Topic: Importing an old v0.3.0 wallet.dat - is my plan sound? (Read 579 times)

Yes, fear not, I have snapshots from various points, with forkcoins in mind and now any potential tax evidence issues. I'll return to forkcoins at some point.

My current measures protect pretty well from burglary but I need a better option for fire - that's a priority.


Oh I am not an extravagant person at all! Honestly, right now I am mostly excited about going to part time work (I like my job, and going part time would not be unusual in my organisation, so would not attract too much unwanted attention). But wow, to have time to Do Other Things! For life is short.



Yes, will give this plenty of thought and keep a chunk I'm sure.

The thing that is going to make my family laugh (when I tell them about all this - nobody knows yet!) is that my annoying habits of geeky tinkering and mild hoarding (including old data and backups!) has finally yielded results!

That's a little.... late Your old wallet.dat's backups are now only useful for Forkcoins, and your Ledger backup words should have been very safe already.
To think about: are your seed words still safe if your house burns down? And can a burglar find them?

Good, keeping a low profile instead of instantly quitting and buying a Lambo

---

---

One more thing to think about: never sell everything! You've ("accidentally"?) been hodling Bitcoin for 13 years and it got you your riches, but who knows what another 13 years will bring for Bitcoin. So my advice (after years on this forum): sell some, but keep some

Done! Thank you!

That was quite scary awaiting confirmations and for balance to be reflected on Ledger Live, but all done.

I left the dust (a few of 0.00000547 BTC) in old wallet.

Will do more backups now.

Will sort thank you tips at some point - am working right now!

btctaipei - per previous suggestions, I loaded old wallet in offline Bitcoin Core, got a receive address from Ledger (on another online PC), copied via USB stick to offline PC, sent this in offline Bitcoin Core, copied raw transaction string back to the online PC, broadcast it via blockhair's Tor address. Repeated for each UTXO.

I had similar situation and it turned out some coin generated were not moved for quite sometime.

It is very important to go offline with once you synced to current block height on a new bitcoin core install.

for security and anonymity I would recommend dumpwallet and manually export those address to another machine (because address =public key due to P2PK).  Query those bitcoin address using another machine via tor with blockstream or mempool.space to maintain anonymity as these days communication lines are rspan tapped by nation state actors.

 If my memory served me correctly dumpprivkey won't work in those early version clients there is a separate process that is required to extract private key value, which I believe someone on this forum will be able to cite earlier bitcointalk threads to better help you with this.

That's what I would do
The dust (0.00000546 BTC by any chance?) might have been part of a dust/spam-attack. If it's that small, it's not worth the transaction fee so don't add it. If it's more, you could add it together with the balance from the same address.

Thanks LoyceV - so in coin control I have 3 sizeable inputs and 3 tiny ones (I think dust from a few years ago).

So I should do a transaction for each of the three main inputs to a different Ledger receive address (ignore the dust)?

I have been checking the receive addresses in the Ledger device as you advise.

Thanks again!

I'd send everything from the same address at once. For privacy, it doesn't hurt not to combine inputs from different addresses. In Bitcoin Core, enable "Settings > Options > Wallet > Enable coin control features". After this, on the Send tab, you can click Inputs. If you have different addresses there, you can select one at a time to keep them separate (and send funds to a new address on your Ledger). Then click "Use available balance" to empty that entire input.
I wouldn't send smaller chunks if you're planning to send everything. The risks (such as losing your seed phrase) are the same whether you send large or small amounts.
When selling (some of) your Bitcoin, it does make sense to send and sell smaller amounts at once.

Just to be sure: when sending to a new address on your Ledger, you should verify that address on the Ledger's screen (and not just on your computer).

That tickbox is mainly useful when you're sending all funds at once.

I would probably do multiple transactions, though you can't really hide your stash that way. But I would prefer to have not so large UTXOs aka coins in my wallet. If you make a large transaction in one go you end up with one big UTXO in your new wallet. Any spend from this will usually reveal your wealth by spending your large change coin/UTXO.
(If the terms don't ring a bell in your head: brush up your Bitcoin knowledge at https://learnmeabitcoin.com)



As you are transfering from your original wallet to another one of your own, it doesn't much matter. Say you decide to transfer 1 BTC with 'Deduct fee from transaction amount' checked, i.e. your source wallet amount is reduced by exactly 1 BTC by the transaction. The transfered amount to your destination wallet is less than 1 BTC as the fee is taken from the 1 BTC away.
If 'Deduct fee from transaction amount' is unchecked, your destination wallet will receive exactly 1 BTC and your source wallet amount is reduced by 1 BTC plus transaction fees.

