Question about a very old wallet

[imjustagirl]

Hi, my friend asked me this question today. Way back he set up one of the first bitcoin clients, which generated coins. He generated a bitcoin genesis transaction, however it never synchronized with the network, maybe due to his firewall. The transaction of generating the coins never made it to the network, so this transaction is useless now, right? There is no way to write it into the network, and no way to reclaim those coins, am I correct?

[1714178648]

1714178648

[aplistir]

What he mined was not bitcoins, but altcoins.

You can do the same now, if you install some of the first versions of bitcoin. The client would mine coins, but since old clients are not compatible with the current blockchain, the coins would be worthless. You would be making your own blockchain, which would practically be your own altcoin.

The same happens if you mine without connection to internet. You might succeed in mining "coins", but the blockchain could not know it, and wouldn't accept your coins in a later time...

So, no way to reclaim coins, because there are no coins.

[imjustagirl]

aplistir, thank you for the explanation, it was helpful  told my friend he should have trashed the firewall and started mining instead of abandoning it long ago. Oh well.

[ncsupanda]

When you say a genesis transaction do you actually mean the first block on the network? That would obviously point to an altcoin, but based on when your "friend" became interested in Bitcoin he may have simply found a block.
When it comes to old wallets it never hurts to take a look and see - maybe your friend had some coins saved up that he forgot about.