Bitcoin wallet from 2011?

[Helloworld21]

removed by me

[ncsupanda]

Question 1: There's no reason you can't use the wallet.dat you found, it is just advised to make a backup as often as possible. In fact you can even use multiple wallets.
Question 2: This plan seems fine - will take a while, you should download a bootstrap to save yourself a huge amount of time.

I believe that as soon as you load Bitcoin Core your addresses should appear, though your transactions may not appear until the blockchain is fully synced.

[HCP]

Question 1:   I read people advising to only try and access backup files of Wallet.dat?, why?. Could it suddenly mess it up?. And can you simply copy by Copy/Paste?

While it isn't likely, there is always a possibility that something may occur that might corrupt your wallet (bad shutdown, wallet file format upgrade, adding encryption by setting password etc). So, when dealing with older wallets, it is generally advisable to avoid using the original copy too much, just in case something goes wrong and the wallet gets corrupted. By working with copies, if anything goes wrong, you still have the original

And yes, you can simply use Copy/Paste to create copies

Question 2: Is this plan ok??..   I plan to let Bitcoin Core download the whole blockchain after I get new harddrive (150~gig??? insane), and then I will see if I got any Bitcoins, right now it shows my balance as zero?, but Bitcoin Core says not to trust it until it has updated all.

As ncsupanda said, you SHOULD be able to see all the addresses in your wallet file... you could check all of those addresses using a block explorer without having to wait for Bitcoin Core to fully sync up.

[LoyceV]

Password wise I am not sure If i am screwed, I think I recall making some insane password? that it was required. But when I open it in Bitcoin Core, then I have the option to encrypt it and the "Change password" is greyed out, which leads me to believe there is none??.

This sounds about right.

I plan to let Bitcoin Core download the whole blockchain after I get new harddrive (150~gig??? insane)

While syncing, Bitcoin Core tells you how far it is behind. If you're sure your wallet was last used in 2011, it won't take that long to synchronize only a few years of blockchain (it was much smaller back then). So I suggest to just start it now.
You can also add "-prune=550" at a command line option when you start Bitcoin Core, this will reduce the harddrive requirements to less than 10 gig (but you still need to download 160 gig).

Good luck in your treasure hunt! Tip: ignore Newbies asking you to Skype them.

[fra.pel]

Hi,
but you don't remember the password of your old wallet.dat? And you want recover it?

[darkangel11]

Hi,
but you don't remember the password of your old wallet.dat? And you want recover it?

Don't ask stupid questions, let the man do his work. Who knows, maybe he'll find 100 or more coins in his wallet and put us all to shame. In 2011 you could come up with a coin fairly quickly. Don't know the exact rates but I estimate something close to 10BTC a day from a single GPU.
Good luck OP, that password of yours could be worth millions