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Comment by bubbabojangles | Hacker News Reader

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/166BuLPWHUjqoqiYp5rGE3B5r5Am...

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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")

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."

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.

What was the market value of the painting? I fail to find any result corresponding with the comment.

It fetched ~50K Guilders in an auction by Mak van Waay, which in the 1970's was a lot of money.

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...

Did he try Dropbox support to see if they have a backup?

Oh yeah, completely exhausted that route - it was over a year before he realized it and way past their retention period...

"Hi Dropbox support! You get $1m USD if you figure this out."

Generous bitcoin contributor may be thinking that he made a wrong choice of giving away.

He probably has several times that amount...

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.

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

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

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 :)

Wondering the same thing. Was a passphrase used to generate the private key?

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/) to scan your drive for the private keys

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.

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.

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

i was going to ask the same thing, you can search the bytes in hex for 01 03 6B 65 79 41 04

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.

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