Topic: Lost bitcoins (Read 809 times)

I agree; I liked bitcoin better when it was it was more decentralised and anybody with a computer could contribute. I bid on Ebay on an early mining rig - just missed out and gave up on the idea. But it was when people started putting serious money into ASICS that I first realised that it really was going to turn into something big. By that time though, I had enough wealth in Bitcoins that I couldn't bring myself to spend significant money on buying more.

I also owned a fairly powerful (for the day) computer that I used exclusively for games, and kept off the internet so that I didn't have to slow it down with antivirus software. Had I used it to mine bitcoins I would have made a lot more of them, but I suspect I wouldn't have actually ended up in a financially very different place. What was important to me was the ability to buy a house and live debt free - a position in which I now find myself. If I'd had twice the number of bitcoins I would have reached that point sooner - but on the grand scale of things, not a lot sooner. If I slightly regret anything, it's that I toyed with designing a hardware wallet back in 2010 but didn't have any spare time to devote to the project.
 
Any particular reason you want to own a block? It was fun to see the 'mining' symbol next to the funds when you run Bitcoin-QT. I get some real satisfaction from having been there from relatively early on.

Trying to find a block now is so difficult I have been hunting for one for some time I bought a bunch of older ASIC miners for the hunt just ended up with a "very" large electric bill.
I even rented like 20PH for 2 days and never managed to find a block.

I think bitcoin would have been better staying CPU/GPU they removed this from core a long time back now.  Now you must be a slave to bitmain or others if you want to be in the mining game today.

This really is a fantastic story there are not many people here who have mined blocks way back then that managed to keep them until now.

CPU - I think it was the 900 series with a 20GB hard disk an an Intel Atom processor - N270; 1.19 M#/s. I gave up mining when GPUs came in - simply too busy to do all the work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC

I appreciate the tip re. the forks. I was aware of BCH but not some of the others and Darkstar's website was nice.

You don't need to give anyone money here we are a free community there are a lot of members here who are "un-educated" at best.  But you seem to be on the ball with that so no more will be said on that matter.

As posted previously you do have the chance to claim your fork coins at a ratio of 1:1 for BCH So that might come as a surprise to you that your holdings are actually worth a lot more than you first thought.
Though a note here.. I myself have not claimed any of my BCH for one reason.  I do not feel comfortable with the split and the fact I do not fully trust this "new" chain so I myself decided against it.

Though the option is there for you to make if you decided to do so.

I was interested in your first post you stated that you ran core on anaemic EEPC ?  I could not find any reference to what this was? I guess since it was back in 2010 it was cpu or gpu?

Btcspot. At one point you asked me whether I had recovered my funds yet. If you knew as much as me about Bitcoin you would have looked up the address on blockchain.info and seen that I hadn't. I agree you sent me a link (which I had already found for myself, though you were not to know that) but you also gave some advice I consider to be quite poor and hassled me to an extent I found unpleasant. I like to keep quiet about my Bitcoins. The reason I posted here was that I didn't understand why I was having trouble with the transactions and wanted guidance to avoid making expensive mistakes. I was really hoping not to have to resort to raw transactions. Not that I wouldn't have been capable of it (remember I downloaded the software in Summer 2010) but because there was a lot of detail I didn't want to have to learn and such a clear potential for getting things wrong.

Have you ever been to the third developing world? The crushing poverty can be overwhelming with poor kids and beggars hassling you for money. It's deeply distressing and yet hard to do anything about. I'm not generally a fan of Bill Gates but I believe he said that it's as hard to give money away effectively as it is to make it in the first place. I'm afraid I see no indication that giving away money to you would be particularly effective - which is not to say I'm not sympathetic, though it may not seem that way to you.

It may sound a bit crude, but I keep thinking of an unkempt man who owned a van and apparently cruised the streets of of a local city yelling 'Want a f**k?' at any women he passed. One or two in a hundred apparently said 'yes' and joined him in the back of the van, in which he had a mattress.  It's one way to get laid, I suppose, and as far as I can imagine it's not illegal. But the cost is that the 99 women who say 'no' feel distressed and perhaps threatened as they go about their daily lives. Likewise, it's very corrosive if you are trying to discuss technical matters against a constant backdrop of begging letters. Perhaps not as bad as the example above, but it still leaves me with something of a bad taste in my mouth when I visit the forum.

