Topic: I'm back into Bitcoin! - page 3. (Read 364 times)

he wouldn't be able to have such an amount if he didn't leave bitcoin. he probably had spent it when it's worth $1000 or had gambled it away already.
almost the same story with the girl who forgot her Bitcoin after the silkroad was closed. she was using her BTC to buy drugs during that time. after years she opened her wallet again from the same laptop and discovered she has a lot of money.

congrats!  comes as a surprise when all you just did was send a coin to your wallet practically worth $20 years ago and then now is worth more than $100K.  

The statement you back into bitcoin really indicates that you were here before or you were dealing with bitcoin before but at of sudden you slides, but since you are back again, i can only tell you to learn all the procedures of bitcoin and start at fresh so that you will understand the basic concepts of bitcoin including the forum rules and regulations, so i will encourage you to follow the full step's others to do what is obtainable.

First of all, congratulations on your finding OP. I sure hope that you've managed to install the "official" version of Bitcoin Core and none of those fake ones that only exist to steal your balance. Verifying a program executable before installing gives you 100 % that the file that you've just downloaded is the one that the developer intended for you to have instead of being an malicious executable that somehow managed to "insert" into the download page of the "official" version to make it look real. If you want to try your hand at verifying the version of Bitcoin Core that you've got you can try this guide[1].

Now you seem that you've fairly new to this whole concept of hardware wallets and remaining terminology related to crypto so my advice for you is to take things slowly and learn as you go. For example, the forum provides a great there where you can learn all about Bitcoin Wallets right here[2]. In your specific case, we call Bitcoin Core a desktop wallet - you basically downloaded it and went ahead installing it on your PC. As Lauda has put it:
I think that you have two options here:

• First one - You can simply send your bitcoins that you have in your wallet directly to a hardware wallet
• Second one - You can install Electrum, send the coins from wallet.dat address to your new address (provided by Electrum) and then decide what to do with them (either let them stay in the new addresses or send them to a hardware wallet). The reason that I've spoken about this second option is that by doing this you'll have your coins on a easier desktop wallet program to use, plus it's faster.

If you do end up going by the second route, I highly advice you following the following guides (in order):

• [GUIDE] How to Safely Download and Verify Electrum [Guide] - In this thread you'll learn how to download and verify downloaded Electrum executable
• TUTORIAL: How to use Electrum (for beginners) - In this one you'll learn how to create a new electrum wallet to receive your coins from your wallet.dat file (generated from Bitcoin Core).

Regarding hardware wallets they are just as secure as the user actions towards them - If you do end up visiting a look a like (fake) website from a hardware wallet manufacturer, such as Trezor, and you end up entering your seed phrases, you'll be sending them to someone over the internet that will be able to use them to have access to your BTC balance. Imagine that the seed phrases are a set of words (that most likely you don't remember for your current wallet.dat file) that allows you to control your BTC wealth (similar to your PIN code in an ATM). You'll get seed words from your Electrum wallet if you've followed the previous link that I've shown you. The main difference between a desktop wallet and a hardware wallet is how they generate these seed phrases - while the desktop wallet generates them in your PC (and you never know if your PC is infected), a hardware wallet generates those seed phrases in an offline place (the hardware device itself). These seed phrases never leave the device and all the transactions are signed in it as well.

So yeah, hardware wallets are great, but as long as you are very careful with the generated seed phrases. There are two well know hardware wallet manufacturers:

• Trezor -https://trezor.io/
• Ledger - https://www.ledger.com/

Even when you're buying these devices you should be really careful and make sure that you're getting them from either an official reseller - or better yet - from the real website. Any kind of wallet that comes to you already with the seed phrases written is a scam and you should never use it.  The forum has it's very own thread regarding hardware wallets here[3]. There is also a

I reckon this is a massive pile of information (but I believe it looks like somewhat understandable) for someone that is starting out in some concepts. Do take your time to read and whenever in doubt just put your question here and I'm sure someone will help you out. Just three more final remarks from my side:

• Remove the mention of how many BTC you have. You'll put a target on your back by getting in the sight of scammers;
• Don't reply to any kind of PM pretending to help you. They'll most likely try to rob you of your BTC.
• Depending on how hold your BTC are, you may be edible to claim forked coins - such as Bitcoin Cash for example (and others). You can see if you're "edible" by pasting here[4] one address of yours and see the results. However be advised that this is not a "beginners" step (from my point of view) and you should only do it when you're more comfortable with crypto ...
  

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[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/wiki/verifying_bitcoin_core
[2]https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/general-bitcoin-wallets-which-what-why-1631151
[3]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=261.0
[4]https://someone235.github.io/btc-forks-balance/

Congratulations, not everyone is able to retrieve their bitcoins if it's been on their hard drives for a long time. And yes, you should get a hardware wallet if you want to and I also own one because it's a good way to store your bitcoins. My suggestion either Trezor or Ledger Nano S. I own the Nano S version and there's some issues with Nano X.

Reference: Ledger Nano X Battery Pandemic

But if you have decided not to buy one, make sure that you're keeping the private key or seeds of it in a safe place, take note of it on a piece of paper that you'll keep and make sure to do a backup. Better not back it up on your cloud storage and email.

Hello everyone, I recently did a cleanup on my external hard drive and I found a wallet.dat file.

At first I didn't have any idea of what this was, so I went ahead and deleted the file and continued my cleanup. I was still pretty intrigued by the filename, "wallet" so I looked up the exact name of the file: 'wallet.dat'. The first search result was this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet. I read that it's basically a file containing all of the important information related to a Bitcoin wallet. I also read that this file is normally located in the Bitcoin Core wallet directory, so I went ahead and installed the latest version of Bitcoin Core and looked in my trash bin folder, and sure enough, the wallet.dat file was in there. I had to wait 2 days or so for it to sync to the blockchain. Unfortuantely, I knew did not mine any BTC back then, I could only remember visiting a faucet a few times.

Today I woke up to this: 2.49 BTC sitting in the balance field. Man, I knew Bitcoin wasn't worth 20$ anymore! Let me tell you, this made my day, probably, my week or even this entire year!

Is there anything I need to do now that I'm holding a pretty big amount of Bitcoin? I've read that hardware wallets are the safest, should I buy one? Is there anything I need to know?