Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

In my initial post I advised that I had an address that was receiving BTC payments from a mining pool but that I had only the receiving payout address.. I have been unable to decipher which wallet service I may have used that generated the current address that is receiving these BTC payments. I have tried going to various wallets and trying to reset a wallet password by entering my  various email addresses in hopes that I get an email with a wallet that shows this public key being generated but I have had no luck in finding the wallet that generated this pay address. Now I have so many freaking new wallets my brain is spinning out of control!!

These are the only facts I can confirm:
1) I have a public address receiving BTC, I do have a coin base Wallet from around the time I believe I set up this unknown wallet but in coin base it does not show the public address in my pool as being generated.
2) I think have a Password for a Wallet. The password I most definably a long string of number letters that i can confirm I would have been the one that selected this specific phrase.

3) I received my first deposit in the public address in mid Feb, so i am assuming that i set up my wallet end of Jan beginning of Feb

4) I am not sure if this matters but I need the wallet in order to test mining with few Blue Furry USB Block Erupters on a Raspberry Pi. (Although the have no hashing power they are currently still running)

3) I various drives laying around due to the fact that I am constantly ripping out a drive and reinstalling windows. I have tried to search these drives for a wallet .dat file but no success. Any suggestions to of search word/phrase possibilities.

4) If I am correct, a private wallet key for should begin with a 5 or a 9. Is it possible to search in Win7 for a specific formatted string such as private key using a variable for the first character.

Currently I am at a 2 BTC loss if I cannot relieve these coins so I will need to change my pools receiving payout address and set up a new wallet.
 Obviously I wasn’t knowledgeable the first time doing this so how would I go about getting a new wallet setup and backed up correctly. 
Thanks to for taking the time to read my issues and I welcome your suggestions!!
what an how should I get this new wallet and  guess it isnt too bad,

Finding the private key is going to be rather difficult, especially if you might even have used a web based wallet (such as coinbase, or blockchain.info).

To start with, I'd immediately set up a new wallet, and create a good backup of it.  Store the backup in a safe place where you know you can find it in the future if necessary, and put a big label on it that says "My bitcoin mining wallet!"

Then change the payout address to this new wallet right away.  That way even if you don't find your original wallet, you won't continue losing more bitcoins to the unknown address.

Given how new and uninformed you were, it is even possible that you accidentally put someone else's bitcoin address as the payout address for the mining.  You wouldn't be the first newbie (or second, or third, etc.) to make that mistake.  I've responded to many newbies who come here to bitcointalk.org and their first post is:


Bitcoin doesn't have a "sending address".  In every one of these instances, what the newbie accidentally did was choose from their transaction history an address that they previously sent to.  In other words, someone else's address.

If you made this same mistake when you were a newbie setting this all up, then you'd have to figure out whose address it was, and ask them to send the bitcoins back to you.

If the address belonged to an entity that no longer exists (such as silk road, bitfloor, MtGox, etc.), then getting those bitcoins back would be extremely unlikely.

D.H., I agree with your sugestion regarding a new wallet is needed but I am not 100% certain how to safely create and back up a wallet and its private key. Can you reccomend a trusted video or possibly step me though it?

Make sure your computer is free of malware, and download one of the popular wallet client (qt, electrum, multibit, mycelium, etc.) from its official site.

Of course, it is even better to get an offline wallet (generate and keep your wallet in an machine never connected to internet) or paper wallet (http://www.coindesk.com/information/paper-wallet-tutorial/).