Bitcoin Forum

Total Newbie.  Apologies for a dumb question.  Please help.
I've been sitting on a BTC wallet and a 'legacy' BTC address since 2009.  The wallet starts with the number 1.

It's a bitcoin-qt wallet and I've just opened it.  It was over 730 weeks behind.  There is an orange header at the top of the wallet with a message

"URGENT: Alert key compromised, upgrade required"

Do I need to do anything other than let it sync?  How would I update the wallet?

The alert key compromised message refers to this update which disabled the alert system: https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.14.0#final-alert. You don't need to do anything about it, except update your wallet software.

In terms of accessing the coins, the first thing I would do would be to make a couple of back ups of your wallet.dat file, if you haven't already.

Depending on the version of your client, you might find that it won't sync. You can download the latest version (24.0.1) from https://bitcoincore.org/, verify it, and install it, and then let that sync instead. Alternatively, if you want to avoid waiting for it to sync, you could dump your private keys from your wallet.dat file and import them in to a light wallet.

I will only add to what o_e_l_e_o already said that imho best would be if you make a separate/safe backup of the wallet file and store it safely before doing anything else (including upgrading Bitcoin Core).

I believe the wallet version I'm using is 0.8.5-win32

I don't have private keys or recovery passwords or mnemonic seed phrases.  All I have it the original password that I used to create the wallet.

It is syncing.  Only 473 weeks behind now.  Started at 730.

The private keys are within the wallet file. You can extract them from it by using the dumpprivkey command. I would only do this if absolutely necessary though, since extracting and handling raw private keys puts them at a higher risk of being stolen.

If your client is syncing, then just let it finish syncing for the time being. After that you can decide where to send your coins to. Somewhere more secure than a hot wallet would be a good choice.

I'm going to let it finish syncing and see what I've got.  I have several hard wallets in my cart at amazon.  If the coins are still there I'll have a hard wallet in my hands in less than 24hrs.

Exciting story :)  regarding the hw wallet I suggest Trezor.
Just a tip, scammers are everywhere so avoid offers for help in PMs, don't share any files/keys/seeds with anyone and avoid any remote desktop softwares like TeamViewer or Anydesk.
Stay safe:)

Trezor is a solid choice and I also suggest you to take a look over the dedicated section of the forum where hardware wallets are discussed[1]. As it stands, it I were to buy one (or more) right now to hold a considerable amount of bitcoins, for sure I would highly consider Passport Batch 2[2]. n0nce did an incredible detailed review that you can check out for yourself here[3]. If you don't live in the United States you can still find official resellers of the device in their official website[4].

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[1]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=261.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=261.0)
[2]https://foundationdevices.com/passport/ (https://foundationdevices.com/passport/)
[3]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5421713.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5421713.0)
[4]https://foundationdevices.com/resellers/ (https://foundationdevices.com/resellers/)

You don't have to wait for it to sync to check your balance. Since from your first post in this thread you seem to know your address, you can just take that address over to a block explorer such as https://blockchair.com/ (or http://blkchairbknpn73cfjhevhla7rkp4ed5gg2knctvv7it4lioy22defid.onion via Tor if you want to protect your privacy) and look it up. I would use this block explorer specifically for this, just in case what you have stored as your address is actually storing P2PK outputs rather than P2PKH outputs. Blockchair will show both types of outputs, while some block explorer will simply miss out the P2PK ones.