.

But the brainwallet could also have been generated from a concatenation of the 8 words and the 13+ symbols password, which makes a lot of sense to increase entropy with the added password.

I did only a very brief search when brainwallets were invented. I'm not sure if there's a particularly specific period of their inception. Probably many people had the idea to just hash "something" with SHA-256 to get a private key where you'd only had to check it falls within the bounds of valid private keys (being out-of-bounds is very ... very unlikely). And some if not many might not have made a fuzz about their brainwallet idea.

If brainwallets were "a thing" in the time period you set, I can't say for sure. I'll leave my brain farts at this...  

You know what a brainwallet is? Taking the famous XKCD password strength sketch "correct horse battery staple" the corresponding brainwallet private key is SHA-256("correct horse battery staple") yielding uncompressed private key 5KJvsngHeMpm884wtkJNzQGaCErckhHJBGFsvd3VyK5qMZXj3hS with public address 1JwSSubhmg6iPtRjtyqhUYYH7bZg3Lfy1T or compressed private key L3p8oAcQTtuokSCRHQ7i4MhjWc9zornvpJLfmg62sYpLRJF9woSu with public address 1C7zdTfnkzmr13HfA2vNm5SJYRK6nEKyq8.

Needless to say, don't use above example "brainwallet". Some stupid lost 10.8BTC as the biggest chunk of coins sent to the uncompressed address, total losses of this uncompressed "brainwallet" as of now: 15.94702373BTC. It's even worse for the compressed address: biggest lost chunk was 21.3861BTC, total stolen amount is 21.88971469BTC.
I assume any sent coins were stolen by stealing bots.

Never ever use publicly known stuff for brainwallets!

If you want to play a bit with brainwallets, download and verify the page code of bitaddress.org. If you play with your words and password, do this only on a disposable offline instance of a live Linux or Tails in offline mode.

8 words & a 13+ character password to generate a wallet in 2010 all within 2 weeks to 6 months max of the pizza article showing up on the Heraldsun website. $200 AUD transaction at anywhere from 0.03c to 0.09c USD per BTC.

Show me how to regenerate the same wallet & as soon as I access it I'll transfer you a couple of million dollars worth of BTC quicker than you can blink plus pay the tax component the "shit" useless goverment in your country wants on the capital gains or tax on the "gift" so you can clear that money straight into your account down to the very last cent. After that we can celebrate together if you want anywhere you want at my expense.

That is the crux of the situation & right now ive got nothing else to work with. It's doable as far as I know...how beats me. Could be nice & simple or it could take a lot of trial & error. Look at it this way...everyway possible is worth a shot.

I don't need the cash right now to be honest & probably never will. Pretty happy with my current situation. Money is not what this is about. Its a little niggle/riddle i've have in the back of my mind that's been bugging me for ⅓ of my life. I just would like to give it a go to try & solve it. Still got 10 - 20+ years worst case scenario to figure it out. One thing i will say is if I do look like kicking the bucket I'll post the 8 words & password on this forum before I go in hope that someone one day gets those coins.

Not much else to say right now other than if you are ever at the Goldcoast with a pocket full of cash Little Truffle Dining & Bar is a great place to start for a nice dinner.  

I do appreciate your reply. Just got off on the wrong foot my friend & i apologise for the confusion. Would have been nice & easy to find the Scandisk USB with the keys & the given words but it didn't happen. If it did i probably wouldn't be on here telling my story. I'd have much better things to do with my time.

IIRC, BIP32 (hierarchical deterministic key derivation) has been introduced somewhere in 2012 and BIP39 (representation of wallet entropy by mnemonic recovery words and a specific scheme to derive the master extended private key for further BIP32 derivation) was proposed somewhere in 2013.

Armory wallet introduced a different way to provide a deterministic wallet and likely was earlier than BIP32 and BIP39, but I don't know exactly when Armory showed up with their deterministic approach. You might find such details in this forum's Armory board.

I have some doubts that this happened how you recall it, simply based on the timeline of wallet technological progress.

It's already problematic when you can't recall or have no documentation of what kind of wallet you used. Was it an online wallet or was it some locally installed software wallet?

I'm not sure if e.g. the online wallet of blockchain.com was one of the first to provide recovery details in some form of words or so. Very doubtful to have happened already in 2010.

Some guy, user Tyke, compiled a book and timeline of Bitcoin's history:
The Bitcoin History Book 2008-2024 [Paperback/Hardcover/eBook]
See if you find some timeline clues there.


Do you have these details available to you? (I'm not asking to disclose them to the public here, of course.)

For 2010 I can't quite believe this to have actually happened as you say. There were no offline or online wallets that used normal words to represent a wallet or being able to recover one from those words in 2010, IIRC.


I understand your frustration, but it's your duty to gather the pieces and details and present them in a concise manner. That's what I criticized when I wrote it's a mess here how you present your case. Think about it, why should those with some knowledge do the hard work for you to sort the details, to find clues, omit your distracting personal details when those have nothing to do with your case.

It's OK to annouce that you won't be able to respond for a certain time, if that's the case. Your other personal stuff is irrelevant and off-topic here. It's just noise and may distract readers and put them off to to deal with your case.


Do you have any documentation or notes about this purchase? On which website did it happen? Anything that could provide clues how and where you might've received the purchased coins? You must've transfered fiat money for the trade. There weren't too many exchanges in 2010 to buy coins. (Don't remember when something like localbitcoins was a thing.)

I'm far from being a role model for proper documentation, but I still know how and to which pool I mined my first bitcoins back in 2011. I still have the wallet files and the software used. I know what I did with my coins from the beginning of my Bitcoin journey in 2011 until today.

And because I had to recover my wallet from a dying harddrive, I learned a lot in this process which I simply didn't see and know about wallets and how Bitcoin works in particular. I just used the Bitcoin node and wallet client software in 2011 and was far from any decent understanding back then.


My suggestion for any progress here from other knowledgable forum members:

• gather all bits'n'pieces and details you have, you might need to search more in what you have on storage media and whatnot else
• sort your "shit" in a presentable manner, that's your duty, not ours
• try hard to classify what can safely be made public and what you shouldn't disclose to avoid someone else stealing your coins (helpful newbies here aren't trustworthy by default; it's your choice whom you want to trust)
• human memory is a tricky thing, it's not uncommon to associate things from different times to one narrow timeline when memory is fuzzy and due to years past and no specific need to recall details precisely (also due to lack of technical understanding, no offense)

Im pretty sure the next thing you should focus on is to get the harddrive of the PC (the one running the operating system) secured into a forensic image, and then examine the image with tools able to parse the information below.

For a given timeframe in 2010, i would spend some time looking into:

- eventlogs
- browser history
- searches
- applications installed
- files opened etc.

As you dig into it, some pieces of the puzzle may start to appear, and use this information to move further on with the examination.

So that said could I have been givem 12 random words to open wallet in 2010 whether it be encryption related or forgetting password related?

Pretty sure I was given the words after creating the wallet plus saved them to a notepad file & was there in 2010. Does that make me a historian. 🤔

I actually can't believe how difficult it is get anywhere with this. Seem to be spending alot of time on the semantics rather than taking the key information & trying to do something with it.

Might aswell ask again cause haven't really seen a decent response yet...

Do you know if there was a way to build keys using 8 words & a password... I've founds ways to do it but nothing has generated a pre-existing old wallet yet.

After that once keys are built are you able to tell me why they can't be used to regenerate the wallet...

I'm no original Bitcoin client software historian, but I highly doubt what you say here and such false claims don't help this topic. Prove me wrong with some descriptive source links of your claim!

