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I used to mine Bitcoin back in 2011 and I lost my wallet.dat file (through several stupid moves on my part). It's got approx 103 BTC in it, anyone is welcome t

I used to mine Bitcoin back in 2011 and I lost my wallet.dat file (through several stupid moves on my part). It's got approx 103 BTC in it, anyone is welcome to it, I've given up trying. https://blockchain.info/address/166BuLPWHUjqoqiYp5rGE3B5r5AmqgHpoL https://blockchain.info/address/166BuLPWHUjqoqiYp5rGE3B5r5Am...

dantillberg 9y ago
Wow. That's like, "I know I bought a house a few years ago. It was a decent house, I think, but I lost the address and can't seem to remember where it was or how to find it again." (except that with Bitcoin, it's like, "the house is somewhere in this galaxy, but I can't remember which solar system")
- diegoprzl 9y ago
  It's more like: "I bought a painting for 20$ at flea market. 6 years later I learned it was from Van Gogh but sadly I don't know where it is now."
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    My dad actually bought a painting for $25 at a flea market in Amsterdam and it turned out to be a Paul Citroen, we ate pretty good for a couple of years because of that. Not quite a Van Gogh but still, a good catch.
    - zulln 9y ago
      What was the market value of the painting? I fail to find any result corresponding with the comment.
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        It fetched ~50K Guilders in an auction by Mak van Waay, which in the 1970's was a lot of money.
diegoprzl 9y ago
It's not possible with only the address. If you have the encrypted wallet I could give it a try though.
placeybordeaux 9y ago
As in trying to guess the private key given the hash of a public key? If thats the game there are higher value address to try.
vxl 9y ago
Do you have the hard drives wallet.dat was stored on at some point?
- NwmG 9y ago
  i was going to ask the same thing, you can search the bytes in hex for 01 03 6B 65 79 41 04
  - bubbabojangles 9y ago
    I have tried that, I've been scouring old hard drives for the last few weeks. I also had the file "encrypted" on a True Crypt Container in Dropbox, but I deleted the container in 2012 before the file was lost. (One of the stupid moved I made) Dropbox will/ can not help me recover the file.
illumin8 9y ago
My brother accidentally deleted his wallet.dat from Dropbox a few years ago - he had given it a random filename and encrypted it with GPG so it was unrecognizable to hackers (and apparently him as well). It had 1,000 BTC in it! He had received them from a generous Bitcoin contributor in the early days who said "here you go, hold on to it, it will be worth something someday." I still give him a hard time about his $3 million USD mistake...
- sweettea 9y ago
  Did he try Dropbox support to see if they have a backup?
  - illumin8 9y ago
    Oh yeah, completely exhausted that route - it was over a year before he realized it and way past their retention period...
    - zulln 9y ago
      "Hi Dropbox support! You get $1m USD if you figure this out."
- zuck9 9y ago
  Generous bitcoin contributor may be thinking that he made a wrong choice of giving away.
  - illumin8 9y ago
    He probably has several times that amount...
lend000 9y ago
Any hints on how you generated you key/passphrase? Did you use Satoshi's original Bitcoin client? Will reward information which results in successful discovery :)
- 6c75726b6572 9y ago
  Wondering the same thing. Was a passphrase used to generate the private key?
tylersmith 9y ago
Dave the wallet recovery guy might be able to help if you have any sort of hints as to what your key might be. Obviously do some research to verify I'm not scamming you. Good luck. https://walletrecoveryservices.com https://walletrecoveryservices.com
feelix 9y ago
do you have any spinning disks around that once may have had the unencrypted keys on it? I could modify the commercial data recovery software I wrote (https://macosxfilerecovery.com/ https://macosxfilerecovery.com/) to scan your drive for the private keys
- bubbabojangles 9y ago
  Thanks for the offer, I kept the drive I stored the TrueCrypt container on. I think it was like a bad drive arm or PCB. I'd considered paying for a service to move the platters to a good drive, but at the time the service cost more then Bitcoin worth and there was no guarantee of recovery. I ended up throwing the drive away (another dumb move). Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would increase in value like it did. I think I would have sold a lot sooner if I had access to the wallet file for the whole time.
  - feelix 9y ago
    That's alright. I see a lot of these posts saying "the bitcoin I lost would be worth $X Million dollars now", but the thing that people overlook is that it would not be worth that now, because they would have sold it a lot earlier if they had access to it. Many people would sell the moment it's all worth about $20k depending on a few factors. In almost no cases is is it truly a million or multi million dollar loss.

