If you still have the original HDD then why not plug it in?  Then search it for a wallet.dat file.

If you find a wallet.dat file then you can very carefully back it up, multiple times.

Once backed up in its saved state you can then try to import it.  If you did not encrypt it (you may not have at that time),  then you should actually be able to look at it and see what is going on.

If you ran for only an hour you probably did not get any Bitcoins but on the other hand in 2009 there is a chance you did.  If you were solo mining we are talking 50 BTC if you managed to mine one block - that is a boatload of money now so you should definitely check into it.

I happen to be in the storage industry (disk drive engineer/architect for almost 30 years) so let me know if I can help in any way - especially if your disk drive does not appear to work.  Since it is an older drive it may be repairable.

Where are you located?  I am in Colorado and have an extensive set of tools for dealing with old/broken drives.

Good luck!

Every Casascius Coin now has:

1 BTC plus
1 BCH plus
1 BTG plus
"collector value"  (more if it is an older coin with the spelling error) plus
"condition value" (worth more if in better condition, graded, slabbed, etc.) plus

whatever other forks you care to mention (Bitcoin diamond, CLAM, etc. etc.)

So when buying or selling you need to take all this value into consideration.

Do you have any more details?  Do you remember anything about how or where you got the Bitcoin address?  How the private key was generated?  Do you remember at all if you used an old wallet (which "brand" of wallet you used)?

What are you trying to say here?  

I see no reason not to use a Trezor at a merchant.  Are you just typing random crap?

Unless you reuse the seed words there is no way to ever access any private key from the Trezor.  It is impossible.  Again, are you just typing random crap?

Why on Earth would you want a way to transfer private keys from your Trezor?  The entire purpose of the Trezor is to keep your private keys safe, segregated from all other electronic devices, and totally secure.

Conclusion:  You are just typing in random crap to increase your post count.

You are correct, aplistir does not know what they are talking about.  Modern HD wallets remember all used addresses. 

The number of possible words for each of the 12 words is 2048 so the total number of 12 word combinations is:

2048¹² = 5.44452 x 10³⁹

That is for the weaker 12 word seeds.  I use the Trezor wallet which uses a 24 word seed so for my wallet the number of possible ways to select the 24 words is:

2048²⁴ = 2.96428 x 10⁷⁹

Compare these numbers to the total number of Bitcoin addresses:

2¹⁶⁰ = 1.46150 x 10⁴⁸

and the total number of private/public key pairs:

2²⁵⁶ = 1.15792 x 10⁷⁷

First, you see that you should really be using a 24 word seed and not a 12 word seed.

Next, I believe the amount of work to go from the seed words to the xPriv then to the xPub then to the generated Bitcoin addresses is more than the amount of work LBC does to calculate the next private key [just a simple increment], the next public key [just add G to the previous public key], then to the Bitcoin address.

So, going through all the possible 12 word seeds is "harder" than going through all the Bitcoin addresses on a Bitcoin addresses / second basis.

Plus, after going through all the possible 12 word seeds you will only hit about 2048¹² / 2¹⁶⁰ = 0.00000037253 % of all Bitcoin addresses.

You are wasting your time.  The person who created the puzzle has already posted exactly how he did it.  It is random.  You will not find a pattern to predict the private keys.

I think it is:

1 convert the BTC address to hex
2 convert the hex value found in step 1 to a CLAM address
3 look up the CLAM address found in step 2 in the CLAM block explorer to see if it still has CLAM

Correct me if I am wrong.

Obvious troll is obvious.

If you have really been here a long time use your real account instead of creating a new one.

If you really cashed out about $4,000,000 in profit then why are you here trolling?

Retire with your millions, move to the islands, leave us alone in our misery and future huge losses due to issues everyone knows about.

"BTC is a peace of shit"

as opposed to what?  A "war" of shit?  I am so confused.

Noob knows not what they are talking about.

There are 2¹⁶⁰ possible Bitcoin addresses.

There are 2²⁵⁶ possible public/private key pairs.