Let's level the discussion ground. When we speak of Bitcoin Core, we mean the original Bitcoin node client software, develeoped by Satoshi Nakamoto and further developed and evolved from there by other Bitcoin Core devs. This is what we call Bitcoin Core today, in early years it wasn't called Bitcoin Core yet.

To my knowledge the early Bitcoin client software didn't have encryption to secure a wallet, wallet and private key encryption came later. A wallet encryption passphrase could be anything, words or a continuous string of "symbols". Symbols meaning anything you can type in.

Private keys in old legacy wallets were random not deterministic. The concept of an HD wallet which derives its private keys deterministically from a random hdseed key also came later. The original Bitcoin client software never uses mnemonic recovery words until today. You always had to backup the wallet file or jump through some hoops to save and restore the hdseed key of an HD wallet to recreate it without a backup wallet.dat file.

We probably need to define what legacy is specifically if it's important for the ongoing discussion. For me a legacy Bitcoin Core wallet is a pre-HD wallet, i.e. a wallet with a non-deterministic keystore full of unrelated random private keys.

Mate you try remembering what happened 14 years ago using 8 words & a password to make keys then optop of that exactly what you did to make your first ever transaction.

I've already explained its even harder to remember when the first 4 years are all mixed together after the use of darknet markets. Think you'll find most people have trouble remembering finer details after a few years pass let alone over a decade. Obviously haven't read the whole thread & just jumped in too throw in your 2 cents. We don't have 2 cent pieces over here anymore you know why... Cause they are useless.

Riddle me this...why would anyone bother posting "a hoax" like this just for the sake of it cause i'd love to hear your response.

I'm on here asking for help to solve a mystery. You know problem solving. Have you ever played a game of Cluedo before cause its similar to that or are you just missing the clue component altogeather. Could have been as simple as a paper wallet back then but also could have been a very early Bitcoin Client wallet.

Real old Bitcoin Core legacy wallets had a 12 word encryption phrase to temporarily unlock the wallet. Not a recovery phrase so for those of you still stuck on that particular topic now we can move on.

Give me a break. Unbelievable.

GPG keys were never imported into the Bitcoin client. It's never worked like this
In 2010, and for some years later, GPG developers refused to support Bitcoin key pairs. Specifically, the EC curve used in Bitcoin (secp256k1) was not implemented in GPG, and the GPG developer forum discussed adding it, and chose not to

For whatever reason, you've invented this very specific technical detail, but got it so wrong that your entire post is an obvious hoax

It's not that I don't believe you, its just that in 2010 about the only way to generate a bitcoin address was with the bitcoin client software.
8 words and passwords weren't really a thing as far as I can tell.  bitaddress.org, brainwallet, paperwallets websites, online wallets etc weren't online in 2010.

About the only thing online back in 2010 was New Liberty Standard, MtGox, Bitcoinmarket and the other sites mentioned in this thread https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/which-method-do-you-use-to-buy-bitcoin-for-cash-1800

You can use the wayback machine on archive.org to see what these sites looked like in 2010, to see if any if them jog your memory.
eg: New Liberty Standard   https://web.archive.org/web/20100528074505/http://newlibertystandard.wetpaint.com/

Bitcoinmarket mentioned in this article with screen shots: https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/ronan-manly/dawn-of-bitcoin-price-discovery-2009-2011-the-very-early-bitcoin-exchanges/

I could be possible that whatever site you bought the bitcoin on sent you a pgp encrypted wallet file. I read that somewhere, but I have no experience in how any of these sites worked except for MtGox.

Anyway have a nice holiday.

P.S. also have a read of this: https://cryptoassetrecovery.com/posts/how-can-i-figure-out-where-i-created-my-bitcoin-wallet

I just don't get why it's so hard to believe that I didn't buy the coins in 2010...pretty comical really. Don't actually know what else to say about that particular topic so not even going to bother trying to justify it anymore.

Tried searching on Duckduckgo using the custom date range & couldn't find the story either. For content on the website I'm sure they would have been drawing their articles from other sources & just like you said doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Everything else is relevant & will definitely check it out. Super interesting that PGP keys are mentioned. Think you can rule something out then boom new information pops up then round & round in circles we go again. That bitaddress I've seen pop up a couple of times aswell but haven't checked it out just yet.

On a side note this has been doing my noodle for far too long. Going away to the Goldcoast for 10 days early next week & don't plan on thinking about wallets for the entire trip. Even going to give the one in my back pocket to the misses & say you deal with it I don't even want to see it.

Still toasted after the Coldplay concert last night aswell. Need a break. 😞

There were sites around back in 2010 that allowed you to by bitcoins eg, New Liberty Standard, Bitcoin Market, MtGox
Some discussed here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/which-method-do-you-use-to-buy-bitcoin-for-cash-1800

You would have needed a bitcoin address for them to transfer the bitcoins to.

Usually you would download the bitcoin client software and use that to generate an address that the coins could be transferred to.

Otherwise there were online address generators such as bitaddress that allowed you to make wallet addresses and print out paper wallets. They mention a PGP public key.

Here's the earliest version i can find in archive.org that works.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130420072538/https://www.bitaddress.org/bitaddress.org-v2.4-SHA1-1d5951f6a04dd5a287ac925da4e626870ee58d60.html

That way you could have a bitcoin address without ever having downloaded the bitcoin client.

They have a brain wallet generator, but that wasn't added until 2012 so unless the herald didn't report on the pizza buying incident until later maybe your dates are off? Memory can sometime be inaccurate. Earliest article I can find on the heralds website is from 2013, but of course that doesn't mean they didn't report about it earlier, just that it's no longer findable on their website. https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/bitcoin-fervour-goes-viral/news-story/ea5cfc758513db09169163ea94067cab

Otherwise there were online wallet services like blockchain.info (now blockchain.com), MyBitcoin https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MyBitcoin , Instawallet https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Instawallet etc

Do you have access to the email accounts you were using back then?
Searching them might find some clues as to what sites you might have used.

That's definitely plausible. Been on that track for the last couple of days & have alredy seen that same page. Just not so sure its going to be that simple. Been trying to figure out what algorithms were used in 2010. Ive always thought it was Base58. Not sure what that program uses in that archive. Orginially I thought the 8 words were "salt" or to "hash" the password which to me seems slightly different for same end results rather than password just being a 9th word tacked on the end.

Maybe you used the 9 words (your 8 words and the password) to make a brainwallet?  

https://web.archive.org/web/20120514114100/http://brainwallet.org/

Well it made the Heraldsun website which I was paying for at the time while using Supercoach for the AFL.

Haven't used computers since 2012ish. No need got a phone. Pretty certain there were torrents floating around re. Bitcoin plus the White Paper so not out of the question for anyone to take interest.

Had all the time in the world back then to read whatever I liked ie.certain handbooks & whatever else looked interesting plus had two computer joints within 30 meters of where I worked. If I need something just walk into to either one & say yo what up can you help me with basically whatever.

Got two computers now cause I can & thats what I want. Alienware 15 R3 has been annoying me due to its weight. Asus ROG Strix is on sale at JB so thought bout time to start rocking a new computer. Pretty fresh aswell I might add. Now one for offine & one for offline. If there were ever a scenario where this was ever needed its pretty safe to say I've got it sorted & that makes me a happy little Vegemite.

Could not give a fat rats in relation to the Armoury wallet but cheers for that. Might leave that another 14 years to bother opening cause thats got nothing to do much other than it was found. Also counted the 8 words using my fingers before typing them in so mate it happened exactly how I've described it. Also used some site that tested the strength of the password. All done by following a dummies guide. Knew at the time it was big joke & crazy to buy but didn't phase me one bit. Finally why mine when you can just buy for $200 & be done with it.

Pretty funny stuff when you think about it & you have been very helpful by the way. 😂

All that said do you know if there was a way to build keys using 8 words & a password... After that once keys are built are you able to tell me why they can't be used to regenerate the wallet...

