ever find an old wallet?

[vapourminer]

so just happened to scroll back through my wallets history. its the original wallet I made back in 2011. one transaction said "sent: Ubuntu". never remembered it. with no corresponding "received from Ubuntu"

well.. I back things up like crazy and sure enough look through old backups and theres a file named "Ubuntu.wallet.dat". oh yeah..

rename my current installs wallet.dat, copy the ubuntu one in, rescan and there it is. 5.0 bitcoin. exactly that one transaction. nothing else.

its kinda like finding a couple grand under the sofa cushion

price around aug 2011 was around $10.

so, anyone else find old btc you forgot you had? talk about HODLing

[1715554905]

1715554905

[1715554905]

1715554905

[Wendigo]

You are very lucky mate  Personally I don't do any backups and unfortunately I can't recover the clams I have on some of my old empty wallets from 2013 onward. I am kicking myself now for not safekeeping the private keys somewhere oh well lesson learned I guess. I am logging everything now on a password manager that can save notes and such crucial data. Do you guys think cloud storage is good for backups or an external drive is better?

[Hugroll]

its kinda like finding a couple grand under the sofa cushion

price around aug 2011 was around $10.

hmm even if i bought some random currency online for fifty bucks. im definitely sure I'd remember it lol. Although i remember finding a really small amount amount of bitcoins in a wallet that i stored on my old USB drive. have no clue when i got those.

[vapourminer]

Do you guys think cloud storage is good for backups or an external drive is better?

both.

but I like local. redundant, rolling and multiple backups is whats saved me on more than one occasion. one is always in a bank safe deposit box.

all encrypted of course.

heh this wallet was so old it was before encryption was in core.

[vapourminer]

its kinda like finding a couple grand under the sofa cushion

price around aug 2011 was around $10.

hmm even if i bought some random currency online for fifty bucks. im definitely sure I'd remember it lol. Although i remember finding a really small amount amount of bitcoins in a wallet that i stored on my old USB drive. have no clue when i got those.

I probably just figured Id transfer it out again to my main wallet, just never got around to it.

back then when it was new to me I was testing things to see how it worked. this wallet originally was on an old laptop I ran ubuntu on.

[twister]

I did found a wallet which I thought I had used and was empty but it didn't had that much BTC as yours did, not even close to that but it was like finding money in your pocket and it felt great.

Most people would already delete/lost his/her wallet file, i heard a guys throw away harddisk with thousands bitcoin inside it

I wiped a disk partition once accidentally, which contained some altcoin wallets but never throw away any wallets, what if tomorrow a new coin like clams comes along with a blockchain based giveaway?

[SFR10]

I was able to find a wallet I used to use from late 2011 up to mid 2012 and have some funds in it but unfortunately I didn't made a back up or just simply copying everything saved in a notepad since everything used to be saved on my browser in the past and since I installed new windows over the one I used to had (I change windows twice yearly since I play around a lot and always mess something), so as result I don't have the chain words that would help me recover needed information, in order for me to log in (a bit of regret although not that much of a big deal since it's less than a BTCitcoin).

[BitcoinHodler]

so just happened to scroll back through my wallets history. its the original wallet I made back in 2011. one transaction said "sent: Ubuntu". never remembered it. with no corresponding "received from Ubuntu"

well.. I back things up like crazy and sure enough look through old backups and theres a file named "Ubuntu.wallet.dat". oh yeah..

rename my current installs wallet.dat, copy the ubuntu one in, rescan and there it is. 5.0 bitcoin. exactly that one transaction. nothing else.

its kinda like finding a couple grand under the sofa cushion

price around aug 2011 was around $10.

so, anyone else find old btc you forgot you had? talk about HODLing

wow, you da real hodler man!
that has to be a nice feeling when you find some coins that you had no idea existed in the first place. especially if they are worth a lot when you find them.

i don't think i will ever experience this feeling because i keep all my wallets under close observation and even if i have used them a long time ago the addresses are imported in blockchain.info as watch only to inform me about their balances

[vapourminer]

[...]even if i have used them a long time ago the addresses are imported in blockchain.info as watch only to inform me about their balances

thats a good idea for sure.

