Topic: ever find an old wallet? (Read 1982 times)

unfortunately I don't safe wallets backups.. I am a little careless about these things. but I don't think I left money on my previous wallets. so I don't regrets about my lost password.. OP you are so lucky man.

I bought 20 btc when they were $5, and just hodled them. My hard drive crashed one day, but I was fine because I also hosted a copy on another drive. But when I checked my other hard drive, it turned out that it had also crashed. I lost my bitcoin that day, but I guess it's because I have a thing for magnets  

I should be so lucky.  I'll probably end up finding half a doge on this phone 20 years from now when it's a hundred bucks per doge and I'll be wishing I'd bought more.

Happened to me before, but not 5 BTC! Also logged into an exchange that I forgot about and was surprised with some balance.

dont forget to dig for clams after you're done with it too.

Lucky you to find your old wallet and there is still some btc on it, I'll feel so happy if I was you. Unfortunately I knew bitcoin so late (2015) when the price is high already.

I still have a couple dozen old wallet backups from back then. mainly of my current wallet but there are some other wallets for experiments ( to xfer between them to see how it works etc) plus litecoin and namecoin wallets. I just copied them everywhere for backup purposes as I had no formal backup system like I do now. back then there was no password on the wallet so they are in password protected RAR and ZIPs etc.

gotta run em all through and start labeling them "btc.zero.balance.wallet.dat" and such.

I am not lucky enough to knew about bitcoin in early years.I think you are really exceptionally lucky to have got back your lost password.But you would be more luckier if you had found them in 2013 when price was $1000.If you had sold them then and kept that money,you could have bought more than double coins that you then had.Now keep the coins safely for next big price bump

the story isn't over.. what did you do with them?

that a few days destroyed if you cashed them in.. although i wouldn't blame you.

I once found a wallet in 2013 when the price reached $1000 for the first time, that I thought I had deleted, but in there was around 0.036XXBTC which was nothing when I started with Bitcoin, but with the price sitting at +$1000 I found myself a nice $36 worth of coins.

I wish!  In early 2011 I was experimenting with way to get money onto poker sites without using my bank accounts....Around that time I was introduced to bitcoin by a fellow student who set me up with a wallet and around 10 bucks worth of bitcoin to experiment with (they were worth a little under a buck if I remember right)....While still figuring out the technology, "Black Friday" hit and all my poker clients were frozen.  I woke up to an FBI splash screen on all my pokersites!  That scared the hell at of me because I was still under the belief that bitcoin might be illegal....I immediately reformatted my hard drive, filled it up with video, and reformatted it again!  I forgot all about bitcoin until a little over a year ago when I found Betcoin.ag....My intuition was right: bitcoin became the ideal method of transferring funds to poker sites!  So, I had the right idea in early 2011 but was too naive to hold out and threw away around 15 bitcoin....gone forever!

I have stumbled upon a few old wallets I forgot I had, BTC and otherwise, but when I opened them I was not as fortunate as you for they were either empty or contained dust. It is still exciting though, kind of like opening a present to see if there is any decent amount left.

Many people would already delete or lost wallet file, i search about that  many people  throw away harddisk with maximum  bitcoin inside it .

yeah I finally grabbed a trenzor hardware wallet a few months ago. most coins are in paper wallets with a little on coinbase just to have it already there if I want to jump on something quick.

I didn't have a clue about Bitcoin back in 2011 so I can never have that feeling. I am very paranoid about security, although I am gambling a bit  in the sense I am keeping more than 3 BTC online with Electrum and Debian Linux. But lucky you with 5 Bitcoin I suggest you buy a hardware wallet now if you haven't already done so, I intend to buy one once I reach over 10 BTC, but may even buy one once I reach 5 BTC.

I found three old Bitcoin address in my MultiBit software. However they only contain "dust" from various old faucets (around 20 cents).

Not bad. At least, I can use them to receive some Clam coin - which I have not do yet.

unfortunately, in 2011, I don't even know how to turn ON a computer. Then how can I have some forgotten old wallets? But in real life, I have a hobby of keeping money on books, drawers, etc., and I forgot some pennies too.

I'm way to mean and anal to ever leave any amount of coins lying around to be forgotten. I stay on top of that stuff like a hawk. That's a very cool thing to dig out.

exactly, kinda tossed them around like popcorn heh

Back in 2011, when bitcoin was around $11, I invested 10 btc in Pyramining where you were buying hashing power to mine btc without having to buy, set up and maintain any equipment, like cloud mining. You were guaranteed over time to receive back your initial investment + 10%, in my case, 11 btc. I set up a special wallet on blockchain.info just to receive my dividends which they paid out in installments over time. I used to check my pyramining account page and my special wallet for it regularly to see my payments come in.

The returns only slowly trickled in and according to calculations, first it would take ~10 months to get back my investment + 10%. Then it became 1 year, then 2 years, then 3, 4 years and so on due to increased difficulty. So over time, I checked less and less frequently until I stopped checking at all, figuring I'd just check back in a few years to see how things were going while hoping they wouldn't go belly up and/or run away with my money.

So to make a long story even longer...

I had bought a new laptop and never bothered/remembered to add the bookmark for that particular blockchain,info wallet. I had pretty much forgotten about it until around last year when I happened to fire up my old laptop and saw the bookmark there. It was one of those, "Oh shit, a blast from the past," type moments since over the years, bitcoin had had it's various ups and downs and stuff (Pirateat40, US Senate Comittee hearings on bitcoin, multiple new ATH's, flash crashes, MtGox debacle(s), first halving, etc, etc, etc.

Anyway, so I open up the wallet to see what I might or might not find and low and behold, a total of 11btc was sitting in there, built up from a number of micro payments over the years.

Coincidentally, I also rediscovered other special wallets I had made around the same time booked marked on my old laptop in 2011 for receiving payments from a bitcoin pyramid referral scam scheme, various bitcoin faucets and another for Crowdflower where I was paid small amounts of btc for doing various menial internet jobs. The btc from these old wallets totaled just over 3 btc.

So in all, I found a little over 14 btc in old forgotten wallets. I know, sounds crazy that one could just forget or lose track of 14 btc, but back then (2011), 14 btc wasn't really that much. Plus, I was more focused on growing and using my main bitcoin stash at the time.