Check this out IT guy. Think it proves you can generate keys with 8 words as passphrase &:password as salt. I had it back the front....

https://brainwallet.io/

Yeah I am with this guy, you have confused your self a bit with fairly basic stuff and terminology.  You also post anecdotes that aren't needed and prove nothing other than to I feel convince yourself.  You mention things that you have either heard someone else say from their experience or read from somewhere and have taken it as your own experience.  

No one cares what you remember or know about events, we were all there too and doesn't solve your problem.  I myself was mining BTC with GPUs, so thats 2010. BTC started in 2009 and I heard about it from an unlikely source, but I was working in IT at the time with some computer scientists and they told me about it.   The tech hasnt changed THAT much.  

It beggars belief someone with who lacks basic fundamentals and knowledge about computers in general and btc would even be looking at BTC back then as this site was the only one around and it was created by satoshi himself and he has posted here, but you claim you bought it after "hearing" about the btc pizza guy which was in May of 2010 and it didnt make the main stream media news, it was just news on this site at first when it happened as the exchange/convo and agreement happened on here. People were sending btc for fun all over the place on here and selling it which came a little later on. Lots of people selling BTC on here if you look, like some people were asking for 20 bucks for 1000 btc around the same time etc and no one bought it.  

MT Gox came online in March 2010, Silkroad was 2011 and Agora was 2013.   So your telling us, you bought btc in 2010 after the btc pizza incident, transferred it and then never touched it again ? but then you claim to have used silkroad and agora etc later on, so what did you use then ? Cant have been the original account since you cant access it and coins never moved since buying.  

Install armory already and try and import your screen shot, its all you can do. You didnt need a new computer to do that, its a 24mb download.   If you created this paper wallet on a website, its the same as using the qt client, its just quicker and you get access to both the keys for that account without needing to download anything else. Most people downloaded the client and ran the node, and still do which keeps the keys in their wallet.dat file.  Paper wallets are created basically the same way as every other account, there is nothing mysterious about it.  There were no seed or mnemonic words until 2013.  Seed words, mnemonics, secret words are all the same thing. It what was used to recreate the account from the blockchain. Basically the words are the human readable version of a sequence of random words that stores the data required to access or recover cryptocurrency on blockchains or crypto wallets.   I feel your are not going to be able to rebuild the wallet with random words that arent a part of any recognized word list, as they are very specific words and not random made up words on the spot and nor could you choose which ones you wanted, never ever worked this way.  

Anyway good luck.

Coins "live" and move only on the blockchain, never anywhere else. The purpose of any wallet software or hardware is to hold and manage public (watch-only) and/or private keys, with latter to sign transactions, so that you're able to move coins for which you've appropriate private keys. Additionally a wallet shows you the balance of all coins your private/public keys control. Very loosely summarized...

If you want to entertain yourself with learning some Bitcoin knowledge, feel free to hop over to https://learnmeabitcoin.com, great site to scratch the basics or deep dive to serious technical stuff and more!

The Blockchain.info was first announced on Aug 30, 2011:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/blockchaininfo-bitcoin-block-explorer-currency-statistics-40264

However, Blockchain.info was initially founded as a block explorer and blockchain analytics website.
The Blockchain wallet was launched in Beta on Dec 1, 2011:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/blockchaininfo-bitcoin-block-explorer-currency-statistics-40264.msg636996#msg636996

Quick search suggests Blockchain.info was founded in 2011. Not sure of the exact date or month but I do know Silkroad was first seen in February 2011. Both sites were formed after the orginal $200 AUD purchase  The reason I would have seen the linked site in 2011 is after hearing about Silkroad. As far as im aware there was no reason to purchase BTC in 2010 whatsoever other than just for finding the concept interesting. I never made another purchase till late 2013 - 2014. By this time it was ridiculousy easy. Open MtGox account. International transfer straight from bank account online. Bitcoins hit the wallet. No mucking around with keys no nothing. Everything else including the website you have linked comes later. Need to go back even earlier.

What I'm struggling to understand right now is after keys have been generated & money has been transferred how would that be registered on the blockchain in 2010 without the use of the Bitcoin Client.

Untll I get my head around the basics properly & can explain myself properly unfortunately my posts are going to be confusing. If anyone out there could make a simple summary of what's been discussed so far that would probably be helpful to readers. Ps. Got new Asus ROG Strix today...looks nice. 😁

If indeed it is an old blockchain.info wallet, you would need to be searching for files called wallet.aes.json 

Definitely not going to rule the above link out all together at this stage. I did straight away when mnemonic was mentioned expecting it to be something to do with word lists that dont contain all of the series of words I picked myself.

It's certainly old enough to consider being within 18 months of the orginal first purchase (estimated date of September 2010). That's site does mention 2012. If anything the rubics cube & even more so the "love bitcoins" logo are the familiar component plus the simple basic text fields.

Was then able to watch the video aswell. That's some seriously classic stuff right there. Would not be surprised if I have seen that before. Actually pretty amazing that it still exists. 

Thanks mates. 😊

First post I made was just spewing out everything I can recall from 2010 - 2014 era. Feel its necessary not to edit that post & just use it as a reference as they key information is there regardless if its a bit of a mess. Its jumbled simply because so much time has passed. I now understand the difference between private keys & PGP keys. I must confess it did take some time relearn everything again but I'm getting there slowly. I just needed to get down in text exactly what I could recall regardless of whether it sounded ridiculous cause where else could I possibly start.

I am by no means bitcoin technical. Just feel into it in 2010 after reading the infamous pizza guy story & purchased $200 worth of bitcoin. What I did with those coins & the private keys still remains a mystery. Latest theory some sort of brainwallet that was converted to a paperwallet that could be printed. I know I used 8 words & a password to create the wallet. I also know these crucial pieces of information...nothing is missing like similar scenarios I've read.

The folder for the PGP keys are just a series of text documents that I'd saved from people on darknet markets along with my own PGP key & for some reason an Armoury wallet VERY similar the one in the pic you sent. It reads identical but the format is slightly different. I assume it was a single transaction or even a refund when MtGox collapsed. Both people I've been speaking to on email are solid guys not looking to scam me in any way shape or form. They have been very sincere & actually very helpful.

Thank you for taking the time to respond by the way & I apologise for the confusion. Yesterday I had my old Alienware M14x laptop checked by the local computer dude in hope that it could be used for some Github related test run of one particular program in an offline environment once factory reset. Turns out there was a graphics card or motherboard issue so in the end he pulled out the harddrive for me & the rest of the computer got binned. Random drive is a backup of that particular laptop. A blue Seagate Plus Portable Drive again 1TB.

I've decided I'm going to buy a new Asus ROG Strix (for online) & factory reset the current Alienware 15 R3 (for offline). Its been a bit of a pain to get two computers side by side but I'm working on it. Happy to post pics of the PGP keys & Amoury wallet (minus key details) so everyone can see I'm not making any of this up. It's the real deal I assure you.

I'm not sure anyone can follow what you do with those files on one of your "random drives". OK, I can't and that's just me, ignore it.

Your details are confusing. Public keys are this: https://learnmeabitcoin.com/beginners/guide/public-keys/
I've no good explanation why someone not-so-Bitcoin-technical would've a folder with a "series of public keys". Is this folder in proximity of some wallet related folders? Do you mind telling its name, unless it's totally private and self-named? Not sure if this would shed some more light into this mystery.

Does this Armory wallet screenshot look similar to this one?


Source of picture: https://recovermycryptowallet.com/recover-bitcoin-from-armory-wallet/

I can't speak for the integrity of users whom you send possibly pictures of wallet recovery details. You should be careful whom you can trust with such details.