Im still running the same wallet from 2011 on my daily driver PC. made some others on various offline machines just to move them out of the main wallet around when wallets were not encrypted.

now most btc are in paper wallets but slowly moving some to the trenzor.

[thejaytiesto]

so just happened to scroll back through my wallets history. its the original wallet I made back in 2011. one transaction said "sent: Ubuntu". never remembered it. with no corresponding "received from Ubuntu"

well.. I back things up like crazy and sure enough look through old backups and theres a file named "Ubuntu.wallet.dat". oh yeah..

rename my current installs wallet.dat, copy the ubuntu one in, rescan and there it is. 5.0 bitcoin. exactly that one transaction. nothing else.

its kinda like finding a couple grand under the sofa cushion

price around aug 2011 was around $10.

so, anyone else find old btc you forgot you had? talk about HODLing

Well 5.0 is a lot of BTC and a lot of people are dreaming to even own 1.0 BTC so congratulations on this one.
Personally I have never found a wallet lying around because I always make sure that I know where the current wallet is, and I always pack the wallets together when doing backups and put them in different places but I always remember where the wallets are, so no chance for me to find some forgotten wallets.

[StoreBit]

And I am totally new to the world of bitcoin, my bitcoin wallet is about a few months older, I have created it on this year 2016 and the first transaction to it was from faucetbox.

[tobacco123]

How I wish I heard about bitcoin in 2011! I only started in 2014 and was using Coinbase. Only recently installed the BitcoinCore but it is really resource consuming so I decided not to continue.

Hope more people can find their old wallets so that those coins will not be lost forever!

[BellaBitBit]

Very cool that you found that old wallet.  Some of the stories about wallets from 2011-2013 are crazy, thousands lost/thousands found. I have not been in long enough to have an "old wallet" 

[vapourminer]

Personally I have never found a wallet lying around because I always make sure that I know where the current wallet is, and I always pack the wallets together when doing backups and put them in different places but I always remember where the wallets are, so no chance for me to find some forgotten wallets.

my backup plan is more organized now. FreeNAS rig in the basement with ZFS Z1 (like RAID 5). but back then it was "copy anything important everywhere you can" type of thing.

now after this as i find old wallets Im putting them in one place to check them out. most are copies of the main wallet but namecoin and litecoin wallets are there too.

[thejaytiesto]

How I wish I heard about bitcoin in 2011! I only started in 2014 and was using Coinbase. Only recently installed the BitcoinCore but it is really resource consuming so I decided not to continue.

Hope more people can find their old wallets so that those coins will not be lost forever!

Well it is unfortunate that you can't run Bitcoin Core in your computer, but I recommend that you at least download Electrum because it is infinite times better than holding your coins in Coinbase or any exchange whatsoever. So everyone should learn how to use Electrum at least, but if you want the real deal you gotta have the blockchain in your hard drive, at least pruned mode if your hard drive is small.

[vapourminer]

And I am totally new to the world of bitcoin, my bitcoin wallet is about a few months older, I have created it on this year 2016 and the first transaction to it was from faucetbox.

yeah thats why I looked back over my transaction list, to see what the 1st transaction was. it was from Slushs pool mined on an HD4850

[dollarneed]

And I am totally new to the world of bitcoin, my bitcoin wallet is about a few months older, I have created it on this year 2016 and the first transaction to it was from faucetbox.

yeah thats why I looked back over my transaction list, to see what the 1st transaction was. it was from Slushs pool mined on an HD4850

Woow it's really cool, seems like cloud mining was profitable,
you are so lucky,first you are the early adopter and just found 5 bitcoin on your old wallet, such a great story.
Anyway the only thing that i just wondering is how much bitcoin that faucet site give to the peoples? it must be high rewards, isn't it?