To see what's currently necessary for transfer fees, you can have a look at https://mempool.space as at the moment there's quite some transactions congestion and fees are rather high.

Be careful when you copy/paste transfer destination addresses. Always check if destination address is correct and unaltered (by clipboard malware or similar nasty things).

OK, good point on testing send from Ledger - did so and it worked fine.

Should I send the rest in one go or divide into say 5-10 transactions? I know that will be more hassle and a bit more transaction cost but is it worth it in case of some unforeseen problem?

And should I leave 'Deduct fee from transaction amount' unchecked when sending from Bitcoin Core?

Have a specialist advisor company in mind that have many good reviews in my country (but will do more research on them),

Thank you!

For peace of mind: see if you can send from your Ledger too.

The fiat-part really depends on where you're living, and it might be difficult to find a local expert. Once you find a trusted exchange (and jumped through their KYC-hoops): don't send them too much at once (not even after a few smaller tests).

Forum rules state that begging isn't allowed, tipping isn't mentioned (and thus allowed).

OK, thanks both.

My test transaction has been confirmed >10x now, so I have more confidence in what I'm doing with this bit at least.

Planning to move the rest within 24h then get some specialist advice on tax, exchanging for fiat etc.

What is the forum policy / etiquette on tipping to say thanks?

Those are just common heuristics on identifying the recipient from change.
Here's their official documentation about their "privacy-o-meter": https://github.com/Blockchair/Blockchair.Support/blob/master/API_DOCUMENTATION_EN.md#link_700

Since you're going to send all to your Ledger Nano anyways, it'll be inevitable that heuristics will see that the receiver and sender is the same user.
But it shouldn't cause a link to your identity.
It's Ledger Live's server and Exchanges where you'll end up using that you should worry about (your privacy), but that should be on a separate topic.

I wouldn't worry about Blockchair's take on privacy

Thanks again nc50lc

I took the plunge and made a small transfer to Ledger via blockhair on Tor - received OK

Blockchair gave warnings on privacy re:
 - matched addresses identified
 - round value
 - output value x1000 (I guess Bitcoin Core had to use a large UTXO)
 - discrepancy: no output of the same type as inputs

Anything I need to be concerned about here?

I can't see any reason of keeping some unless you're planning to use the wallet in the future.
Moreover, when claiming forks, it's best to send all of your Bitcoins from that wallet first, since you may have to expose it to unsecure clients as part of the fork-coin-claiming procedure.

Hello, thanks for your replies once again.

I will keep making multiple dated wallet backups for disaster and tax/bank query purposes!

Ledger device received and set up. Recovery words secured on paper (though I may get a metal backup version).

Tor Browser set up as it looks like copying the raw transactions from my offline Bitcoin Core and broadcasting would be simple and secure enough.

I see Blockchair have an onion address for this (taken from the footer of their site): http://blkchairbknpn73cfjhevhla7rkp4ed5gg2knctvv7it4lioy22defid.onion/broadcast

I checked the getwalletinfo again, it's definitely my imported wallet that has keypool=1000, the empty wallet I created has keypool=0

So I now have to sleep then work, but next I plan to send say 10 mBTC to my Ledger wallet this way to test things out.

When I get to transferring the rest to Ledger, is there any point in keeping some BTC in my imported Bitcoin Core?

Thanks for reading, and for your patience. I don't want to mess anything up by not having a good enough grasp on things.

Keep your old wallet for 2 reasons: Forkcoins and to have a plausible story for taxes.

Correct. Large amounts use a change address too, unless you send everything.

It knows, but won't know when it's confirmed.

Correct.

Your 1000 key keypool is good, but it's probably created by your current wallet, not your old wallet. That means all your existing backups are useless for change, so create a new backup of your wallet.dat (or more than one) before sending anything.

• Bitcoin Core will select a suitable UTXO to spend for that transaction, then if there's an excess amount of BTC, it'll send it to one of your address (change address).
  All those are included in that single transaction. It's the reason why a common Bitcoin transaction has two outputs: the 'recipient' and 'change'.
  Here's some basic info about how Bitcoin transaction works: learnmeabitcoin.com/beginners/transactions#
  
  
• When you broadcast the transaction to your node's mempool, even offline, it'll be able to include that change to your available UTXO so you can spend it in your next transaction.
  The minor issue here is the time gap between the small test transaction and your next actual transaction because it has a default expiration of 14days;
  but even after expiration, you can always rebroadcast it to your offline node's mempool before sending the actual transaction.
  