I also don't get why you speak of PGP keys in the context of wallets. You mentioned PGP keys already earlier which confused at least me a bit, but I didn't see it as important.

Every now and then new things pop up. Next is "keygen software". I would associate this with the warez scene, keygens being usually small pieces of software to generate serial keys for some software which needs specific serial keys to activate/license it.

This is no rant, I'm just confused by your story. Consider to omit unnecessary personal details of your family and how you spend your time. I don't see how this relates to your topic here. You may think it's nice for the context, but I find it rather off-topic and distracting. I don't know how others think of it.

Personally I find a lot of recovery related topics quite interesting because many have good challenges and things to learn from. Enough for now...

8 words and a password sounds like an old blockchain.info wallet recovery mnemonic

Does this look familiar?  https://web.archive.org/web/20120120172358/https://blockchain.info/wallet

Before I start banging on I've sent you pics on email.

Went looking for the external harddrive today & the manilla folder that should have my name on it along with a piece of paper re. BTC/wallet/keys. Neither could be found in the "liveable" section of the house/garage. Had roughly 2 hours spare to get as much done as possible after a kids party that finished at 1.30pm. Then had to get my misses to the shops before they shut by 4.30pm with drive time taking up a solid hour between.

Came across one plastic container filled with paperwork from that era that look forever to go through page by page. Fairly certain its a "home" base container not the one from "work". Managed to find a series of the larger SD cards, one older laptop that's not early enough, a heap of phones one iPhone particular that may have an image of the piece of paper & a small USB that just doesn't look right.

All that said there is still a "storage" section that hasn't been checked but to get this done its going to be an absolute nightmare. No chance I could do it by myself in a day. Just looked at it & why me. Feel it's necessary to mention today's events.

Anywoo last night I boot up one of the random drives I already had & transfered the majority of the files unrelated to media (music/video). One of the folders contain a series of public keys but funnily enough an Armory wallet screenshot I don't even remember from 2014. Screenshot has a box with eighteen random 4 letter combinations & a QR to regerated the wallet. Sent pics to CryptoJ0hn on email & will also send them to you.

Done some more thinking & what's not making any sense to me now is why would PGP keys have been used in 2010 if there's no reason to encrypted a message when simply buying & transferring coins to a "wallet" with private/public keys that are in a different format. I'm pretty sure after find other people's public keys along with the Armoury wallet that I didn't learn/explore PGP encryption until 2011 possibly later & had no reason to use it till 2014.

So now my theory is there was basic keygen software. Software created two keys with 8 words & a password.

Keys could then be stored in a "vault" that were encrypted with same password.

A series of words were given incase you forgot your password to access the encrypted keys but then you would have to change your password to have the ability to decrypt the keys or those words themselves may have been enough to do the decryption.

My guess is any piece of paper for that era may have been printed & contain a QR plus the encrypted keys printed on it aswell. I suspected that this piece of paper/wallet may have just been turned over then all I did was write the master key on the back. How a master key comes into play along with a public/private key has got my miffed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/n2hup6/help_with_possible_nonbip39_8word_key_phrase/?rdt=37418

That dude seems to be the only scenario I can find that's similar accept he's missing the password. He's also missing the program that stores the encrypted keys same as I am.

Now I'm wondering if a "brainwallet" could be generated super easy then printed on a piece of paper making it a paper wallet without the use of anything other than basic keygen software. I remember the whole move the mouse non sense for entropy for keys & I just don't think I used it. Instead I picked another option where 8 words & password did the samething using an algorithm.

The whole wallet.dat concept for me is over. Has nothing to do with my story whatsoever. The simple fact that a series of words were given to me for password recovery in 2010 rules out the Bitcoin Client & there was no other option.

Im still unsure the harddrives are secured into forensic images? and not just a logical copy?
If the harddrives has been imaged byte for byte, you would be able to search in the unallocated area too.
 
Since we're talking about a wallet.dat from 2010, what i've read is that the header should not be encrypted, so it should be possible to search for a specific header, with regular expression for all the volume, including the unallocated area.

Take a look at this topic for inspiration:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/walletdat-hex-code-in-2009-2857580 

Well $200 AUD even at 0.9c gets you 2222.22 BTC. Then times that 100K AUD. So I guess that's worst case for 2010 without taking into consideration any exchange rates that based on the 0.003c day pizza guy bought his pizzas, 0.03c two weeks after he bought them & 0.09c at the end of the year.

Mnemonics is not a factor. Words were given to recover password. Not the "wallet".

Gone off wallets. Can't be Multibit, can't be Electrum, can't be Amroury. Bitcoin Client maybe but as far as I know the blockchain had to be downloaded to open a wallet (or so I've read) which i dont think ever took place on the work desktop. No mnemonic or series of words for password recovery were ever given on that platform either.

This leads be to believe there way have been another way to store the coins. For some reason a remember some sort of "vault" where either the private keys were locked in a password protected vault by them selves or many even with a coin balance. 8 words I selected to encrypted the vault.

If this was the case this is where paper way come into play aswell..I'm playing a massive game of catch up. Spent two weeks looking in to "wallet" recovery. Hard to find info on the early days.

The search on old 1TB Seagate drive copy came back negative for wallet.dat. Was hoping there may be other searches possible for private keys or vault program. Going through every file one by one with unhide files selected for the drive.

Tomorrow I'm off on a treasure hunt...so just hope luck is on my side.

Is it a big balance? Is it small? Let's find out what you're worried about. Then, if it's worth it, we'll try to solve it. Maybe it's not... The situation is slightly different if the address is from 2010. Mnemonic words started to be used frequently in 2013. The earlier ones are different ...

Had a massive reply to the last two post. Took forever to write. Went to send it but session had timed out & I lost it completely.

Want to run this scenario past you guys even though it may sound ridiculous. Done the whole wallet concept to death & now something else is bugging me. Using orginal post as reference in my mind this seems like a logical explanation. Done no research on the topic yet & can explain later but just go with me...

1. Lets just say the keys are created in the simplest way possible & leave it at that.
2. Rather than a wallet a "vault" is used to store the keys.
3. Keys are encrypted inside the "vault" using 8 words i picked & say Base56.
4. Password is used to access the "vault".
4. A series of words are given to access "vault" if password is forgotten.
5. Paper then comes into play somehow.

This ticks all the boxes but in a different way. Paper wallets come up quite a bit across the board early possible storage option...

"Bitcoin paper wallets were introduced in the early 2010s as the go-to way to store the crypto private keys safely."

I've come across this post a couple of times re. wallet 2010. Whenever i read "seed" words I normally tap out but this time it got me thinking. The above would be my explanation as to why (12) words were given in both cases.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/seed-from-2010-bitcoin-5457689

My approach would be to get both harddrives secured forensicly correct into digital images, when done these are the ones you're working on.
Examining the secured images can either be done with forensic software and/or mounting tools, and then use whatever software or script you prefer.

Doing it this way has no impact on the original harddrives, as they are only touched with a writeblocker while imaging them.
The data transfer between the examining PC and a digital image vs. an old mechanic drive will also be a signigicant advantage.

I've been running pywallet on some old hard drives. It takes ages, especially if it is a large capacity drive.

You're probably better off trying to run it yourself at home on a machine that's not connected to the net.

Yeah nice. That's definitely doable. 20 minute train ride. 4.9 stars & 260 reviews. Not bad at all. 😁

The data recovery company is www.payam.com.au

They specialise in recovering data from busted drives. I'd use them as a last resort for you original external drive, if you are unsuccessful in recovering the wallet data from your other copied drives.
 

Thanks for the info. Intend on getting absolutely everything I've got togeather then putting the whole lot on one drive. Once complete doing a search on the whole lot in one hit.