Having some money feels very odd. I've worked very hard at school since I was 4, got into a very competitive course at university, continued to work very hard ever since. Ended up with a mortgage on a fairly modest house that I expected to pay off when I was 62 despite overstretching myself financially to pay for it. One day I read an article about Bitcoin on Slashdot, downloaded the program and mined 50 bitcoins that 7 years later are worth more than I earn in a decade. I'm not complaining but neither am I kidding myself that this is anything like 'normal'.

Being around people with money can be very harmful to your perspective on life. Bitcoin is about money, so for a little help on the forum you suggested I pay you $50,000 (or whatever 3 bitcoins were worth at the time). At the moment I also need a bit of help with a carburetor with a flat spot. If somebody helped me out on the carburetor forum, would you expect me to pay him $50,000 for his expertise - which these days is at least as specialised and scarce as expertise about Bitcoin? In my job I could easily kill somebody if I'm not careful. A few times I've even saved somebody's life by spotting something other people had missed*. Do I get a $50,000 bonus every time I save somebody's life? Should I? The answer is 'no' on both counts. There's nothing special about advice about money that makes it more valuable than advice about other matters.

So, cultivate a sense of perspective. I get the impression that you are young and I am aware of how hard life can be these days. Although my mortgage has been crippling, I considered myself lucky to have one at all. I know that quality jobs are not as common as they used to be - the salary for my job is far lower than it would have been a decade or two ago. Something is going fundamentally wrong with the way society works. But that doesn't mean that hassling people for bitcoins on the internet is an acceptable thing to do.

Paradoxically, I think the reason I have made money out of Bitcoin was because I was interested in it for its own sake and never really expected to. It seemed like a fun experiment and I was intrigued by it. What else are you interested in? By all means keep whatever bitcoin you own, but can I suggest you try to think of them a little less. I think your life will be better for it.

* true, that works both ways

DarkStar_ is right, you have some balance on the forked chains (you can sell them off too!)

You have another ~7BTC worth of forks on your address ($80000 USD!) I'd consider trying to claim the BCH at the very least, it should be a fairly simple process. Other coins might be more of a hassle to claim and sell. Congrats on finding over $550000 USD!



Source: https://someone235.github.io/btc-forks-balance/

Sorry my bad for asking, i also have a shitty paid job and i thought i could shoot my shot, sorry again.

If giving to charity is one of your goals, consider these kids:

https://youtu.be/SPJAbVJ7igs

It's the Kantha Bopha Hospital. Sad sad sad. I see these long snaking queues everyday on my way to work.

Or perhaps a local charity if you have similar initiatives nearby.

A bitcoin or two to individuals here might make their lives better but consider first and foremost the greater good: your family. Don't give away your coins like candy.

Now that your main problem has been solved: don't forget to look into Forkcoins, if you haven't done so yet, you may find another "small" fortune in Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, and many other forks that are more difficult to extract. Don't forget airdrops like Clams and BitCore.

It wouldn't mind to turn your paranoia up a notch before importing such a high value private key into any forkcoin wallet. Don't trust any of them, keep your privkey offline and sign offline.

As for the beggars on Bitcointalk: just click "Report to moderator", or "Report To Admin" in PMs.

Good advice.

Rickorick, btcspot, I'm sure a bitcoin or two would make your lives better. But to earn the sums you're requesting I would have to work several months of 60 hour weeks, of which 1 in 3 are night shifts. On a bad day I may have to tell a mother that she has accidentally killed her child.

I also work with some great nursing auxillaries whose work can be equally stressful but who are very poorly paid. I'm acutely aware of how lucky I've been, but if you think I'm going to give you money just for asking then you're soft in the head. There are better ways of improving the world.

I see. I apologize for my earlier assumptions and retract them. I just found it somewhat suspicious which was why I reacted by posting what I posted earlier today.

I wish you well with your 50 BTC. Use it well and focus first and foremost on giving your family an opportunity for a better life. If you have kids, think about their future, their education and ambitions. Invest in those precious opportunities.

You might get a flood of PMs from long lost “relatives”. Or offers to double or triple your coins. I’m sure you are an intelligent individual. Don’t fall for any tricks.

To be fair, he didn't ask me to give any keys to him. I think more of a chancer than a fraudster but I did find the requests for 3 btc a bit much. At the time that would have been more than my salary for a year!

Achow101, I will send a pourboire when I am back at the computer. I will also be making some donations to charity and some more to pay off my mortgage.

Were you hoping he would put the private keys online? Shame it didn't work, hey? Good thing OP wisely worked on the recovery of his coins in a secure way. I was wondering why you pm'd him, instead of advising him publicly.