  
• I don't get what you mean by "link" but all it has to do is to sync to the blockchain to see if any of its keys can spend your coins.

Oh, so Bitcoin Core updated your old wallet's keypool, "keypoolsize=1000" ensures that the concern about the change address wont happen.
Because your wallet already reserved 1000's of addresses.

Since it's not HD, it's a good decision to create a backup of your current wallet.dat to be on the safe side since the newly generated keys aren't included in your old backup.
Although those wont be used in the two transactions that you'll create.

Thanks again for the replies.

Ledger Nano arrived today but will tackle that tomorrow. Not wise to try it while tired and slightly drunk 

My plan is to move everything from old wallet in offline Bitcoin Core to Ledger, then once all that's confirmed on the blockchain I guess the old wallet becomes redundant?

getwalletinfo for my old wallet returns: walletversion=10500,  format=bdb,  txcount=6, keypoolsize=1000

I was not aware of the change address mechanism, so please help me clarify:
 - small (test amounts) outgoing transactions from my old wallet will use a change address from my keypool
 - Bitcoin Core is offline so won't know about change returned
 - I presume that once I sort my Ledger Wallet, the blockchain will link all change transactions to it?

I will make multiple backups as I go, but I suppose my anxiety is that because my old wallet is offline and I am try to move all to Ledger, that my change will disappear into the aether (as I don't fully understand change address mechanisms)...

I have tried to copy the whole data directory before to circumvent another initial block download and it's indeed possible.
But that test included the wallet file, I haven't tried it without the wallets. (other users may have tested it)

If it didn't work out for you, try to -reindex and see if it can fix any issue that you might encounter.

That's a good option for better privacy, setting it up isn't too complicated either: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/tor.md

Aside from LoyceV's concern above about how your old wallet.dat will handle the change, I can't think of anything else.
But it's an issue if you're planning to back-it up now, use it for some time, delete it, then restore the backup; the keys that you have used may not be included to the backup.

If you're worried about it, you can set your own change address via "Custom change address" in the 'Send' tab.
Set your offline-wallet's receiving address that you've verified to be "ismine: true"  and "solvable: true" via getaddressinfo address command.

For the procedure in my previous post, it ensures that the unconfirmed transaction will be saved in your mempool and wallet.
So if you need to spend the change, Bitcoin Core can refer to it as long as the setting "Spend unconfirmed change" is enabled.

This should work, but why use a full Bitcoin Core installation just to broadcast your transaction? You can get a Tor browser (for privacy) and use https://coinb.in/#broadcast (or many other websites) to broadcast the raw transaction.

I can't answer this. If it's working, I wouldn't touch it, but it might be worth it if you currently don't have spare addresses in the keypool (which means you need to make new backups).

Read this: Five Ways to Lose Money with Bitcoin Change Addresses, especially the part under "1. Backup Failure".
Modern wallets prevent this, your old wallet may still have this risk.

Hello all,

While I await the Ledger Nano, thinking ahead...

My plan is to transfer BTC from my offline Bitcoin Core to a Ledger wallet, using the method outlined by nc50lc above involving a new online Bitcoin Core, to broadcast my offline transactions.

I have a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8gb ram which could do this, using a fresh Ubuntu install. Can I copy the blockchain files (not wallet!) from my offline installation of Bitcoin core to save me some time? That way it would only have a few days worth of blockhain to update.

Would I be wise to run this over Tor or is that overcomplicating it?

Is there any point in doing an upgradewallet with my original wallet in the offline Bitcoin Core?

Finally, once Ledger set up, is there any risk/implications in transferring a test amount (like 1 to 10 mBTC) so I can get the hang of things?

Thanks again all.

Well.

Bit of an emotional rollercoaster here.

Thanks again for all advice! Sorry for confusion re forks, spent best part of a day unspending all the purchases I had made in my head.

Will ignore PMs, none so far. I am a noob but I can learn.

Will get tax advisor! (words I thought I'd never say).

Going to do some more, careful backups. Back later!

Then it's now 100% certain that the displayed balance is correct.