Plan on using the new computer dude for everything. Not waiting till Xmas for the external hard drive hunt either. Got that organised for Sunday.

Also plan on buying a new laptop aswell in the next couple of days so I've got one that's "air gapped" so if there any clowns reading all this intending on doing something strange I've got that covered.

Still don't really know what I'm doing so still researching & just going with what's seems logical. No real computer use since 2012 when half decent smart phones could do most of what the average person needs. Next time I walk past his shop I'll show him that command list. Assume that's something that can be done while I watch him do it.

Can't understand why doing it the hard way isn't more exciting. 😂

I tried to message you too and got the same message. It said you have to allow messages from newbies in your mail settings in profile>personal message options : Allow newbies to send you PMs. Ive been on here since 2013 yet somehow I'm still a newbie. Must be related to post count or merit. I dont post all that often.

I was going to recommend a data recovery company if you are in Australia, and have no luck finding the wallet on your drive copy. We recommend this company to all our clients.

As for finding the wallet on the drive copy you have, I would scan the drive with pywallet:  https://github.com/jackjack-jj/pywallet
It's a python script, so you would need to install python2.7 (I assume you have a windows PC) : https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7/

You would then need to open a command prompt, eg type cmd in the windows search bar. If you're as old as I am you should be fairly comfortable running commands from the command prompt.

You then run it like so:

# --recover  option tells pywallet to operate in recovery mode (ie. scan the device looking for wallet files)
# --recov_size options specifies the size of the device... 256Gioif you have a 256gig drive, or 1024Gio if you have a 1Tb drive etc
# --recov_device specifies the drive letter for the device you want to scan
# --recov_outputdir tells the script where to place any "recovered" wallet files etc.

For example:

In the above example
Pywallet will scan the entire e: drive (you would use the letter windows assigns the drive when you connect it) looking for the data signature of old bitcoin wallet files, even if they are hidden/deleted, and if found put the results in c:\recovered-wallets folder

Edit: have been testing pywallet and found that the above command threw some errors.
Didn't  like the decimal place in the size parameter. Didn't like the "\" in the device parameter.
Have tested this and it works:

Just got a bit mixed up at the start mate. Already told you I have't used a forum before & didnt realise there was a rule book. If you can't understand that I'd pop that in the ignorance basket along with my "unruly" behaviour. Lazy would be not responding at all for days to messages or taking the easy route of only concentrating on a wallet.dat file.

I've figured out how to edit so cheers for that. On the the subject of rockets I bought at 0.06c so all I really have to say to your rocket science remark is BTC to the moon. 🚀 😂😂😂

If you've got anything productive to say I'm all ears. Lets start with how to rebuild private keys using 8 words & a password on GPG4win, Kleopatra or Keepass.

Your posts get merged and/or deleted because you're constantly violating rule #32 of Unofficial list of (official) Bitcointalk.org rules, guidelines, FAQ which prohibits consecutive posts within 24h by same user. There's absolutely no reason and need to reply to different users in separate consecutive posts other than pure ignorance or lazyness.

If you have something to add to your last post even after a few hours past, you can always simply edit your last post if it's the very last one in the thread. No rocket science...

Yeah I do. Didn't have to wait. Scan & transfer to new drive took total 4.5 hours. Dude probably didnt start straight away & maybe had some lunch before he called me back so you probably about right. Noticing a bit of sarcasm. If you want the specs on the drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12...first released Q1 2011. Now you can go calculate yourself silly. Ps. There was nothing wrong with the drive so guess lucks on my side. 🍻


Whys that...  Dont know what country you live in but of you can't trust your local computer tech to copy a drive without looking at your files theres something wrong. 60+ year old asain & all I said was there were old family photos, movies & music on there.

Spoke to him first yesterday. & wasn't suss on him at all. Nice guy actually. Scanned the drive first then copied it for me. Dropped it off at 9 30am & got it back by 2pm. If you read the story the wallet is only on this drive if it's "hidden" in a movie folder.

Moderators are deleteling half my posts so if that part of said story isn't on here that's why. Haven't done anything with it yet accept look at old family photos & videos. Was also busy doing other "things"

Pretty sure theres two ways to do this...the easy way find the wallet.dat (blah blah blah) or the hard way rebuild the wallet. I'll get there either way & if I don't I'm fine with that.

Finally password is in my brain no where else.

I hope for the OPs sake the wallet is encrypted, and the password is not on the same hard drive.

But, yeah, should have taken it to a professional data recovery service, not the local computer guy.

I've some doubts that you and your local computer store guy know what's required and needed to create a full bit-by-bit, sector-by-sector copy of your source drive.

He wanted you to wait? Let's do some ballpark calculation: assume your old 1TB Seagate drive reads 100MB/s (likely not that fast on average over the whole capacity of the drive, but we neglect this); 10s per GB, 10,000s for one TB, so under optimistical conditions reading the whole source drive takes at least 2h 47min (hooked to an appropriate interface that supports such a transfer speed), very likely even longer (depending on how "modern" the source drive is).

And you trust the local computer store guy to not keep a copy of your drive and peek around to see if there's something valuable on it? Well, good luck with that, sincerely.

Never played the formatting game. Once it goes on a drive it stays on a drive & I leave it. Never really needed to format anything other than a small drive that was attached to a pen. Did it just for fun. Had the option other Fat32 or NTFC from memory. Again no idea what I was doing just picked one hit format thought wow that was fun & never used the format function again for anything.

I get what your saying about the external harddrive & understand next level stuff would be required to recover the data. If I ever were to find it I'll wrap it in cotton wool before I do move it but I dont think it matters. It's pretty fair to say nothing has going to have changed since computer dude touched it. It's just been moved from place to place heaps of times same as this Seagate. I managed to find that pulled that apart, bought the sata universal jack, plugged it in & it booted straight away. That thing hadn't been touched in 10+ years just didn't have the files I thought it had.  I knew straight away it wasnt identical to the orginal external harddrive cause there was no porn file in the first list of files so had to rethink what happened. 😂

---

Yo John,

It's probably about time to fess up. There is a very good chance I did use Keypass for the private keys. Master key is the dead giveaway. It's been on my radar along with encrypted keys from the get go just didn't know where it fit in.

My memory squishes everything I've ever done together when it comes to encryption. I was sure PGP keys were used same as what you would use for encrypted messages but I was getting them confused with private keys.

Was talking to a mate (computer programmer) about it the other day & he was adament PGP keys in there format were never used then imported into a program to create a wallet. I tried arguing with him & was meant to go away from the conversation then prove him wrong. Turns out he's right I'm wrong & what you have suggested is a piece of the puzzle I'm missing

I'm not exactly sure what I should & shouldn't be sharing on a forum that can be seen by the entire world. Just trying to play it pretty safe right now. I do appreciate your help so far & I've always found that honesty is best policy in life & it doesn't feel right not to confess before I move forward. Just been playing a bit "dumb" on the thread so people don't take too much notice of it unless they really know what they are talking about. I knew most of what people would say already ie. Mnemonics on blockchain.info, Github & wallet.dat blah blah blah.

I haven't figured out where the 8 words fit in to Keypass yet nor have i tried Googling it either. Been waiting for my mate to reply to yestersdays messages with the new information but he takes forever.

Been talking on Signal not SMS & he keeps notifications off. No doubt hes sick of getting message bombed by me for 2 weeks straight. Using his account as a record of what we both come up with as we go.

Plan on getting a new computer for anything that has to happen off-line that's never connected to a network. My understanding is thats an air gapped computer.

Ive read horror stories of people losing coins to malicious code written into programs on Github. If I'm going to keep going down this road I want to do it right & double then triple check everything I do before I do it.

