Bitcoin Forum

Other => Beginners & Help => Topic started by: dubmon on January 10, 2021, 01:21:24 AM



Title: Is there any way to recover my lost Bitcoin? (due to android key rotation)
Post by: dubmon on January 10, 2021, 01:21:24 AM
I'm 99.9999999% sure that my BTC is lost forever but I figured I'd throw this question out there anyways.

I was using the Bitcoin Wallet on my Android phone back in 2013.  I have a private key backup and also know the password.
Anyways, my Android phone decided to take a dump and I needed to restore the whole thing. I had a backup of my phone via Android Kies but sadly the Kies backup didn't include a backup of the data for the Bitcoin Wallet app.

After successfully importing my private key and using the password, my BTC balance is 0 BTC.   I did some research and this is due to the Android Key Rotation (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=271831.0) as there was a security issue due the bad Android random number generator so the Bitcoin Wallet app rotated addresses and automatically moved all my BTC to a new wallet address.  I have the new wallet address but sadly my private key backup is for the old wallet and not the new wallet that was internally migrated.  BTC wasn't worth much in BTC so I was just hodling and not paying any attention to the crypto scene.

I don't have the Android phone anymore and at the time (2013) it seems very unlikely that I could try to recover the BitCoin wallet from the flash memory on the phone so I didn't bother. I just chalked it up to losing a grand back then and a lesson leart about being more vigilant with taking regular backups.

Any creative suggestions would be appreciated and I realize this is 99.9999999% a case of too bad, so sad.

TIA 🙏




Title: Re: Is there any way to recover my lost Bitcoin? (due to android key rotation)
Post by: jackg on January 10, 2021, 01:24:39 AM
If you got rid of the phone entirely then it'll probably be impossible to recover it now. There'd have Ben a small chance if you kept it bu there's probably no point dwelling on that now.


Title: Re: Is there any way to recover my lost Bitcoin? (due to android key rotation)
Post by: bitadelco on January 10, 2021, 02:14:31 PM
When the wallet app rotated addresses was the expectation that you had to retrieve your new recovery key associated with the new address?