Bitcoin Forum

Hi, 6 years ago a friend with whom I no longer have contact gave me a small amount of bitcoin.
I never did anything about it and do not have any reference re them.
What I since found on my laptop is a string of 256 characters labelled ´keys´
Could this be relevant to my missing bitcoin?

If so, how do I go about dealing with it? I already have some bitcoin in my wallet.

Many thanks.

First and foremost, you are probably getting lots PM already for 'help'. Do NOT disclose your 256 characters labelled ´keys´ to any of them.

In last 6 years, Bitcoin's USD value has already gone up ~200x. So, whatever was gifted to you is now worth ~200x in USD value. Plus, you can have many free fork and airdrop coins out of it. If anyone gets your key, assume it is irreversibly gone.

Thank you for the advice, thankfully I am aware of not disclosing anything.  Yesterday I sold and got back my initial investment, so now I have the balance which will grow....so it seems.  I tend to want to play safe as I am a bad gambler.

You can refer to this article to educate more about sha256 key use and description.

I'm not that expert on cryptography but I believe the one you are holding is the sha256 key for a cryptographic message like sign message. But let's wait other expert here.

No. ECDSA keys are used for the public/private key. SHA256 hashes has 64 characters, not 256. Message signing is also not done with SHA256 but rather ECDSA.

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Bitcoin wallets usually use WIF for easier importing of private keys and they usually start with 5, K or L and are not 256 characters long. For ECDSA private keys to be 256 characters long, the key would have to be represented in binary, which AFAIK no wallet does that.

Without revealing the keys themselves, can you tell us what character set the 256 character string uses?

If it is binary (just 0s and 1s) then there is a chance that it is a binary encoding of an individual private key. Converting it to hexadecimal and then calculating the relevant address may yield some results, although this seems unlikely as ranochigo has said.
If it is hexadecimal, then it isn't really clear what this number could be. Are you sure it is one individual number, and not 2 or 4 separate numbers?
Or maybe it uses a variety of letters and numbers and is therefore likely to be Base58? Does it start with anything that looks like "xpub" or "xprv"?

This may sound like a silly question, but how did you count the exact number of characters in your so-called potential keys? Hopefully, you did that not by means of any online tools because, in such case, you would have already compromised your sensitive information.

Don’t be misled by thinking everyone who PM you is genuinely interested in helping you get back the wallet and I won’t advise you should by any means disclose your 256 character to anyone or your private keys they are to be kept in a sect location where only you can access. Don’t joke with your wallet because in the past couple of years bitcoin have increasing ridiculously. So imagine what you have in your wallet right now.

Thanks for trying to assist.  I will not reveal anything of the numbers to anyone.  I made an error above, there are 236 numbers not 256.  I don´t know if they are meant to be together or not.  There is a mix of upper case, lower case, numbers, slashes, plus symbols.  It does not start with the numbers etc as suggested above.  I counted them by hand/eyes .

I'm afraid this could be almost anything, in that case.

There are no obvious private key related numbers which are 236 characters long (or some standard fraction thereof). The commonly used base systems in bitcoin - binary, hexadecimal, and Base58Check - do not include slashes or symbols. Most likely, this is an encrypted private key, seed phrase, wallet file, or some other encrypted data.

By any chance are the first characters "U2FsdGVkX1"?

It sounds like it is base-64 encoded. I have no idea what the contents might be. There are plenty of ways to decode base-64, though you should be careful because it is potentially a seed or a private key. Even after decoding, it might not be obvious what the contents are.


Good guess. If that is the case, then it is encrypted and you need the passphrase.