HELP: Recover Bitcoins mined using 0.3.23 client

[cdcine]

Good evening,

I am not an expert in the topic but due to the recent boost of bitcoin exchange value, I remembered I mined for some time during my years in the college and I did not event pay attention on it.

First of all, I was scared because the laptop I used back then was erased several times to speed up Windows. Nevertheless and luckily, using recovery software I managed to find the wallet file.

I installed bitcoin core and replaced the wallet but I could not see my BTCs. So I became nervous again. I read several forums and they said it was normal to have a 0 BTC if the wallet replaced was old (from 0.3.23 client)

It is because of this I new your help.

First of all a doubt. I received all my BTCs mining. This means that all my reception addresses should not contain balance? I checked each one of my 30 addresses BitcoinCore found in my wallet in BlockChainInfo, and none of them has balance. This means I lost my BTCs?

Do you think there is a solution? I read about extracting the private key using pywallet. Is this trustful? Which is the best way?

I read a lot and I am kind of desperate. Any help of documentation will be welcome.

Thanks in advance.

[achow101]

I installed bitcoin core and replaced the wallet but I could not see my BTCs. So I became nervous again. I read several forums and they said it was normal to have a 0 BTC if the wallet replaced was old (from 0.3.23 client)

If Bitcoin Core is not fully synced, you will not see any Bitcoin.

First of all a doubt. I received all my BTCs mining. This means that all my reception addresses should not contain balance?

No, they should have a balance.

I checked each one of my 30 addresses BitcoinCore found in my wallet in BlockChainInfo, and none of them has balance. This means I lost my BTCs?

If you do not see a transaction history for those addresses, then that means that those addresses never had any Bitcoin, be that through normal transactions or from mining. If you do see a transaction history and there are transactions that send money from those addresses, then the Bitcoin has been sent elsewhere.

Do you think there is a solution? I read about extracting the private key using pywallet. Is this trustful? Which is the best way?

There is no need to do that if the wallet is not corrupted.

If Bitcoin Core is not fully synced, then let it fully sync. Once it is synced, you will know if you have any Bitcoin or not. If not, then there is no way to recover any of those Bitcoin because the private keys are probably gone and are not part of the wallet that you have.

[Chrstian]

If the addresses you found have no transaction history you are looking at the wrong wallet.dat file. If you have the original hard drive then there is a possibility you may be able to recover the previously erased wallet.dat file and extract the private keys from that. I know datarecovery.com in Toronto has repaired lost/corrupted wallet.dat files in the past, they charged one guy 800$ and recovered 30k$~ for him(this was a few years ago, source: ( https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2n02lt/iama_data_recovery_engineer_i_get_files_from ) You may need to pay upfront if you can't prove or provide an old address with a proven balance.   If you're certain there were Bitcoins on that laptop DO NOT throw it away or give up.