Creating a signed raw transaction in the GUI while offline is quite simple:

• Go to send tab, enter the recipient address and amount.
• Next to the "Transaction fee", click "Choose...", then switch to "Custom:".
• Set a desirable transaction fee rate in BTC/kvB (shown as "per kilobyte"),
  Since estimation wont be available, you'll have to check the priority fee rate at mempool.space or other mempool monitoring website (of course using a separate online device).
  For example, according to the said site, today's "good" fee rate is at "83 sat/vB" which is equals to "0.00083000 BTC/kvB".
• After setting the fee rate, click "Send" and it'll be signed and broadcasted to your own mempool.
• Go to "Transactions" tab and find the transaction, right-click on it and select "Copy raw transaction".
• Transfer that raw transaction to an online PC and broadcast using an online synced Bitcoin Core via sendrawtransaction command or any push/broadcast txn service of your choice (less private).

I'm not saying that, you said it.

As long as OP is anonymous, that doesn't matter. But: he can expect PMs from scammers, and shouldn't trust anything send by PM. See this example.

Don't share this information in your local bar

You should also figure out the tax implications, which will depend on where you live. Pay whatever tax is due, and enjoy the rest of your money. That way, you can also answer the questions your bank is going to ask you.

While it's interesting to read such a nice success story, you should be more discrete with showing off your stash. Consider to edit your disclosed wallet amount, though the cats are already out of the bag.

I once had to recover an old Bitcoin Core wallet from 2014 which I nearly lost due to a dying harddisk (I wasn't very backup savvy back then). But I knew that there were far less coins in it. Anyway, so sats deserve to be lost. Once my harddrive showed signs of failure and surface read errors, I quickly saved a ddrescue image of it and saved it for later recovery. For reasons that I won't disclose, this recovery started years later (I don't complain...).
Contrary to your experience I had more trouble to load my wallet.dat in more recent versions of Bitcoin Core. My route was to gradually update my Bitcoin Core step by step starting from the Bitcoin Gui version which I last ran in 2014 to more recent ones until I arrived to the then current version a few years ago. My path was probably more tedious than yours, maybe not necessary at all, but in the end me too arrived at a current wallet file version which I was able to transfer to a HD wallet with mnemonic recovery words as backup.

Be carefull with your coins and don't talk about it! You might want to read the PDF at https://smartcustody.com


Yepp, you have the fork coins in addition to your BTC, but make sure to first move away your real BTC before you use your old private keys to claim the fork coins. I have done that, too.

Hang on LoyceV, are you saying I have xxx BTC actually for real? And then derived amounts from forkcoins in addition to that?

My first reading of your reply was that the xxx BTC had been 'diluted' by the forking, but I would be happy to have misread that...

OK, in the Bitcoin Core console I rescanned my wallet imported as described above (call it 2010-first) - no change.

Then I used the 'recover wallet' option in the GUI on another backup copy of the original wallet.dat, which led to another wallet being created in Bitcoin Core which I called 2010-second. Rescanned this in the console, result was again no different.

OK, I need to get my head around creating, signing and broadcasting. I only ever received one transaction in 2010 which was just a matter of giving someone my public address.



Yes I was dimly aware of forking - so not enough for the jet! But basically free money so I'm not complaining.


Right, will have to get my head around all that at some point then.

Thanks for your help!

Looks like you found your riches, good for you!
Now don't go online again with that disk installed. Once your hardware wallet arrives, and after you've made a few safe backups of the word phrases, create and sign your transaction offline, and broadcast the transaction from another system.
After that (don't risk it before securely moving your Bitcoin), don't forget to take a look at Bitcoin Forks. At current values, for 105 coins you're looking at $15k-ish in Forks.

---

---

Note: I wasn't around in 2010, but chances are your old wallet has no spare addresses. That means, if you send a small transaction as a test, the change probably goes to a new and freshly created address. That also means all your other backups won't have access to those funds anymore. I'm not exactly sure how this will play out, but you should check it before doing it.

The steps are quite outdated, precisely, the commonly used steps when Bitcoin Core only supported single wallet.dat file.
Now, all you have to do is to restore or load the wallet.dat file without creating a wallet to be replaced.

You can restore it using the command: restorewallet "wallet_name" "path_to_old_wallet.dat"
Or load it using: loadwallet "path_to_old_wallet.dat"
The former will create a new wallet file and directory with the hd/keys based from the old wallet.dat file.
The latter will directly load the old wallet file; both are available in the GUI's "File" menu.

