Bitcoin Forum

About 2 1/2 years ago I got interested in bitcoins and buying stuff with them. I didn't buy anything but do think I bought some bitcoins. By now I don't remember anything about it but I recently found a "bitcoin" folder on my computer. Here's what I found in there:

- These files: bitcoin.exe, libeay32.dll, license.txt, readme.txt [Copyright (c) 2009-2011 Bitcoin Developers],

- These sub-folders: daemon, locale, src

- A text file I created containing this information:

mtgox.com - xxxxxx / yyyyyyy (presumably ID and password)

libertyreserve.com
  Account Name xx.yyyyyy.zzzzz
  Email [my email address]
  Account Number xxxxxxxx
  Password xxxxxxxxxx
  Login PIN xxxxx
  Master Key xxx

goldexpay.com
  [my email address], xxxxxxxx [password]
----------------------------------------
Here's what I tried:

mtgox.com - Couldn't login using the xxxxxx ans yyyyyyy in any combination.

libertyreserve.com - "This domain has been seized by the United States Global Illicit Financial Team"

goldexpay.com - "This domain has been seized by the United States Global Illicit Financial Team"
----------------------------------------

My question: Is there any way for me to know if I have any bitcoins, and if so how do I go about "getting" them and redeeming them.

All comments appreciated :-)

Did you have the Bitcoins on your local wallet or on those websites?
The important file is in an other folder, search for a file named wallet.dat on your computer.
Could be this path C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin

If you still have Coins on mtgox.com you could try contacting the support there.
I don't think Liberty Reserve had Bitcoin wallets, so they probably aren't there. Don't know anything about goldexpay.

Thanks! I found a wallet.dat file on my computer, dated 6/1/2011.

Now what?

That's the file that contains the keys to access the Bitcoins (so make a copy right now, so you don't lose it when you reinstall the Bitcoin-client or something).

You should probably install a new version of the bitcoin-qt client and let it update (going to take a while, it will create a new wallet.dat) and (close the program) replace the wallet.dat with your old stored one. If you had any Bitcoins there, they should show up then.

(btw: does anyone know if blockchain.info supports the import of wallet.dat? That would be a faster and easier way.)

Yes.  Make a copy of it.  Very important, before you mess around with anything, make sure you have a copy of the wallet.dat in a safe place.

Thanks, all. I downloaded and am running the new version of Bitcoin QT. And you're right; it's taking a LONG time :-)

Bitcoin-qt downloads the history of all transactions (also known as blockchain), there are light clients that don't need to download all of it.
But those don't use the wallet.dat format, so you will have to use Bitcoin-qt for now.
The blockchain is >10 GB.

At the bottom of the Bitcoin QT window, "Synchronizing with network" started in the high-400 weeks and slowly counted down. But now it's been stuck on 81 weeks for over an hour. Any ideas?

could be just alot of transactions in that part. if it dosnt get anywhere you can close bitcoin-qt wait a minute and open it again and it will resume

Thanks. So if I close bitcoin-qt and turn off the computer tonight, then it will resume when I start it up again in the morning, right?

You can do that but why not just leave your PC on and let QT run overnight?
It can take more than 24hrs to download the blockchain.

yes.

some people dont like leaving computers on all night. and in some cases ISPs can bitch about large amounts of data downloading continuously for 24 hours

Pretty sure you can just import it into Blockchain.info.

With this it's quicker: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145386.0


Is this going to be one of those million dollar stories?

Two and a half years ago bitcoin was really cheap...

I shut down Bitcoin QT, restarted the computer, started up Bitcoin QT and now it's counting down the weeks (slowly) as it was doing before.

It will take hours and hours, just leave it on till it's done.

Hehe I will watch this thread. I hope for you that you bought a lot of Bitcoins 2.5 years ago.

If any, it wouldn't have been much. Somehow $30 is in my brain. Looking at some history charts, that time of April-June 2011 was when the price ran up into the high teens (US$) instead of being really low. So I might be looking at only a few hundred dollars.

You can download a big chunk of the blockchain with bittorrent, by using that it will take less time to synchronize, something like one day, it will depend on several factors but much less than letting Bitcoin-QT from scratch.

Check here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145386.0

I thought I'd check in to say that bitcoin now shows "4 weeks behind", much better than the almost-500 weeks it started with. So it will be finishing any day now :-)

What should I do after it finishes synching to find out if I have any bitcoins, and if so to redeem them for $US? Remember, I have the original wallet.dat file saved.

If you're just trying to find out if the wallet has and bitcoins and immediately sell them for U.S. dollars if you do, it might have been faster/easier to just try importing the wallet.dat file into a blockchain.info wallet:

https://blockchain.info/wallet/import-wallet

Well, that's not the path I chose. So I'm looking for what to do after the bitcoin sync finishes.

Or is the blockchain method a better one, aside from being faster?

Can't wait to see the results!

When the sync is done, shut down Bitcon-Qt.

Find the data directory for your operating system:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory

This is where the current wallet.dat is located.

Remove the current wallet.dat from that data directory, and replace it with your backup of wallet.dat.

Start Bitcoin-Qt back up.  It will scan through the blockchain that you've downloaded and search for any unspent outputs to addresses in the wallet.dat that you just installed.  Depending on how fast your computer is, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.

Bitcoin-Qt should then display your old bitcoin addresses in the "Receive" section and show the entire balance of bitcoins that you can access with that wallet.dat.


I guess that depends on what you mean by "better".  It is certainly faster and easier (seconds or minutes instead of hours or days) .  It's possibly slightly less secure, but not enough less that I'd be worried about it.

Watching this thread closely! As for your question about redeeming them for USD, you should have no issue selling them for market value over at Coinbase, however I'm pretty new here so more experienced users may have a better suggestion.

OK, another question. My bitcoin sync message was down to "2 days behind" earlier today. I left for about two hours, with bitcoin running, and when I came back it said "7 days behind". Is that just  how it works? Or?

Bitcoin finished the sync. I renamed the "live" wallet.dat file, then put the saved wallet.dat file in its place. Then started bitcoin. What happened is that it kept displaying the bitcoin splash screen, with "verifying blocks" at the bottom. That went on for several minutes so I restarted the computer, then against started bitcoin. The same thing is happening. Shouldn't that splash screen go away, leaving the bitcoin window displayed?

Bitcoin is using about 20% of the CPU (task manager). In fact, if I put something over the splash screen (like this page), then move it away, the area that was the splash screen contains the prior page that was in that location. it's been 15 minutes now this last time.

It finally stopped that splash-screen thing and displayed the bitcoin-wallet window. But it says Balance: 0.00 BTC and Unconfirmed: 0.00 BTC. That means that I didn't actually complete a bitcoin purchase before, right?

The tooltip for the green check mark at the bottom right says "Up to date. Processed 267613 blocks of transaction history."

Anything else to try?

Darn, I was hoping for a large cache of coins.

No more than I was :-)