Right now I'm assuming the next step is definitely the new computer along with downloading older version of Keypass to see what the story was at the time.

Open to suggestions. Appreciate your help & you will not be forgotten if I do manage to pull this miracle off.

Kind Regards,

UJ

There's my message to John for everyone to see. I see no issue posting this after some thought. As of now two people on this forum have been emailed pics of the Seagate drive I keep banging on about. Seagate 1TB not 2TB Barracuda. Released Q1 2011. I bought the coins before drive was ever released so there your concrete evidence it happened in 2010 folks.

I know this forum has the knowledge & talent to figure this out. Ive seen alsorts of crazy stuff being done on here. Just need the right people to take me seriously. Here's an example of what I'm talking about...

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/how-is-a-private-key-generated-from-the-seed-phrase-5249764

Plan on going to the cryptology department at MIT next. I'm not fooling around I'm just plain lost & being overly cautious. It's only been two weeks since starting this wallet rebuild quest started. The external drive stuff has to be secondary till Xmas. Even then I might not find anything & it's just waiting two months.

---

Tried copying the 1TB old Seagate drive today to the new 5TB drive myself. Didn't work so went to the local computer & asked if the guy there was prepared to try. He was fine with it...also gettting another new 2TB drive today so he's working with a brand new drive that has never been touched & the 1TB old Seagate.

Asked about Linux & Ubuntu. He just me down & said don't over complicate the process. Wants me to wait till he's done a scan with whatever program he uses first before going any further.

It could be quite important to have that harddrive with the OS examined, as it might have information about what you used it for back in 2010, which websites were visited, which software was installed etc..
Windows keeps track of all this, and it's possible to dig into this stuff.

If the harddrive with the Operating System has been formatted since you used it in 2010, there is a risk some of the missing information has been overwritten by other data, but still there would be a chance some important parts of the puzzle could emerge.

I would suggest you stop using any of the harddrives, and get some help in securing these into digital images for a proper examination.

As stated in one of my earlier posts, i've been working with stuff like this for many years, and willing to help in whatever capacity fits you.
I get that trust is a big issue here.

Feel free to reach out in private messages (if you can)

This thing boots up no drama. Just plug it in & turn it on. Problem is it's not a copy of the orginal junked out external harddrive. It's a stretch that anything actually made it from the external hardrive to the Seagate I have infront of me which is annoying af. My skills at organising computer files are about as good as my organisation in life...a complete mess till something goes real wrong & I have to scramble to sort it out.

I do remember playing around with he hide files windows function at one stage & "stashing" the Scandisk files somewhere in the movies section. Actually got a few drives floating around right now I need to look at properly. Plan on merging them together as I find them. Got one more stop to make & rest assured I'll be checking every square inch of that property for absolutely anything that holds data.

Been around computers since dial up, floppy disks, Commodore 64 & Leasure Suit Larry. I know to make backups & have old drives all over the shop. Even pinched a copy of the server backup disk before i left incase I needed anything. Logged in as administrator to the server & downloaded whatever i could aswell. Didn't really know what I was doing either just new password was enough & it was a snatch & grab for whatever I could one night till laptop battery died.

I'm basically a computer tard that has an issue losing data. Hoping Vista computer never got turfed, there's also a Dell that might have some clues but from memory it has nothing to do with anything, an Acer after that, an old Alienware after that other Alienware infront of me. It's actually ridiculous how that I managed to cock this up so bad but these are the breaks when you aren't an organised person & bitcoin weren't worth diddlydik at the time.

---

We are talking 2009 - 2010 when the external harddrive first showed up. Having a 1TB hardrive that was portable with mad music & mad movies on it was pretty much legendary stuff at the time. Guy I got it off was crazy into computers & even moved to Boston USA for computer related work. Looked like it was slammed together by a mexican (nothing against mexicans just making the point it wasnt your off the shelf piece of equipment). No brand name no nothing just metal brick with power supply hanging out the back that plugged into the wall.

As other states, do not use that external harddrive, it needs to be secured to a digtal image, which then is the one being examined.
Every time you use that drive, you're potentially deleting areas on the hardrrive that could hold crucial information about your wallet.

Do you still have the harddrive which was used by the operating system? this harddrive could also have some leads that could help you moving on,
If you have this harddrive the same applies to this, it needs to be secured into a digital image, in a forensic sound manner.

Unfortunately, an error also occurs...

Basic best practice in data recovery is to avoid touching the original storage media/drive as much as possible. You make one or more forensic master copies (bit-by-bit, every sector of source device needs to be copied). Faulty media is a challenge, there are some tools to deal with problematical source media. A common Linux tool would be ddrescue that tries to read as much as possible from a faulty media in a clever way, reading first all the good parts and then approaching the bad spots. Beware that stressing an already faulty drive could finally break it.

From master copies you make work copies and do any recovery steps on such disposable work copies. The idea is to be able to always create a fresh work copy of the original source media. If you screw up, doesn't matter, you can always restart with a new fresh work copy.

Strange, I have the option to accept messages from newbies enabled in my settings.

I tried to PM you today. Got error saying can't message newbie. Got the messaged saved. Will send it when I figure out how to fix the problem. Anything Linux related is above my head but do have someone that can help me. Ps. Think you have to message me first.

As I wrote earlier, hard drive recovery remains your first option.

You need to use this hard drive for reading only and make a full copy of it (dump).
The best way to do this is with dd Linux.

In the future, you need to work only with the copy of the disk.
The dump may contain certain bytes that relate to private keys, including deleted data.

Not 100% sure about the harddrive that corrupted location. I will try find it but won't get that opportunity for another couple of months. Was an external hard drive with its own plug in power supply with USB attached. Should have really put it back together but I just threw it into a box. It looked like a broken completely trashed piece of junk so fair chance someone binned it during a move without my knowledge.

Got it from a mate at the local football club with movies, music & alsorts of dumb stuff on it. Was pretty much an entire library of good movies & full music albums of every band you could ask for at the time. Always thought I had a copy of that drive on a 2TB Seagate drive. That power supply failed but i pulled that apart myself & bought a SATA cable/power supply & was able to boot it but filing system was different. Turns out one of his mates got me a new drive then copied everything back on there & more. Wasn't that long ago that the Tiktok video I watched reminded me of hiding a small Scandisk drive but couldn't find it when I went looking a few weeks ago. Was actually pretty devastating cause I was so sure it would still be there.

Anywhoo not even sure why the computer dude pulled the "external" drive apart in the first place. I sat with him & he plugged it into his computer & was able to see all the damaged/fragmentment/corrupted files in little blocks on the screen. If he could have fixed it he would have done it for me for nothing. We were basically "neighbours".

Bit of a crazy story really from start to finish though the entire 14 years. Literally thought I'd finally put all the pieces of the puzzle together but in the end it was an EPIC fail. Been smashing forums for the last two weeks reading other people's story's to make me feel a bit better about the situation. Was hoping password plus wallet address might be enough when i started looking & only then did the 8 words come to mind.

I do have one question you may be able to answer. If I boot the Seagate drive again & I've "hidden" the files someone where ridiculous what command would unhide the file & find the wallet.dat. I just tried searching for that & a text file. Neither showed up in a quick search. Still got that drive here with me. Haven't tried finding hidden files yet but it's definitely a different filing system which threw me off straight away. I'll send a pic when I figure out how to do that. Just says [IMG] twice when I press the picture icon.

Once smart phones came out, pokerroom shut down & then pokerstars got banned in Australia I had no reason to really touch a computer again. Could do pretty much everything I need on a phone. Don't get me wrong either I still have a computer here just don't use it.

Wallet recovery is an option I guess but right know trying to relearn everything & catching up with actual computer related things is pretty interesting.