[vapourminer]

yeah thats why I looked back over my transaction list, to see what the 1st transaction was. it was from Slushs pool mined on an HD4850

Woow it's really cool, seems like cloud mining was profitable,
you are so lucky,first you are the early adopter and just found 5 bitcoin on your old wallet, such a great story.
Anyway the only thing that i just wondering is how much bitcoin that faucet site give to the peoples? it must be high rewards, isn't it?

no, slush is a pool. it still exists.

when I 1st did bitcoin Slushs pool had clearer instructions on setting up GPUs and the bitcoin wallet than anywhere else. so Slush was the 1st place I mined.

the HD4850 I mined with was low powered at that point but since I had it I used it to prove bitcoin worked. once I sold the coin, converted it to USD and transferred it to my bank account, I then grabbed some modern cards (modern at that point was the HD6xxx series).

used mtgox and dwolla to convert to fiat. luckily I saw the red flags at mtgox and split.

[LFC_Bitcoin]

so just happened to scroll back through my wallets history. its the original wallet I made back in 2011. one transaction said "sent: Ubuntu". never remembered it. with no corresponding "received from Ubuntu"

well.. I back things up like crazy and sure enough look through old backups and theres a file named "Ubuntu.wallet.dat". oh yeah..

rename my current installs wallet.dat, copy the ubuntu one in, rescan and there it is. 5.0 bitcoin. exactly that one transaction. nothing else.

its kinda like finding a couple grand under the sofa cushion

price around aug 2011 was around $10.

so, anyone else find old btc you forgot you had? talk about HODLing

That's pretty cool to be honest, I'm quite paranoid & overly protective of my bitcoin's so I know how many there are in every source of cold storage & local storage method.

I imagine that as a very early adopter somebody could forget about lots of coins though in an address or two when the price was low.

You should be pretty happy though Enjoy the money you forgot you had.

[tuvok007]

so just happened to scroll back through my wallets history. its the original wallet I made back in 2011. one transaction said "sent: Ubuntu". never remembered it. with no corresponding "received from Ubuntu"

well.. I back things up like crazy and sure enough look through old backups and theres a file named "Ubuntu.wallet.dat". oh yeah..

rename my current installs wallet.dat, copy the ubuntu one in, rescan and there it is. 5.0 bitcoin. exactly that one transaction. nothing else.

its kinda like finding a couple grand under the sofa cushion

price around aug 2011 was around $10.

so, anyone else find old btc you forgot you had? talk about HODLing

That is one fun story   lucky you

[aizzaku]

so just happened to scroll back through my wallets history. its the original wallet I made back in 2011. one transaction said "sent: Ubuntu". never remembered it. with no corresponding "received from Ubuntu"

well.. I back things up like crazy and sure enough look through old backups and theres a file named "Ubuntu.wallet.dat". oh yeah..

rename my current installs wallet.dat, copy the ubuntu one in, rescan and there it is. 5.0 bitcoin. exactly that one transaction. nothing else.

its kinda like finding a couple grand under the sofa cushion

price around aug 2011 was around $10.

so, anyone else find old btc you forgot you had? talk about HODLing

I wish i had something like that. though i do have few wallets of different alt coins. i need to sync and check how much it sums to. all collected in 2013. fingers crossed since i dont remember anything now.
and as for btcs i found 0.018 :p lol.

[DimensionZ]

Congratulations dude I am very happy for your happy ending. I haven't had any old wallets of mine to recover but I have heard a lot of horror stories of people throwing away their obsolete HDD drives from desktop and laptop machines. There was one guy in the UK who threw away his old HDD with a lot of mined Bitcoins on it to a landfill site and later on when the price went to the Moon he was trying to dig it out. The amount was huge I think more than 1 million at the time and his story was all over the news. I think it was just after the price hit $1200 in 2013.