dantillberg 9y ago

Wow. That's like, "I know I bought a house a few years ago. It was a decent house, I think, but I lost the address and can't seem to remember where it was or how to find it again." (except that with Bitcoin, it's like, "the house is somewhere in this galaxy, but I can't remember which solar system")

diegoprzl 9y ago
It's more like: "I bought a painting for 20$ at flea market. 6 years later I learned it was from Van Gogh but sadly I don't know where it is now."
- jacquesm 9y ago
  My dad actually bought a painting for $25 at a flea market in Amsterdam and it turned out to be a Paul Citroen, we ate pretty good for a couple of years because of that. Not quite a Van Gogh but still, a good catch.
  - zulln 9y ago
    What was the market value of the painting? I fail to find any result corresponding with the comment.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      It fetched ~50K Guilders in an auction by Mak van Waay, which in the 1970's was a lot of money.

diegoprzl 9y ago

It's not possible with only the address. If you have the encrypted wallet I could give it a try though.

placeybordeaux 9y ago

As in trying to guess the private key given the hash of a public key? If thats the game there are higher value address to try.

vxl 9y ago

Do you have the hard drives wallet.dat was stored on at some point?

NwmG 9y ago
i was going to ask the same thing, you can search the bytes in hex for 01 03 6B 65 79 41 04
- bubbabojangles 9y ago
  I have tried that, I've been scouring old hard drives for the last few weeks. I also had the file "encrypted" on a True Crypt Container in Dropbox, but I deleted the container in 2012 before the file was lost. (One of the stupid moved I made) Dropbox will/ can not help me recover the file.

illumin8 9y ago

My brother accidentally deleted his wallet.dat from Dropbox a few years ago - he had given it a random filename and encrypted it with GPG so it was unrecognizable to hackers (and apparently him as well). It had 1,000 BTC in it! He had received them from a generous Bitcoin contributor in the early days who said "here you go, hold on to it, it will be worth something someday." I still give him a hard time about his $3 million USD mistake...

sweettea 9y ago
Did he try Dropbox support to see if they have a backup?
- illumin8 9y ago
  Oh yeah, completely exhausted that route - it was over a year before he realized it and way past their retention period...
  - zulln 9y ago
    "Hi Dropbox support! You get $1m USD if you figure this out."
zuck9 9y ago
Generous bitcoin contributor may be thinking that he made a wrong choice of giving away.
- illumin8 9y ago
  He probably has several times that amount...

lend000 9y ago

Any hints on how you generated you key/passphrase? Did you use Satoshi's original Bitcoin client? Will reward information which results in successful discovery :)

6c75726b6572 9y ago
Wondering the same thing. Was a passphrase used to generate the private key?

tylersmith 9y ago

Dave the wallet recovery guy might be able to help if you have any sort of hints as to what your key might be. Obviously do some research to verify I'm not scamming you. Good luck. https://walletrecoveryservices.com https://walletrecoveryservices.com

feelix 9y ago

do you have any spinning disks around that once may have had the unencrypted keys on it? I could modify the commercial data recovery software I wrote (https://macosxfilerecovery.com/ https://macosxfilerecovery.com/) to scan your drive for the private keys

bubbabojangles 9y ago
Thanks for the offer, I kept the drive I stored the TrueCrypt container on. I think it was like a bad drive arm or PCB. I'd considered paying for a service to move the platters to a good drive, but at the time the service cost more then Bitcoin worth and there was no guarantee of recovery. I ended up throwing the drive away (another dumb move). Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would increase in value like it did. I think I would have sold a lot sooner if I had access to the wallet file for the whole time.
- feelix 9y ago
  That's alright. I see a lot of these posts saying "the bitcoin I lost would be worth $X Million dollars now", but the thing that people overlook is that it would not be worth that now, because they would have sold it a lot earlier if they had access to it. Many people would sell the moment it's all worth about $20k depending on a few factors. In almost no cases is is it truly a million or multi million dollar loss.