Bitcoin Forum

Hi foks o/
 
A while ago I manage to break a disk with some bitcoins.

Fortunately, I copied some info to a safe place. But I didn't write what is any of the strings, who needs comments, right?
(bloody past self)

Not sure if what I wrote down is enough to recover the money. This is it:


Need some help to identify which one is the public key, which one the private, and how I can use importpubkey and importprivkey. And if they are encrypted somehow, how to decrypt them. (If that is the case, hopefully I used some password that I still remember)

Thanks!

Do you recall what wallet you received the bitcoins on?

Given the existence of "+", "/", and "=" in those strings, they look like they are base64 encoded.  I'm not sure what wallets base64 encode the extracted keys, but it wouldn't be Bitcoin Core.

Actually I think I used Bitcoin Core. It was 2013 though.

From what I can recall back to 2012, Bitcoin Core has never exported keys in base64.

I'm guessing you either used some paper wallet generator, or perhaps used MultiBit (I can't remember if MultiBit uses base64 encoded keys).

Hopefully someone else will stop by with more info.

You were totally right :) Thanks a lot. The 3rd string was the private key as exported my multibit.

I have been able to import it, though I cannot currently do anything, it is syncing. That raises some questions:

• Will Multibit be able to sync given is 3 years old?
• Will I be able to use my money from there?
• Can I somehow import my multibit private key in Bitcoin Core?

Yes. It should be able to.

However, MultiBit is no longer being actively developed or supported.  There may be some bugs or issues.  You should move to some other wallet as soon as possible:
https://multibit.org/blog/2017/07/26/multibit-shutdown.html


Yes. You should be able to.

However, see my note above about moving to some other wallet as soon as possible.


Yes. It should be possible to convert the base64 private key to a WIF (Wallet Import Format) private key.

Also, I think MultiBit Classic provides an option to export WIF keys:
https://multibit.org/help/v0.5/help_exportingPrivateKeys.html

However, it might be easier and safer to just create a transaction with your MultiBit wallet to send your entire balance to a new address in your new wallet.

Also, most new wallets (Bitcoin Core, Electrum, etc.) use are HD (Hierarchical Deterministic) wallets which means that all private keys and addresses are generated from a single seed value.  Using such a wallet means you only need to back the seed up, and all future private keys and addresses can be regenerated from that seed value at any time if needed.  Importing a private key would result in that key NOT being backed up with the seed value and would therefore complicate the process of maintaining a reliable backup.

Try this:
Go to bitaddress.org (or better run it offline), click on "wallet details" and I'm out the bunch of numbers that are not your address.

Let me know if it worked :)