Bitcoin wallets, cryptology, hardware, terms used etc. etc. etc. has all changed. Even finding a situation identical to mine has been a task. I've pretty much given up looking so decided to post.

Was hoping I could just figure it out myself to be honest with no hardrive & some common sense just rebuilding the wallet to get back what i need to load into Bitcoin Core then use the password.

Back then it all seemed pretty basic so why it can't be redone again beats me. Now it's a cookery...I can find clues here & there that suggest it is possible but just haven't put all the pieces together yet.

Gives me something to do regardless & until I've explored all avenues I'm not going to be happy. Got atleast a year till bitcoin crashes again as far as I understand it so plenty of time before I can just forget it again.

Pokermate above said pretty much zero % chance which isn't zero. 1% chance is enough for me to give it a crack. Got nothing else to do plus anything over a couple of million bucks on a $200 purchase is pretty funny stuff if you ask me. If you do the math it's a bit more than that. 😂😂😂

Do you have the harddrive ?

I did read the whole thread, but all i remember you stating that the harddrive was toast
Getting any data secured forensicly sound from that particular harddrive could be worthwhile, as it might reveal some of the missing puzzles about what really happened on that PC back in 2010.

I've been working with IT forensics for nearly 14 years, would for sure try and help you in any way possible, the first step would be to secure any data from that harddrive if you still have it.
Would love to help with whatever i can.

You could also reach out to this australien dude who might be able to help you further, he runs a YT channel (https://www.youtube.com/@CryptoGuide) and has a company that has a wallet recovery service with private sessions.
https://cryptoguide.tips/recovery-services-consultations/

Unfortunately those two options arent ringing any bells...

Keypass is a form of identification in Australia. Nothing to do with anything other than its similar & it came to mind straight away.

Keybase was around at the time as far as I know.

Keystone set a light bulb off. Quick google of that word & its a hardware wallet. Probs read that recently unless they had an old program for USB's...can definietly explore that further.

After hitting the "key" button in my brain for a coupe of hours that's about as far as it goes.

Going down the "specific" road even further Multibit appears to have the similar interface to the classic Bitcoin Client. Armoury & Electrum just don't look right.

Fairly certain Windows 7 was running on the work computers in 2010. Laptop downloading blockchain Vista. The blue from Window 7 in the "classic" wallets is very similar to how I remember it.

Thank you for your replies John. Been good to have someone to bounce off. 🍻

It might have been KeePass/LastPass or something similar, but you need to remember what kind of program it was.

When you say specific what would my options have been at the time for "cold storage" on USB. I checked the brainwallet list with weak passphases list but a. Not enough coins in the wallets b. Words don't match.

Let's say it was a paper wallet or just program that holds the keys...is there a list of those somewhere. I just need to see the right word most of the time to click ie. Kleopatra.

Private & public addresses were definitely encrypted & I wrote either one of both down on a piece of paper. That piece of paper went in a folder with my name on it. There is a possibility it's still around.

Off topic but is the whole PGP key regeneration possible using 8 words & a password. Base56 is the next thing to pop up on my radar couldnt tell you why but im sure it was used somewhere along the line in whatever process was used.

My understanding is you could get from private & public PGP keys to whats needed using a series of algorithms. Basically starting from scratch to rebuild the wallet.

Slowly starting to explore that avenue & "apparently" it's technically possible.

Was $200 AUD at the time. If you were to do the math then check the dormant wallet list there's only one possibility. One in & zero outs. There's small "dust attacks" but when the coins hit the wallet they never moved.

Trying my very best to give you everything I've got. I know it's a complete mess but it's going to annoy me if I don't give this my best shot.

It's not ALL about the money. It's a little niggle I've had for years. Bitcoin goes down I forget about it. Bitcoin goes up & it's worth rethinking. Will be 4 more years before I worry about it again if I don't say anything now.

If we are talking about the original Bitcoin wallet, then no.
The wallet.dat file contains private keys and is encrypted with a password. Without the file, the password is useless.

It seems that at that time there were no other alternatives, including a brain wallet.

Perhaps you are confusing the year, or used something very specific.
I suggest you recover hdd data, if it's worth it.

Was remembering possible location of USB after watching Tiktok videos. One particular of an old dude finding his drive in a roof space. I did the same but either moved it or it was found. USB had a password protect vault all the files were in that. The 3 weeks of XRP trolling on Tiktok didn't help the situation. Couldn't pick up my phone without seeing a crypto vid. Literally every third video was crypto related.

Longstory short couldn't find it USB. Then not long after a came across someone on this forum that mentioned a series of words that's you could choose yourself & boom those 8 words hit me. Always had the password but nothing else to work with till roughly 6 weeks ago when the USB debarcle started. Thought I'd give I a red hot crack now with what I do have.

I apologise for the multiple posts. Not actually sure how to reply properly but I'll try figure it out. What im doing now is obviously wrong. Never used a forum before. Had to do lots of edits to try make it all read easy.

Look pretty stupid as it is without adding more stupidity to the mix. 😞

---

Words were a variation of "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog". I just changed it up a bit cause using those exact words seemed a bit silly at the time. Wasn't to difficult to switch most of the words to my own & take out a word to give me 8 instead of 9 & still have a sentence that made enough sense to "remember".

Also I don't think the "f" bomb is on any of the word lists.

How about 1626 words on very old version of Electrum which can be seen on https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/5883aaf8ca2f79bf694d11ac6b63f5defd2a2c38/client/mnemonic.py?

You should know that you are breaking a forum rule by posting multiple posts in a row, I have reported them to be merged, and rest assured that it is not a serious breach but in future occasions edit the post and write below instead of writing multiple posts.

And after all this time, what made you want to try to recover the coins now?

As I told you, you are not the first, far from it, many people who lost their coins one day when they realize that if they had not lost them they would be multimillionaires they start trying to recover them however they can but 2010 coins in 2024 seems a little late to worry about them.

Tried that. One of the word doesn't compute. Doubt it's was a legacy wallet based error message.

---

I tried that & thank you for your reply. My guess is the 8 words I selected were used as "salt" to create orginal PGP keys.

Possible that the wallet I then used spat out a different set of words as a recover/change password feature.

---

A reasonably uneducated guess would be from August - November 2010. Cheers for the information not exactly sure what to do with it but rest assured I will definitely explore this avenue. Plan on getting a new computer for everything Github related. That can be done pretty quick once I figure out whats possible with the "older version". Could it be possible that password is enough to recover wallet or am I missing something?

Right now I'm of the belief that regenerating PGP keys using the 8 words I know & password then running algorithms on them to give me private/public addresses which were then somehow encrypted is one plausible way to do it. Could be wrong.

Public address then gives wallet address. Private address gives 64 bit hexadecimal somehow but lets face it I don't really know what I'm talking about just working from what I've read.

---

Did that picking random words & using a couple of my words. It hated one of my words. Took it no further.

Thanks for taking your time post. Its really is appreciated. Nice to talk to people that I can bounce off. Limited to how quick I respond. Tried smashing out replies but have to wait 360 seconds.

---

Confident words I choose were PGP key related. Done a bit more reading today & now Gnupgp is dinging bells. Problem is I looked at everything at the time. Found the whole principal of digital currency fascinating & had more time than you can poke a stick at to dive down the rabbit hole.

---

Big bucks. Think of a massive piggie bank full of $1 coins filled to the brim but in bitcoin. Enough to go around that's for sure. One for you, one for you & more for you. Lol.

Hyperthectically speaking if it was a brainwallet for arguments sake why would I need a wallet.dat. That gives another chance.

It might be from this..

https://login.blockchain.com/wallet/forgot-password

try entering your 8 words and see what happens.