So, there are approximately 2²⁵⁶ / 2¹⁶⁰ = 2^{(256 - 160)} = 2⁹⁶ public/private key pairs per Bitcoin address.

Congratulations!

You did not have to do this.  You could have continued to use the wallet in the legacy mode.  But it is an great idea to do it for the reasons listed below.  Eventually you will be glad you switched over to the HD wallet.

YES.  The 12 words are the seed, the 12 words are everything.  From those 12 words you will be able to recover all your private keys, all your public keys, all your Bitcoins on all your private/public key pairs and your entire transaction history.  You do not need to back up your wallet anymore - there is no need to back up since you can recover everything from those 12 words.

NOTE:  anyone can recover everything from those 12 words so never ever never ever lose them, put them on the internet or in any way allow them to be compromised.  Anyone who has those 12 words can take all your Bitcoins.  They do not need your password.  They only need those 12 keys.  This is because all your current private keys and every private key you will ever use in the future are contained in those 12 words.

Keep them safe.

12 words -> every private key you will ever use -> every public key you will ever use -> every Bitcoin address you will ever use -> every transaction you will ever do -> your HD wallet

Not exactly.  Even in the old legacy wallet you could manage many private keys, public keys and many addresses.  You just chose not to.

Now here is something you need to know:

In the old wallet, whenever you sent out Bitcoins to someone else, the change from the transaction was placed back on the original address.  This was very convenient and allowed you to think you only had and only needed one Bitcoin address.  But this behavior was causing great privacy concerns for the entire Bitcoin system. So...

In the new HD wallet every time you send out Bitcoins to anyone the change will come back to a brand new address calculated from your seed.  So do not be surprised when your Bitcoins move to a new address every time you do a transaction.  It may take some getting used to but that is the way it works.  Since all your Bitcoins are currently at one address you will see the change move to a new address every time you send out a payment for any reason.

You do not need to export your xPriv.  Your xPriv can be calculated from your 12 words.  Technically this is how it goes:

Your 12 seed words are used to mathematically derive your xPriv
Your xPriv is used to mathematically derive your xPub

Your xPriv is used to mathematically derive all the private keys you will ever use
Your xPub is used to mathematically derive all the public keys you will ever use

Your public keys are used to mathematically derive all the Bitcoin addresses you will ever use.

Cool, eh?

NO.  It is impossible to derive the xPriv from the xPub.  You can only derive the xPriv from the 12 words.  If someone gets your xPub they cannot get your xPriv and they cannot steal your Bitcoins.  However, if someone gets your xPub they will be able to calculate every public key and therefore every Bitcoin address you have ever used, are currently using and will every use in the future.  So they would know exactly how many Bitcoins you have and be able to track every transaction you ever do.  This is a great privacy concern.  So, keep your 12 words and your xPub safe and secret.

Again, you have all your private keys now.  You have all your current and future private keys.  They are all contained in your 12 words.  That is all you need to backup - ever.

No, I believe that the private key found is identical to the private key originally used, hence this is not a collision.  LBC just found the original private key.

I think we both agree that it is obviously possible for two keys to hash to the same Bitcoin address.  In fact, as we agreed, there are approximately 2⁹⁶ keys for every address so of course, yes, collisions are possible.

Where we disagree is:  you think that these private keys that were found by LBC are possible collisions.  I do not.

You can waste your time trying to prove that it was a collision.  It is your time to waste.  I am perfectly happy with the simple explanations I have given.  Your position (that they are collisions) is highly improbable.  My position is highly probable.  

How about we talk more specifically.  Exactly which private keys do you think are possible collisions?

Almost all Bitcoin addresses generated from private keys in the 2¹⁶⁰ through 2²⁵⁵ range will probably alias to Bitcoin addresses generated by private keys in the 2⁰ through 2¹⁵⁹ range by the definition of Bitcoin addresses.  So, no, they are not looking for "collisions" in that sense you suggest.  They just know they will find almost all the possible Bitcoin addresses by the time they reach 2¹⁵⁹ so they will not need to search 2¹⁶⁰ through 2²⁵⁵ once they have already searched 2⁰ through 2¹⁵⁹.