[vapourminer]

Congratulations dude I am very happy for your happy ending. I haven't had any old wallets of mine to recover but I have heard a lot of horror stories of people throwing away their obsolete HDD drives from desktop and laptop machines.

thanks.

I dont even know if I still have the laptop I ran that Ubuntu wallet on. might be in the shed somewhere but I recycled a few laptops and towers a couple years back. but I do pull drives from anything I recycle and toss them in the Stuff box. got a couple RLL and MFM 5.25s in that box.

Ive been smiling all day. my wife too.

[calkob]

I have an old multibit wallet from 2012 which is on a laptop that i cant access cause i dont have a charger to charge it .... its not much but i cant throw it away knowing there is bitcoin on that thing..... 

[Junko]

Back in 2011, when bitcoin was around $11, I invested 10 btc in Pyramining where you were buying hashing power to mine btc without having to buy, set up and maintain any equipment, like cloud mining. You were guaranteed over time to receive back your initial investment + 10%, in my case, 11 btc. I set up a special wallet on blockchain.info just to receive my dividends which they paid out in installments over time. I used to check my pyramining account page and my special wallet for it regularly to see my payments come in.

The returns only slowly trickled in and according to calculations, first it would take ~10 months to get back my investment + 10%. Then it became 1 year, then 2 years, then 3, 4 years and so on due to increased difficulty. So over time, I checked less and less frequently until I stopped checking at all, figuring I'd just check back in a few years to see how things were going while hoping they wouldn't go belly up and/or run away with my money.

So to make a long story even longer...

I had bought a new laptop and never bothered/remembered to add the bookmark for that particular blockchain,info wallet. I had pretty much forgotten about it until around last year when I happened to fire up my old laptop and saw the bookmark there. It was one of those, "Oh shit, a blast from the past," type moments since over the years, bitcoin had had it's various ups and downs and stuff (Pirateat40, US Senate Comittee hearings on bitcoin, multiple new ATH's, flash crashes, MtGox debacle(s), first halving, etc, etc, etc.

Anyway, so I open up the wallet to see what I might or might not find and low and behold, a total of 11btc was sitting in there, built up from a number of micro payments over the years.

Coincidentally, I also rediscovered other special wallets I had made around the same time booked marked on my old laptop in 2011 for receiving payments from a bitcoin pyramid referral scam scheme, various bitcoin faucets and another for Crowdflower where I was paid small amounts of btc for doing various menial internet jobs. The btc from these old wallets totaled just over 3 btc.

So in all, I found a little over 14 btc in old forgotten wallets. I know, sounds crazy that one could just forget or lose track of 14 btc, but back then (2011), 14 btc wasn't really that much. Plus, I was more focused on growing and using my main bitcoin stash at the time.

[vapourminer]

exactly, kinda tossed them around like popcorn heh

[European Central Bank]

I'm way to mean and anal to ever leave any amount of coins lying around to be forgotten. I stay on top of that stuff like a hawk. That's a very cool thing to dig out.

[Rude Boy]

unfortunately, in 2011, I don't even know how to turn ON a computer. Then how can I have some forgotten old wallets? But in real life, I have a hobby of keeping money on books, drawers, etc., and I forgot some pennies too.

[jacktheking]

I found three old Bitcoin address in my MultiBit software. However they only contain "dust" from various old faucets (around 20 cents).

Not bad. At least, I can use them to receive some Clam coin - which I have not do yet.

[BitcoinSupremo]

I didn't have a clue about Bitcoin back in 2011 so I can never have that feeling. I am very paranoid about security, although I am gambling a bit  in the sense I am keeping more than 3 BTC online with Electrum and Debian Linux. But lucky you with 5 Bitcoin I suggest you buy a hardware wallet now if you haven't already done so, I intend to buy one once I reach over 10 BTC, but may even buy one once I reach 5 BTC.

[vapourminer]

yeah I finally grabbed a trenzor hardware wallet a few months ago. most coins are in paper wallets with a little on coinbase just to have it already there if I want to jump on something quick.