I already had an inkling after checking a previous post where you were trying to sell a Bittrex account for 2 BTC or $26,000 at that time.



Well done, OP!

It could of been issue with the way the keys are imported and exported and with the wallet in question being a much older wallet you are attempting to use now there may be issue from the older version of core to electrum.
You can thank the forks for that one.

also make sure it conforms to BIP62 strict DER encoding was introduced since the early version of core.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0062.mediawiki


Glad you got your coins moved safe. 

It has worked. Thank you for the reassurance.

I remain curious about why the transaction failed using other methods (mycelium, electrum etc...). Anything I could/should do to investigate?

I don't see anything obviously wrong with it. There's a transaction fee and, assuming that the input you are spending is actually 50 BTC, there's no need for a change address.

The advantage that you are more likely to create the transaction correctly. However yours looks correct, so there shouldn't be any problems.

Achow101, thank you for your kind instructions.

Given that I have recovered an unsent raw transaction and posted a redacted version of the output above, is there anything obviously wrong with it? I have verified that the number 'MyLedgerAddress' is the correct public key for my Ledger wallet. I won't hold you responsible if I lose my bitcoins, but would be grateful if you could tell me if there is anything obviously wrong with it or if there is any advantage to trying to make a raw transaction from scratch, in the way that you describe?

Well it's a bloody good HODL for sure.   I mined for 2 years solo never hit a block cost me about £3400 in electricity cost!
I think you should stick to advice from people like achow101 he is well known in the community and should be able to advise you on how to proceed.

As for the raw transaction you MUST be so careful doing this.  
I would say get a hardware wallet Trezor / Ledger and get the coins onto that or split them into offline-cold storage paper wallet / hardware wallet / software wallet.

But like you already stated security is priority when dealing with such vast sums of money and coins.

I hope you enjoy your bitcoin fortune and well done for the super long HODL

edit :  just a second thought it may be dew to older version of the software but this is just a hunch. your coins should be ok if they show on the blockchain in the correct address

ps.. watch for members like the 2nd comment they WILL try to get you to hook to a link or some "sketchy" site.  Stick to Mods or even core developers for advice on this subject.

Believe me, I'm more paranoid than that fact might imply! If anybody's wondering, there's no point in tracing my address and breaking in and stealing my computers. That side of things is well taken care of. The psychology of how I managed to HODL them that long is interesting and I'm not sure I understand it myself. Sure there was the temptation to buy new toys but I wanted to hold onto them until the sum was meaningful i.e. pay off the mortgage. Does that make me more or less greedy? I don't know.

I had been intending to send a raw transaction, but what I actually did was to download Bitcoin Core and then the blockchain and utterly disable the internet for that computer. I then copied my private key over onto the Bitcoin Core wallet, which is encrypted, then I just sent the 50 bitcoins to an address on my Ledger Nano. Given that the computer was not connected to the internet the transaction was not broadcast, so I get the transaction ID then used getrawtransaction through the console, then decoderawtransaction to try to verify it. I still haven't sent it.

Would it make sense to send the transaction to a testnet? I'm not sure to what extent the testnet mirrors the current blockchain?

I'm posting here for several reasons.The main one is that I don't want to make a silly mistake. The other is that I'm simply curious about what stopped this transaction working previously. There's something odd about those 50 btc. They show up happily on Blockchain but I couldn't recover them with other wallets. When I ran pywallet on the wallet they were in, it showed up the few bitcoins I had from bitcoin faucets but didn't show the 50 I knew were left from bitcoin mining. I could only see them on the bitcoin-qt wallet. I wonder, 90% in jest, whether that's what happened to all the MtGox bitcoins. Is this a well known bug?

You don't know what you are doing with raw transactions; you should not be attempting to create a raw transaction manually.

---

The following assumes that you don't want to have your private key exposed to a machine that is on the internet, if it is, let me know and I will give you modified instructions.

On a machine connected to the internet, install Bitcoin Core, start it up and then use the importaddress command to import your address. This will import just the address, not the private key, so your coins are still safe. Do this as soon as possible so that you don't have to wait for it to rescan the blockchain later.

Once the address is imported, let Bitcoin Core sync. If you don't have the disk space for the blockchain (~180 GB), then you can use pruning. There should be an option for pruning in the settings somewhere.

Once Bitcoin Core has synced, make sure that it has the balance that you expect.

Now using createrawtransaction, create a raw transaction with no inputs and the output you want. So your command will look something like this:
Note that using the full value of your coins (~50) there is okay, the fee will be handled later. Additionally any change outputs will be handled later.

