Bitcoin Forum

Selling a hard drive I had lost back in 2011 which had a few thousand bitcoins (not sure how much, I'd estimate 3000, definitely more than 1000). The wallet is not encrypted but the hard drive itself (My Passport 1 TB) is encrypted with a password which I for the life of me cannot remember. I know it has 10 characters exactly but that's about it, and it's not feasible for me to bruteforce.

Starting price: 0.03 BTC
Increments: 0.005 BTC
Buy now: 1 BTC

If it has exactly 10 characters, it should be fairly easy to bruteforce. You should invest resources in brute-forcing the password instead of selling it for much less than 0.1% of what you have in it

Problem is you can not bring any prove of ownership of whatever amount of the Bitcoin you have there. Trusting your world is highly risky and I think most of the people around will be on the same page with me.

Its hard to believe that someone who has been into Bitcoin for such a long time never signed up to this forum and participated in it especially considering you have an incredible amount of money stored in there. If you can remember the sort of characters you used then you could potentially bruteforce that hard drive and I think it would be worth investing a few hundred bucks in that.

OP's account registration date was June 09, 2011 so OP was definetely around during bitcoin's early days.

However the claim is dodgy.
If not impossible, maybe OP should try to decypher or find someone to decypher the hard drive, rather than selling it for bits on the bitcoin.
It could be any random cyphered hard drive that you buy and $390 is expensive for a hard drive. :P

If you're serious about your case, I would recommend contacting Wallet Recovery Services (https://walletrecoveryservices.com/) (forum profile (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=130960)) as a 10 character password is definitely bruteforceable with enough computing power. If not now, than in the near future. Your reward for waiting would be significantly higher than the comparatively small amount you're selling for.

I have been floating around crypto's for year and just recently found this forum when i had a question, great ressource of knowledge opened to me ;)

Tough yea, Op seems shady, he can brute force if he wants, even special recovery services exist for these highly valuable info lost.

Seems legit.  ::)

Is this going to be the most expensive hard drive in the planet earth?

I do not think there are any reason to believe the OP. If I had a hard drive with 1000+ BTC in there then I would seek for professional service physically and if needed, I would journey the whole world to find one instead of selling the hard drive.

then make it feasible
for something worth $12M-$36M you can definitely try harder than that
settling for a fraction (0.1%) of its worth, 1 BTC ~ $12k, just does not make sense to me

REQUEST FOR ASSISTANCE-STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL

I am Dr. Bakare Tunde, the cousin of Nigerian Astronaut, Air Force Major Abacha Tunde. He was the first African in space when he made a secret flight to the Salyut 6 space station in 1979. He was on a later Soviet spaceflight, Soyuz T-16Z to the secret Soviet military space station Salyut 8T in 1989. He was stranded there in 1990 when the Soviet Union was dissolved. His other Soviet crew members returned to earth on the Soyuz T-16Z, but his place was taken up by return cargo. There have been occasional Progrez supply flights to keep him going since that time. He is in good humour, but wants to come home.

In the 14-years since he has been on the station, he has accumulated flight pay and interest amounting to almost 3000BTC. This is held in an encrypted drive who's password is currently only known by Major Abacha Tunde. If we can obtain access to this money, we can place a down payment with the Russian Space Authorities for a Soyuz return flight to bring him back to Earth. I am told this will cost  1BTC . In order to access the his trust fund we need your assistance.

Consequently, my colleagues and I are willing to transfer the total amount to your account or subsequent disbursement, since we as civil servants are prohibited by the Code of Conduct Bureau (Civil Service Laws) from opening and/ or operating foreign accounts in our names.

Needless to say, the trust reposed on you at this juncture is enormous. In return, we have agreed to offer you 20 per cent of the transferred sum, while 10 per cent shall be set aside for incidental expenses (internal and external) between the parties in the course of the transaction. You will be mandated to remit the balance 70 per cent to other accounts in due course.

What country do you live in?

I want to calculate the shipping costs

You really think you want to buy the hard drive? Don't forget to post the transaction ID /s

In a serious note, read some of the responses above, especially the one from Stunna.

if he agree escrow in this forum i will take it

Can you post the bitcoin address with 1000+ bitcoins?

whats the address ?

He can not LOL
Read the OP.

He is guessing that his hard drive has the wallet file that has the BTC in there. But since he can not remember the password he can not access them. It was a bitcoin core wallet of course.

If that was my hard drive not sure that I would sell it for 1 BTC, technology is going further so what now is not easy to decrypt it may be in few years so i would say that this is not rationale choice. :o

On the other hand this may be only another attempt to scam people. :'(

I can't find it on BlockChain (https://www.blockchain.com/) but surely one of the other block explorers would have a list of the top wallets hodling >1000 BTC and it would be easy enough to narrow down those that have been dormant since 2011 to give credence or debunk the OP's story?

Wait at least another decade.

Technology always catches up with us.

By the way, in 2030 the value of 1 BTC is way above $50.000

I believe that because of the discussion in this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5165838.0), it is most likely the OPs account was hacked or otherwise compromised, and that the hard drive being described does not exist. It would also be very cheap to bruteforce the HDD if it is encrypted as the OP describes, and anyone would be crazy to part with the HDD for as little as the OP is asking for.

If the OP was telling the truth about the contents of his HDD, I believe it is most likely the coins would be spread among many addresses, probably from mining using his computer. I would believe the inability to prove/disprove the OPs claim is an additional red flag that should discourage anyone from doing business with him. 

So if all of this is true , so we can be subtract 1000 BTC from the total supply of bitcoins because these btc are lost forever. 
In reality, btc supply will be much less than 21 Million, if bitcoins keep getting lost. :)

If you are telling the truth, I don't think selling this is a good idea, I'm not an expert but maybe you can hire someone who's expert in the field to recover your password. You should do a face to face meet up, may offer him at least 100 btc if he can get it, or split if you are too kind, then if it's successful, you both benefit, and if not, only the effort is wasted, not 1 BTC.

This is a question of 1000 BTC and not 1 btc only. Even if you have a face to face meeting with the technical person, he might decrypt the harddisk and transfer all the money to his wallet and tell you that there is nothing in the wallet.  Again remember it is 1000 BTC which can change the person life and you do not have to work to earn the living for the rest of your life, so greediness will be a major factor here.

Not saying this is what happened, but another possibility is the BCT account could have been resold.

I think the OP account could not have been sold because its a newbie account and no one will be interested to buy a newbie. However it could be that OP might have high ranked accounts including this newbie one, however this discussion is just irrelevant.

just the fact that everyone is humoring this claim blows my mind. just shows why there are so many scammers on this site. there will apparently always be too many fish in the sea....

I had a drive that I lost also that had some bitcoins, haha, i also had like a lot of aurora coins which disappeared

A very cheap price for that money inside your hard drive. Well your claim is highly doubtful. So make your story more believable. My advise to you is that you should have someone reputable to give testimony on your behalf.

OP is already 1 month offline and didnt say a word nor updates about this sale or maybe he just decided to open up his hard drive on his own.

Imagine on how much that 1000+ btc cost and if you do know you can open it then 1BTC price of the hard drive is just a piece of dust but the question is,
do really have that harddrive with btc on it? No one will buy if password still cant be remembered.

If there was a way of proving there is Bitcoin on that hard drive and he could demonstrate he is the rightful owner then a 10 character password could be bruteforced especially if the bruteforcing was left for a number of years because that amount of Bitcoin is worth the time and electricity costs that come with bruteforcing it.