Yes, as long as rescan is done after the wallet.dat file is replaced, that's good news.
Otherwise, its just your old wallet.dat file's past scanned balances.

Another rescan will make sure that it has been validated with your blockchain.

Hello all, an update:

I installed Ubuntu on a new SSD in my desktop PC, then installed Bitcoin Core, downloaded the blockhain.

Unplugged the LAN cable (no wifi card).

Made a new wallet (TestWallet) which created the wallet subfolder in the .config

Copied old 2010 %appdata%\bitcoin folder (wallet.dat and all others) to a new subfolder at same level as TestWallet on Ubuntu. Added the new wallet which I presume was then validated against the downloaded blockhain, took a while.


This is good news, right? I've ordered a Ledger Nano.

Yes I'll report either way! I only ran it for a few days on a budget PC so I'll be amazed and pleased to have anything!

I think I decided it was a waste of time and electricity and went back to running distributed.net client instead. 

If there's anything my new Ubuntu install with bitcoin-core will remain offline after downloading the blockchain. I'll back up everything to a few USB drives and buy a safe and Ledger device if it's worthwhile!

Will you report back even if you successfully found 1000 BTC in the wallet? I would be really nice to hear such thing and would be a new example set in the world of Bitcoin. However, curiosity aside, you should first follow the steps that @nc50lc @LoyceV has suggested you. And, do anything with care because it's something really of priority and should be given as much time as possible.

I wish you best of luck with your operations, and it will be really amazing if we can hear some good news from you. If in the process you get stuck or face errors than in that case you will get the best advice through the reputed members of this forum. Keep reporting the progress as that will be helpful for you, and it might be helpful for others as well.

A few simple suggestions that might be helpful for you. If you successfully managed to import the wallet and it somehow contains many bitcoins in it than in that case you should prefer to transfer your bitcoins to a hardware wallet. If that's not possible then you should try to be in offline mode as that will be very helpful for the security of the coins. You should also consider to create some new backups of the imported wallet as that would be a good step for the safety purposes.

Thanks for all the advice. I've ordered a larger drive as I only had a couple of small SSDs handy.

Will report back once I have any news or queries.

The quickest way is far from the safest way.

None of the above, the quickest way is to download pywallet and you can export the addresses/private keys. then import them to Electrum.

https://github.com/jackjack-jj/pywallet
Pywallet Github

https://electrum.org/#home
Electrum download

Good luck
/KX

Since you already know about GnuPG, consider checking signature for the ISO file. Ubuntu website provide tutorial about it, see https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/how-to-verify-ubuntu.


FYI, current Bitcoin blockchain size is about 507 GB. So sync could take some time, especially if you have slow internet or using HDD.

Before starting step 5, make sure that Bitcoin Core isn't configured to prune your blockchain.
It may have been set during the GUI's initial setup or its settings.

Otherwise, it'll have to start all over again after loading the old wallet file.

Make sure that the drive that you'll use has enough space to store the whole Bitcoin blockchain and other data (500GB+).

I'd add a step: 5.1. GO OFFLINE. Unplug your internet, there's no need to turn it into a hot wallet.

You may run into some compatibility issues with such an old wallet, but since you have enough backups, you'll see when it happens.

Ideally, sign offline and broadcast your transaction from another system after throughly checking everything. But don't order a jet yet, wait for your riches first

Hello all,

I have found an old Windows disk backup, on which there is the 0.3.0 version of the bitcoin client which I played around with for maybe a day or two in 2010. The wallet.dat and associated %appdata% files are all there. I’ve made a few off-line copies of everything.

I have some knowledge of GnuPG and Linux (Debian mainly) but I have not used Bitcoin since 2010 so trying to get up to speed with things.

In case there is anything of value in the wallet, I want to be careful. Here is my plan – what do you think?:

1. Download latest Ubuntu ISO using a Linux laptop I have rarely used. Check SHA256 on the ISO.
2. Disconnect all drives from my usual PC (Ryzen 3).
3. Use the ISO to install Ubuntu on a SSD on the PC
4. Install current version of Bitcoin Core using Ubuntu’s own software installation tool.
5. Wait for Bitcoin Core to sync to the blockchain.
6. Import the old wallet.dat, rescan and hope for riches!?

If the old wallet contains anything of value, what should I do next? I gather a cold wallet like Ledger would be sensible, including carefully stored handwritten keyword backups.

Thanks for reading.