Take the output of that and pass it into the fundrawtransaction command with the options I will specify in the example:
What this command does it lets Bitcoin Core fill in the inputs and the transaction fee necessary. The includeWatching parameter lets it choose the inputs from your watching-only address and subtractFeeFromOutputs will subtract the fee from your outputs so you can send the maximum amount possible.

Take the result of the above command and pass it into signrawtransaction. Then broadcast that result with sendrawtransaction.

So you were able to retrieve them?

Holy shit.. Did you mine a 50BTC block back in 2010 and HODL all this time... Well done for you if you did.. Not many people would announce that in public.

Thanks, but it seemed to me that I might as well just send the whole lot at once. If I get the 'change address' wrong, then I lose the bitcoins. If I get this wrong, then I lose the bitcoins. May as well try to send them all at once, at which point they will be safe. And as that is simpler to do, I figure I am less likely to make a mistake this way.

But that is a nice well presented video. Thanks for posting it.

this video might help you it explains how to make a raw transaction using btc. But most importantly it shows you how to use a "change" address with your transaction to avoid the super high miner fee.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWKuqP-zTFk

I find this all very stressful. I've now downloaded BitcoinCore and the blockchain, and created a raw transaction that looks something like this:

{
  "txid": "FirstLongNumber",
  "hash": "FirstLongNumberagain",
  "version": 2,
  "size": 158,
  "vsize": 158,
  "locktime": 509839,
  "vin": [
    {
      "txid": "PublicKeyForMyMinedBitcoins",
      "vout": 0,
      "scriptSig": {
        "asm": "SecondLongNumber[ALL]",
        "hex": "ThirdLongNumber"
      },
      "sequence": 4294967294
    }
  ],
  "vout": [
    {
      "value": 49.99943486,
      "n": 0,
      "scriptPubKey": {
        "asm": "OP_DUP OP_HASH160 FourthLongNumber OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG",
        "hex": "FifthLongNumber",
        "reqSigs": 1,
        "type": "pubkeyhash",
        "addresses": [
          "MyLedgerAddress"
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

I've redacted all the long numbers just in case there's anything sensitive there. The big 'gotcha' it seems is that if you're not careful and don't either spend the lot in one transaction or create a second output going back to yourself, then any change will go to the miners. The intuitively sensible thing to do is to send one bitcoin just to test and see whether it works, with the intention of sending the rest later. This would be a very bad idea as you would be donating a mining fee of 49 bitcoins!

So there ends the limits of my understanding of raw transactions. I'd be very grateful if anybody knowledgeable could look over the redacted transaction and tell me whether there's anything else I might have gotten wrong?

ok, good luck

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm afraid my private key isn't going anywhere near the internet though, btcspot.

I'm going to try the bitcoin-core method - had just hoped there might be something simpler. It's a lot of money to lose if I screw up! I'm also going to need a clean computer. Anything with the key on it isn't going back on the intermet!

Were you able to fix it? Did you try what the poster said above me?

Someone with the same problem tried the latest Bitcoin Core and worked.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/error-16-mandatory-script-verify-flag-failed-1455675 worth a try for that amount.

 I sent you a message. Check your mail.

Hi all. I downloaded bitcoin 0.3.2 a while ago, and as I only ran it on an anaemic EEPC, I only generated 50 bitcoins. That doesn't mean to say I wouldn't like to get control of them again.

My public address is:

18jRv4R1i1MSXNYfmCL1dYvSaXaZBb7Cb1. The blockchain explorer seems to show that the funds exist i.e. there are 50 bitcoins there + a fraction of a coin I sent on the 'hit it to make it work' principle.

However when I imported my private key to Electrum it initially showed 50 coins present but couldn't make a transaction to sweep the coins to my new wallet and it gave me an error message "16: mandatory-script-verify-flag-failed (Non-canonical DER signature)". Now for some reason Electrum only shows 1 microbitcoin, but blockchain info shows 50.001 bitcoins and so does my wallet with Mycelium. However, when I try to make a payment with Mycelium or sweep the coins to my TREZOR, it shows that I have 0.00 bitcoins.

I just made one test payment from the address (a fraction of a microbitcoin) which seemed to work, but aside from this blockchain.info shows no record of transactions from this address.

Have I had my bitcoins stolen? Were they never there in the first place? Is this just some bug which can be fixed somehow? I'd be glad of any explanations/pointers as to what to do next.