Topic: Mined in Beta, how can I get back into it? (Read 189 times)

The menu "File->Open wallet" is just for loading wallet.dat files from the wallet directory, not a replacement for -datadir start parameter.
The main use of it is for opening multiple wallets or loading an existing/backup wallet.

I have purchased a new SSD large enough to hold the chain locally and I'll try this.  I commented just before this, I was able to search wallet.dat as text and found the wallet address.  3 different addresses and 1 duplicate, none of which registered on the block chain explorer as having more than 0.00 BTC.  I did find my old address in an email from the pool and searched that to find that I have BTC somewhere that has not been siphoned from my wallet.  So if I do come across that file, I'll be set.  Around $25k possibly hiding among my old drives.

Thank you for your suggestion, I didn't know this was possible.  I have been using the -datadir option to point my secondary drive that would be large enough to hold all of this, but I did not realize you could "open wallet" that way.

Thank you for this.  This did save me quite a bit of time.  I'll probably still attempt to sync my other wallets just to see if the other comments were correct, and I already bought the SSD to house the new wallet.

I searched my current PC for "wallet.dat" and found 3 different instances and 1 duplicate.  I searched them all on the blockchain explorer site as you suggested, all 3 of these came back 0.00 BTC.  Very sad results...

However, I was able to locate my wallet address from the payouts when I was part of the mining.bitcoin.cz mining pool.  I verified that I do still in fact have 0.61373154 BTC ($25,747.21) somewhere, or maybe no where at all.  No one siphoned the coins from my wallet, so I can still hold out hope that I locate a wallet.dat file on one of my other drives.  I do still have about 4 drives not currently connected to this computer that I don't believe were ever wiped so I'll check those too.

I will add, I'm very surprised that I have 3 different wallets, none of which match the original wallet.  I know I attempted twice to start again, but with a 3rd wallet, it's weird to me.  The duplicate is my most recent attempt where I realized I needed to point the block chain to my wallet and tell it to start creating the block files on my secondary drive where I would have space to build the chain locally.  But the 3rd wallet is from my folder called "LaptopOSDrive" which is where I started mining back on my Asus G73JH with the HD5870. 

I guess wish me luck digging out those old drives and searching them.  A last ditch effort, I might need to create some sort of script to search file contents as plain text on my computer for `name".{34}` and see if another one turns up in some file I renamed.  I may have renamed the wallet at some point.  Another commenter mentioned renaming files, and I think at some point it was suggested as a security measure to rename your wallet file. 

Anyway, thank you for the suggestion.

It's a security feature: you can view your wallet without entering your password, which means you have to enter your password less often. Every time you don't enter the password, it can't be leaked.

There's a way to check the content of a wallet.dat address list without even needing to install the Bitcoin software. Simply open it with a text editor and search for "name" string and cycle through results, you should see the addresses. Look em up on some blockchain explorer to see if the funds are there to calm your anxiety while you sync the full node. It even works on encrypted wallets because for some reason developers have decided to leave that part unencrypted (which is why you shouldn't rely on your wallet.dat password only, but to encrypt the actual file too)

Alternatively, you can dump the private keys from the wallet.dat files and import them in to a light wallet which does not need to sync the entire blockchain, or even just manually turn them in to addresses and look up the addresses on a block explorer.

BIP39 was created in September 2013, so 12 word seed phrases wouldn't have existed before then. Regardless, Bitcoin Core doesn't use them anyway.

This sounds like a caching or swapping problem. Any chance your system is low on RAM?

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TL;DR-version: (I think) "12 word seeds" didn't exist back then. Files named wallet.dat (or somethingelse.dat if you renamed them) are all you need. Create a backup on a USB-stick (and another backup just to be sure) before doing anything else.
Let Bitcoin Core sync a bit, the first "years" of block data are very fast and should be enough to show which addresses you used back then. If a balance show up in Bitcoin Core, check Blockchair.com to see if the balance is still there (without having to wait for a full sync).

I had the same issue with the initial synchronization as yours but I managed to speed it up by following the steps described in the following guide: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Splitting_the_data_directory

Please note, that for this strategy to work you should have either internal or external SSD with at least several gigabytes of free space available. With an SSD it usually takes less than 24 hours to fully synchronize.

What he mean is: If the "Last block time" in Bitcoin-qt has passed the year 2011, the transaction should be in your 'Transactions' or 'Overview' by now.

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Since you have more than one wallet files, I'd suggest you to disable "pruning" so you wont encounter issues when you need to load the other (or more) wallet files.
Uncheck "Settings->Options...->Prune block storage" to to disable it, then it will require more disk space (about 400GB+) because the full blockchain will be saved locally.

If you do not have the space, you should load them all now so the wallets will be scanned during the initial block download.
Copy the (renamed) wallet.dat files into wallets folder in the data directory: '...bitcoin\wallets' folder; if there's no wallets folder: to the 'bitcoin' folder.
Use "File->Open wallet" to load a wallet file; you can select a loaded wallet from the "Wallet:" drop-down menu at the right of 'Overview'.

Yeah, sorry, should have included the TL;DR.  I'm going to steal this.


It says 450+ weeks, and judging by the time I've let it run, it's serious.  450 weeks is 8.5 years give or take.

