Bitcoin Forum

Hi there

I purchased some btc in 2013 and stored them in a multibit wallet. I've since tried to import the wallet to Electrum, but it's a watching-only wallet. I can see the original transactions, however I can't do anything with them. So I'm led to believe the key I have is just the wallet address?

I don't have the seed, and I can't find any files on my old machine relating to wallet.dat etc.

Are they lost, or can they be redeemed through other means? I'm on Mac, I see you can download an old version of Multibit, but looks like its for Windows only, and I'm not sure I have the right credentials to access the old wallet anyway.

Willing to pay for successful retrieval of the coins!

Thanks

If it starts with "1" it must be your public address and the private key must start with "5" for uncompressed WIF and K or L for compressed WIF private key.

If the old machine still alive and you can still access it try to look something like mbhd.wallet.aes for Multibit HD and for multibit classic I think is wallet.key or multibit.wallet.key or yourname.wallet something like that.

Just use that keyword "wallet" and maybe you can find your wallet from your old machine. Once you got them you can start to extract the private key you can check this link below on how to export the private key from your wallet files.

- https://github.com/Multibit-Legacy/read-multibit-wallet-file

There's absolutely no other means to spend from that watch-only wallet aside from getting the private key(s) of the imported address(es).
So you should continue finding the "right credentials" from the old wallet/machine.

Check if there's a thread here that may help or has a similar issue: Bitcoin Forum > Other > Archival > MultiBit (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=99.0).

Correct. If you have created a "watching-only" wallet in Electrum, then what you entered was your wallet address... and not the private key. :-\


Multibit "Classic" never used seeds. It only generated random private keys.
MultiBit "HD" did use seeds.


You will need one of the following:
- The private keys
- The 12/24 word seed phrase (for HD wallets)
- The wallet file (and any wallet file password)

Without at least one of those, you will not be able to recover your coins.

File types for MultiBit that can be useful to recover private keys or seeds:
[walletname].wallet
[walletname].wallet.cipher
[walletname].key
mbhd.wallet.aes

Thank you everyone for those helpful points. One other question - was Multibit Classic/HD only compatible on PC in 2013? This would help narrow the search and stop me rooting through my old mac. Thanks again. 

AFAIK, Multibit was discontinued on 2017; consequently, you might have used your newer machines/laptop computers to store the wallet.

Looking back through the release notes... they had installers for Windows, Linux and Mac as far back as 2011:

So, it is indeed possible that you were using Multibit Classic on an old Mac in 2013.