This is all a moot point anyway as getting to 2¹⁵⁹ is beyond their reach at the current time.

The LBC is not posting "collisions".  It is posting the private keys that contain or contained BTC.  Since they started at private key 1 and are iterating sequentially through the private keys your notion of "fraudulent" makes no sense.  Yes, someone can send BTC to an address created from a private key in the range being searched by LBC - and people have.  I would not consider that fraud by any definition I know.  LBC is not claiming to have found a collision.  They are only claiming to have found used addresses in the lower private key range they are searching.
 
If by hash you mean a Bitcoin address then there are approximately 2⁹⁶ private/public key pairs that map to every Bitcoin address.  This is a well known fact.  So, yes every hash has multiple keys, in fact approximately 2⁹⁶ keys.

If by "in blind faith" you mean "trust in the math of very large numbers, the laws of probability, and the integrity of SHA-256" then I do deny your hypothesis that this is anything other than a simple bad RNG, a code bug, or someone screwing around and putting BTC there to be found by LBC or something similar.

Probably not.  They are pretty set in their ways - their ways being start with private key 1, then try 2, then try 3, etc.

Yes, I understand that.  I guess what I am really trying to say is that with the entropy of the private key found by LBC so obviously defective the likely and obvious scenario is that this was a defective RNG or bug in the private key generation.  So, why all the fuss over this as a possible collision?  Makes no sense to me.  Just sounds like a bunch of people off on a tangent.

Yes, if you have the correct recovery phrase, you have all the words, you have the words in the correct order, etc. then this page should give you the correct password to your wallet.

Make sure there are no extra characters in the recovery phrase.  Not sure if it matters but make sure there is only one space between each word.  It may be case sensitive.

When you type in the 17 words does the password generated look like a password you might have used?  Does it look familiar?  If not then there is probably something wrong with the way you are entering the phrase into the web site.

If this is not producing the correct password then the most likely scenario is that you changed the password and did not print out and keep the recovery phrase for the new password.  The recovery phrase would have changed every time you changed the password on the wallet.

Is it possible that this 17 word recovery phrase is for one of the passwords you used but it is not the most recent password that was used to encrypt the 7 backups you have stored?

The old recovery phrase is not a seed.

The old blockchain.info wallets were not HD wallets and so they did not have seeds.  The old wallets gave you a blockchain.info only non-standardized recovery phrase that you could theoretically use to recover your wallet - but it is not a seed that can be used to import your wallet into another web site or wallet.

The new blockchain.info wallets do use a seed and those seeds can be used to import your entire wallet, all of your BTC and your entire transaction history into another wallet.

You have an old wallet.

You are doing the correct thing using https://blockchain.info/wallet/forgot-password

You cannot send Bitcoins from a watch only address in any wallet.  Watch only means just that - you do not own that address, you do not have the private key, and you cannot move the Bitcoins from that address since you do not have the private key.  You can only watch it.

These addresses contained BTC.  LBC has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the entropy of the private key used to generate these addresses was extremely, defectively, low.  This has absolutely nothing to do with the hashing algorithm.  Hashing has to do with the calculation of the public Bitcoin address after the private key is selected and after the public key has been calculated from the private key.

Since the private key found was extremely defective the only rational explanation is that the private key found by LBC is the actual private key that was used to generate the public key which was then hashed (by perfectly adequate hashing algorithms) to the public Bitcoin address.  Whether the random number generator was defective or this was done on purpose cannot be established.  BTW people writing code have been known to make mistakes and screw up their random number generators in many ways.

The private key is the private key.  I am having a hard time understanding how this has anything to do with hashing or collisions, whether "fraudulent" or not, whatever that means.

You are correct that "bitcoin can’t be POS"

But when you say "price will make energy bill small" you are mistaken. 

Read this thread:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2465881.0