I have like 250 Mbps down and 50 Mbps up.  I'm running an i7-4790k overclocked to 4.5 Ghz

It's running at 90-95 % CPU utilization and 99% Disk Usage.  Completely blocks any other file activity on my computer essentially.  I can run other apps because it appears to really only be using 1 core even though it says 90% utilization.  So I don't think I can just synchronize.  But, to add to this, I'm not sure it's going to even give my coins.  I'm hoping someone has had experience doing this.  Will the old wallet say 0.00 BTC until it's syncs and finds that those coins have not exchanged?  I definitely don't want to burn up a processor in this market for nothing if my coins were really stolen or siphoned out of my wallet somehow.

TL;DR:

The OP mined bitcoins a long time ago and has a wallet.dat (actually several) that may or may not have bitcoins. Synching the block chain is very slow. The OP wants advice on what to do to retrieve his potential bitcoins in the most effective way.

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If you mined in 2011, you shouldn't have to wait very long to synchronize with the blocks that contain your coins.

[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

Hello,

Putting this at the top.

  I started mining in late 2011.  I was using my laptop with an HD5870, if you can believe that was possible at the time.  I never solved the puzzle locally after weeks of letting it run.  Feeling like I was putting in resources and getting nothing, I joined a mining pool.  Mining.bitcoin.cz  Once I joined this, I started getting small payouts over the course of a few months.  At the time, what I was getting in return wasn't much cash.  This was when someone bought a pizza with bitcoins.  So I really started to weigh the fact that my laptop was running at 99 deg Celsius all hours of the day and I wasn't making any real money.  Eventually, the constant use of my laptop while on the charger burnt up my battery.  When I ended up having to buy a new battery that was around the cost of what I made in bitcoin, I stopped mining.

  I still have emails showing all my payouts to my wallet from the mining pool, which later renamed itself to Slush Pool.  They show my public bitcoin address as well.

  Now that bitcoin has went through the roof, I believe I'm sitting on some serious cash, ~0.5 - 1 btc.  I want to try and recover this.

  As I moved between PCs over the years, I copied my old drive, pasted it into my now larger drive and moved on.  At some point, I would install bitcoin again, thinking I would mine, before giving up, not sure why I did this.  But I ended up with another install of bitcoin on a later iteration of my machine.  Finally, about a year ago I attempted to dig up my wallet.  My understanding at the time was that my wallet.dat file held all my money, and all I needed to do was copy and paste my BitCoin folder with bitcoin.exe and start it up.

  When I did this, and bitcoin came up I was greeted with a warning "Your Wallet is at RISK" or something of the sort.  So I quickly closed the application, and researched what I could.  Essentially, I found something along the lines of there was a bug in the client that would allow users who had your public address to siphon all your coins out over time.  I have no idea if this is, or was, true.  But rather than just launch the old bitcoin, I downloaded a new client, bitcoin-qt.exe or something like that.  I copied my wallet.dat into the folder and launched it.  I no longer saw the warning of my wallet at risk, but it showed 0.00 at the top for two different numbers.  At the bottom, it showed 370 weeks to sync.  I let this thing run for weeks thinking that it wasn't estimating it correctly, and it would eventually catch up to the chain or whatever, and find more peers.  I had experience with torrents, and it's common for torrents to start out at like 0.001 kb/s while you have 1 peer and your the only other one torrenting, but slowly, more trackers become available and the torrents climb to a reasonable download rate.  This never happened, in fact, after however many weeks, I distinctly remember it showing the amount of weeks not reduced by that much.  So while bitcoin climbed and it was worth quite a bit, it still hadn't boomed to where it is now.  So I quit.

  Today, I have 3 or 4 different BitCoin wallets that came with each install, but I think I know which is the original.  My issue is, I found that when I copy the wallet.dat file into an installation and run it, it doesn't just use that file, it starts creating more files in AppData.  If I copy those files into my current install from older iterations of my computer, I find slightly more or less weeks to sync, but none of them show any balance in my wallet.

  Finally, I think the earliest version I find is a Beta 0.8.5 client, if that helps answer my questions.

  So my beginner questions, now that I've established some background.  Is wallet.dat really my wallet file?  Or is my wallet stored over multiple files?  If my wallet shows 0.00 balance instead of 0.53 or whatever my math from my payout emails show, did I lose my BitCoin?  If I lost my BitCoin is there a way to use these emails as receipts and reclaim them.  I've never spent a single BitCoin a day in my life.  I ran the mining client on my machine, and when I got the payout emails, at the time, my wallet did display a balance and I had transactions.  What was this siphoning bug I heard about?  I thought the idea behind the chain was that you always knew where the coins were going and you could track the ownership of the coin.

  Also, I have heard of this "Wallet Code" some 12 word phrase that was generated for my wallet.  I do not even remotely recall that being a thing back where I started, but if something came up and said "This is your secret phrase" I'm sure I wrote it down, but I looked and I cannot find it.  So assume for now I don't have a wallet code or whatever that thing is.

  Thanks for reading my story, here's to BitCoin.  I'd appreciate any advice.


Oh, by the way, if I launch a client now with any of these wallets, the weeks to sync is in the 450 range.  I don't think I have 450 weeks of running this client left in my PC.  It doesn't utilize my graphics card at all, it just runs my processor at like 90-95% constantly and burns up my disc space, it starts writing new files like crazy.