Bitcoin Forum

I had bitcoin in my client, then my computer was stolen!???
I don't know what to do?? I have the adress it was sent to
That my client was supposed to receive, it never recieved them
Before it was stolen.

First question, did you back up your wallet to a USB or cloud hosting or something?
If not then you have a problem.
 But, you said something about sending BTC? What is that about? did you send some to your stolen wallet? If that is the case, it may be because the thief has not yet turned on the client.

The address it's sent to is just the public key which is worthless when it comes to retrieving the bitcoins. If you have a backup of the wallet.dat file it contains the private keys, which is what you need to recover the coins. If you do have that file then transfer the coins elsewhere immediately. If you don't have it...you're boned. Even if the person who stole your computer doesn't take them you can't access them.

If your wallet.dat file was encrypted, your bitcoins can't be stolen (though if it's not encrypted, it's another story), but they are lost forever if you don't have a backup.

Two options:
a) you made no backup = your funds are gone forever. 
Bitcoin is like cash. 
Bitcoin is like cash.
Bitcoin is like cash. 
Bitcoin is like cash.

If someone steals your cash it is gone.
If your cash is destroyed or lost it is gone.

Technically Bitcoin has an advantage over cash in that you can back it up.  If you didn't then it is gone.


This doesn't even make any sense.  If the wallet saw stolen how do you know the funds haven't been received.  One thing is certain you should stop sending funds to a wallet you no longer have.

Sorry for your loss bro.

No backup? Lol, time for us to laugh

People don't backup and then whine when something bad happens  ::)And no, backup is not only for btc, it is for everything so saying "but i tought bitcoin..." is not a valid reason.

No risk - no fun :-P

just curious ... getting my comp stolen (or I drop it in a lake or something) seems horrible, I tend to want to leave a lot of my BTC in e-wallets.  is this smart?  I suppose then my risk is that the e-wallet screws me, but at least this way I can spread it out to multiple wallets and leave some on my comp too.  Is this smart?  What do other people do?

Is the private key in the wallet all you need to recover the coins associated with that key, or do you also need to know the public keys?

IE, if I backed up my wallet a week ago and have since created a dozen new addresses and received coins in them, could I recover everything if the wallet is lost/stolen with just the private key, or would I need the private key + a list of all the addresses?

sorry about your loss man. This sucks.

There is 1 private per address.  A public address can be trivially recreated from the private key so the only thing which needs to be saved is a pricate key.  The wallet file of the default client maintains all used public/private keypairs as well as a keypool of the "next" 100 private keys to be used. 

As long as you haven't used more than 100 new private keys since your backup no funds will be lost.

Generally speaking you use 1 new private key every time you:
a) SEND coins (receiving coins is "free").
b) click the NEW ADDRESS button.

You should periodically update your backup to ensure the backup contains all private keys in use by the wallet.

You only need the private keys, because the addresses could be derived from the private keys anyway.  If you backed up your wallet.dat less than 100 transactions ago, you're still covered.  The client is programmed to create and maintain a future pool of addresses that defaults to 100.

I hope this wasn't involving a large sum of BTC.

Bummer. Make sure you keep multiple backups from now on.

2 words: deterministic wallet!
another word: Armory!
2 more words juts for fun: Paper backup!