Bitcoin Forum

Hi there.

I have purchased a bitcoin account and possibly may still have traces of my transaction. Where do I start finding my account?

What if an email confirmation or transaction was sent out to me, does this justify that I am able to retrieve my account?

Or where do I find a true source who can help me retrieve my account?

Note: My earlier post(s) was deleted and I am not sure who to turn to on retrieving my account.

Thank you most kindly for reading this.

Hmmm. There are no "accounts" in Bitcoin. Bitcoin started in 2009, so you must mean 2009.

Were you using an online wallet service?
At the time there was only one exchange MtGox. Does that ring a bell?

Were you running a bitcoin wallet on your machine?
Most of us were in 2009. In that case you need to find your "private key" or a copy of your old wallet. Nothing else will work.

Do you have any info about any Tx you have done? Or a "public key(address)?"

Yes, I may still have it. I still have my hard drive.

Where do I start? Or how do I begin this process?

thank you most kindly!

If you have your hard drive... and it hasn't been formatted or wiped or anything deleted off it.. you will probably want to start by looking for files named "wallet.dat". Also try searching for "bitcoin", "wallet" etc.

If your drive has been formatted or wiped or you deleted things, then things get a lot more difficult. Maybe try Pywallet: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=38004.0

If you formatted your hard drive then don't ever boot from it again. Running an operating system on it could erase any traces left of your Bitcoins. Pay a professional data recovery company to attempt getting your Bitcoins back if you did a full format on it.

If you did a quick format on your hard drive then this post might help.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1961924.msg19522772#msg19522772

If you haven't formatted your hard drive and didn't delete your Bitcoin wallet files then try these instructions.

Click the windows start button, then copy and paste the line of text below into the search box that appears, then press the enter key to open the hidden folder containing your Bitcoin wallet.dat file.

%appdata%\Bitcoin

This is what your search box should look like after you have copied and pasted the line above into it.

https://s21.postimg.org/91dnzi7w7/unconfirmed.png

Inside the folder that opens there should be a file called wallet that ends with the extension ".dat". If you find such a  file you can probably recover your Bitcoins from it, provided it's not corrupted.

There are (the standard interface Coinbase provides is an "account", even though they like to call their account a "wallet"), but none of the account services that exist today existed yet in 2009.


I can't think of any online services that existed in 2009 and are still around today.  They pretty much all of them either got hacked and lost all their bitcoins to the hackers, or were scams that ran off with all the deposited bitcoins. If you were using an online service at the time, then your bitcoins are probably gone.


MtGox didn't start handling bitcoins until July of 2010.  In 2009 the URL was being used by Jed McCaleb to advertise his card game "The Far Wilds".



I don't think MultiBit or Electrum were created before 2010.  Bitcoin Core was called Bitcoin-QT back then. I can't think of any other wallets that you could run on your own computer in 2009.

Therefore, if you were running a wallet on your computer, then you need to find a file named "wallet.dat".  If you don't have that file, then you probably don't have any bitcoins anymore.

It depends on where the wallet came from.  An online wallet from a site that still is up and running, created with an email you still control, can be gotten to, perhaps after jumping through some hoops.  You may even have some autofill data in the browser, maybe.

Software wallets can go anywhere from needing a simple password to needing a 12 word passphrase and perhaps demanding the original saved wallet data.  You may need a free piece of software, but if you have access to the same hard drive, try searching the entire drive for files created at the same time as the wallet, within a small period of time. 

I have my hard drive; don't know where to start. I thought I bought it in 2008. It was very early on when I got in it. Now, everybody seems to say it's in 2009. What were the sites where I can log on for these wallet(s)? I don't know where to find my private key. Is it provided by an email?

I think you're full of shit and wasting everyone's time.  You would know if you got into Bitcoin in 2009 - it wasn't so easy to do.

I was not watching Bitcoin every hour since 2009. I purchased it and did not bother until 2011 and now.

I came here to find help, sorry that you feel that way.

Bitcoin was not invented until January 2009.  It is impossible for you to get bitcoin in 2008.  Perhaps you had Liberty Reserve coin?


It is HIGHLY UNLIKEY that you bought bitcoins from a "site" in 2009.   If you bought bitcoin, then you probably bought them from a person that had them.  It was EXTREMELY easy to mine bitcoin in 2009, so most people just mined them.  Unless it was very late in 2009 (almost 2010) people really didn't spend money on something they could easily get for free back then.  If you ran Bitcoin-Qt on your computer, you could get a few hundred bitcoins per day without really spending any money at all.


You would have been running the Bitcoin-Qt wallet (no other wallets had been invented yet). The private keys would have been stored in the wallet.dat file created by Bitcoin-Qt on your computer.  You either made a copy of that file, or you extracted the private keys and stored them.  If you didn't do either one, then the bitcoins are gone permanently.

There were no online service to log in in order to buy/sell Bitcoins in 2009, there were actually nothing regarding registration on any site

That was somehow related to Bitcoin. if you have an email then you should post the content here so we could see what is going on.

How is this possible? Would this be safe on my end? or perhaps already lost permanently? Providing my email address and knowing the fact is untraceable sounds like I had given my chances to lose it deeper. Any other suggestions you can refer me to?

Truly appreciate you contributing to this topic. Thanks in advance!

Mate you said that you have an email for the account, so what does it say inside of the email? I don't want you to show me the address just

The content of your email, whether it's a registration letter or login notification? in 2009 Bitcoin was a brand new thing, no one actually did

Anything for it other than mining it, no one were selling Bitcoin because you could mine it in bulk back then, that's why people are calling

This a lie, even if you managed to somehow buy from anyone then if you didn't save the private key of your BTC address then don't bother.

No one will return them to you now that the price is $2600 even if you find the service they might not be in business any more, sorry.

Even if you did not save the password from a given site, your wallet address, wallet id or username for a site may be there. If nothing else, this makes for a very interesting list to read.  You will be amazed at the usernames and other data that is saved there. 

The most common online Bitcoin wallet is on blocjchain.info and even though you likely know your passwords, the Bitcoin wallet address is converted into a wallet id and that is used to log in.

That wallet id is very likely stored in your browser because it is hard to remember and most people store that info.