What time of year approximately did you use the client?
You can check older versions here (source code, requires compiling):
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tags?after=v0.3.6

My understanding is Bitcoin Client changed to Bitcoin QT further down the track. The Bitcoin QT interface doesn't look right to me. Wasn't till I found Bitcoin Client interface did the penny drop.

The wallet program that was used MAY have issued some words after creating the wallet as a recovery for password only feature.

My other theory is the 8 words hashed with the password to generate the PGP keys to add "entropy". From what I've read the same keys may be able to be regenerated to give the same PGP's back. Once complete another algorithms can spit out the public & private address for the wallet.

---

It's was bitcoin. There was nothing else in 2010 that any coverage whatsoever ever on mainstream media. I read the story on the pizza saga on the Heraldsun website & bought coins months later. All happened prior to Silkroad. Agora may have been the only darknet markets at the time. I never took a look at any of those sites till atleast a couple of years later when BTC went from $30 - $200.

In 2010 they went from 0.003c to 0.03c & then 0.9c by the end of the year. The were no exchanges so I didn't even bother to check the price after I bought them for that particuler year till recently. I just set up the wallet, made the purchase, thought that was fun & left it.

Definitely happened in 2010 when they were worth peanuts. I was 30 years old at the time. Had just bought a 20k car. Had under 10k in the bank & blazed away on a small bitcoin transaction thinking it was no different than blowing it at the pokies.

---

I've had a quick look into BIP39. Words don't match the list. If we are talking algorithms SHA256 HASH & maybe secp256k were mentioned. May have everything to do with the blockchain & have nothing to do with anything wallet related.

The whole brainwallet concept may have been used but finding information on the programs from that time is tricky. I'm almost certain it was Bitcoin Client. There is the paperwallet option as well but moving the mouse around didn't tickle my fancy so I did it another way.

---

I'm finding this forum tough to navigate. It's the first time I've used a forum. I'll get it right eventually. It's my first time on here. Localcoins may have been used to make the purchase. If it wasn't that it's beats me. We are talking 1000+ coins that cost me next to nothing. Prepared to dish out coins like they are candy if I can just get some help.

The human brain can play tricks on us sometimes, especially when it comes to memories from a decade ago. How can you be absolutely sure that it happened EXACTLY as you described when you yourself admit that you can't remember some key details? It's possible that your recollection of events is slightly off. For example, it would help a lot if you knew exactly which software you used to create your Bitcoin wallet or which website you used to buy coins. Do you have any concrete evidence (other than your memory) to corroborate any part of your story? What if it wasn't Bitcoin at all?

Imho you should think it over again and find better clues about the year, since I don't think that you'll find any wallet in 2010 that was handling words (no matter if seed or brain wallet). All that came later.

And if your story is inaccurate you will get answers on BIP39 and such.
Also, after clearing up what year was it, maybe you remember what wallet you've used; it could be of real help. If it's indeed words-based and local (so I'll cross out blockchain.info), Multibit and Electrum would be the main options, but both came at the end of 2011. I think that only Bitcoin Core was there in 2010 and it had no seed words.

Without better info, the answer to your BIG question is "you don't". Sorry.

Bitcoin core (bitcoin QT at the time) did not use recovery words.
Private keys are contained in the file wallet.dat, and this encrypted file is located in a separate directory from the bitcoin client.
The only chance left is hardware recovery data of hard drive. If you still have it, write me in PM your contact

Yes, countless times.


I have reported the post to be moved to a technical board where they can help you better but from what you tell and a 2010 wallet I think the chances of recovering anything are pretty close to 0.

What amount are we talking about?

I'm sure this topic would have been covered in the past but here goes nothing...

Here's the facts as I remember them...

Two PGP keys were created in 2010. Definitely had GPG4win installed on the computer I was using at the time. And for some reason Kleopatra & PGPtools rings a bell.

On a different computer I recall playing around with a program that could download the blockchain. I was only doing it for giggles at the time & have no recollection if the download ever completed.

Back on the original computer was able to download a wallet program then run it. From there I was able to import the PGP keys to create a wallet which included wallet addresses made from the two PGP keys (private & public) I am 99.9% sure said program was Bitcoin Client.

BTC were then purchased with a small amount of cash from a bank account on a website I dont remember & then transferred to the wallet. All this happened within a few months of the "infamous pizza" story first making the news so it's 100% all happening in 2010.

At some stage I had to make up a password. I do remember it was best practice to make the password a decent length using letters, numbers & special characters which i did & I'm talking 13 plus characters which was considered minimum to have yourself a "strong" password.

I know this password so that is the least of my problems.

This is where things get interesting. At some stage I was prompted to use a series of words...8 being the bare minimum. I'm not 100% sure whether it was in the creation of the PGP keys instead of a email address or if the words were used to encrypted the wallet.

The way I remember it was again best practice to remember the words BUT there is a possibility that the wallet program gave me a different series of words to save incase I ever forgot the password. I'm pretty sure the public & private addresses were also encrypted in this program & there was no particular reason why you couldn't write them down. To me it didn't matter cause the coins were worth nothing but that's beside the point. At this stage I don't have a physical drive with the wallet saved or the piece of paper that anything may have been written on.

Again I know the 8 words I was able to pick myself BUT if any words were given to me further down the track which is highly possible right now I don't have those words. I also couldn't tell you how many words were selected for me nor do I remember any of them.

So after all that nonsense the coins are in the wallet protected by a password on the computer at work. I understand they never leave the blockchain but let's just go with they are on the computer as that's how I understood it at the time.

From there the program & text file containing the 8 words I used were transferred to a small USB & forgotten about for over decade. For context I thought they were on a corrupted drive that may or may not still be around BUT remembered the USB only in the last month.

Went looing for the USB last week but couldnt find it. Might go looking for corrupted hard drive one day but as far as I know it's well cooked. It was pulled apart & in pieces last time saw it after a computer dude tried to boot it & said mate this thing is toast.

As it stands the computer is long gone, the USB drive can not be found, the piece of paper with any address on it may or may not still be around & old hard drive is fried beyond repair.

I'm not overly concerned about a piece of paper to be perfectly honest. This particular avenue is more intriguing & worst case I'll go looking for it if I have to but want to leave that as a last resort after posting on this forum.

Currently I'm stuck on what to do next & before I ask anything I know this is possibly the most ridiculous situation EVER on Bitcointalk so go easy on me. I'm not a Bitcoin guru & never have been...just happened to buy coins in 2010 when I was bored af at work one day & now to me it's just ancient history.

There is no question that this didn't happen in 2010. I've read all the controversy over seed words, BIP39 blah blah blah blah. Honestly forget that stuff in this particular instance...I was there in 2010 & it was reasonably easy to make a wallet the way ive just explained.

"Mnemonic" & "recovery phrase" is about the only possible terms used at the time & it was only for opening a program if you forgot your password. For those if you still debating how it was or how it wasnt it was originally its EXACTLY how I have described it.

Paper wallets were around. Brainwallets were around. That said the program I used has got me stumped. The 8 words I picked confuses the situation even further & I doubt I used an email. If I did I still have access to one of the two possibilities.

This is not a joke either...i'm deadly serious. I also may have the wallet address after checking the dormant wallet list. Can really only be one cause it's the only one that makes any sense.

I've just finished downloading the blockchain. Been through upteen million posts by other people on every forum there is over the past month & still have no idea what I'm doing or what to do next.

Actually not even sure its possible to recover the coins with 8 words & a password. As it stands I'm reasonably confident it can be done so that's why I'm here. Now for the BIG questions...

How do I access the coins... And am I on the right track... And should i bother continuing this quest for long long treasure... 😂😂😂

Ps. My apologies for the lengthy post but had to be done. Would really appreciate anyone that could give me some clues as to what I'm missing or not understanding.