[KingdomHearts]

so just happened to scroll back through my wallets history. its the original wallet I made back in 2011. one transaction said "sent: Ubuntu". never remembered it. with no corresponding "received from Ubuntu"

well.. I back things up like crazy and sure enough look through old backups and theres a file named "Ubuntu.wallet.dat". oh yeah..

rename my current installs wallet.dat, copy the ubuntu one in, rescan and there it is. 5.0 bitcoin. exactly that one transaction. nothing else.

its kinda like finding a couple grand under the sofa cushion

price around aug 2011 was around $10.

so, anyone else find old btc you forgot you had? talk about HODLing

Many people would already delete or lost wallet file, i search about that  many people  throw away harddisk with maximum  bitcoin inside it .

[Za1n]

I have stumbled upon a few old wallets I forgot I had, BTC and otherwise, but when I opened them I was not as fortunate as you for they were either empty or contained dust. It is still exciting though, kind of like opening a present to see if there is any decent amount left.

[cjmoles]

I wish!  In early 2011 I was experimenting with way to get money onto poker sites without using my bank accounts....Around that time I was introduced to bitcoin by a fellow student who set me up with a wallet and around 10 bucks worth of bitcoin to experiment with (they were worth a little under a buck if I remember right)....While still figuring out the technology, "Black Friday" hit and all my poker clients were frozen.  I woke up to an FBI splash screen on all my pokersites!  That scared the hell at of me because I was still under the belief that bitcoin might be illegal....I immediately reformatted my hard drive, filled it up with video, and reformatted it again!  I forgot all about bitcoin until a little over a year ago when I found Betcoin.ag....My intuition was right: bitcoin became the ideal method of transferring funds to poker sites!  So, I had the right idea in early 2011 but was too naive to hold out and threw away around 15 bitcoin....gone forever!

[1Referee]

I once found a wallet in 2013 when the price reached $1000 for the first time, that I thought I had deleted, but in there was around 0.036XXBTC which was nothing when I started with Bitcoin, but with the price sitting at +$1000 I found myself a nice $36 worth of coins.

[smaxz]

the story isn't over.. what did you do with them?

that a few days destroyed if you cashed them in.. although i wouldn't blame you.

[Wapinter]

I am not lucky enough to knew about bitcoin in early years.I think you are really exceptionally lucky to have got back your lost password.But you would be more luckier if you had found them in 2013 when price was $1000.If you had sold them then and kept that money,you could have bought more than double coins that you then had.Now keep the coins safely for next big price bump

[vapourminer]

I still have a couple dozen old wallet backups from back then. mainly of my current wallet but there are some other wallets for experiments ( to xfer between them to see how it works etc) plus litecoin and namecoin wallets. I just copied them everywhere for backup purposes as I had no formal backup system like I do now. back then there was no password on the wallet so they are in password protected RAR and ZIPs etc.

gotta run em all through and start labeling them "btc.zero.balance.wallet.dat" and such.

[Bitinity]

Lucky you to find your old wallet and there is still some btc on it, I'll feel so happy if I was you. Unfortunately I knew bitcoin so late (2015) when the price is high already.

[smaxz]

dont forget to dig for clams after you're done with it too.

[instacalm]

Happened to me before, but not 5 BTC! Also logged into an exchange that I forgot about and was surprised with some balance.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

I should be so lucky.  I'll probably end up finding half a doge on this phone 20 years from now when it's a hundred bucks per doge and I'll be wishing I'd bought more.

[Decoded]

I bought 20 btc when they were $5, and just hodled them. My hard drive crashed one day, but I was fine because I also hosted a copy on another drive. But when I checked my other hard drive, it turned out that it had also crashed. I lost my bitcoin that day, but I guess it's because I have a thing for magnets  

[Ardenyham]

unfortunately I don't safe wallets backups.. I am a little careless about these things. but I don't think I left money on my previous wallets. so I don't regrets about my lost password.. OP you are so lucky man.