Trying to recover old wallet

[Someone_2]

I know.  I'll take it into consideration if the amount in there is worth pursuing.  I did look up the hash speed from the archives, next I have to figure out the earnings, I've seen charts that show the network difficulty back then.  Kind of ironic, if I had known a way to look it up before all of this I would've done it that way, then investigated what would be involved in recovering the wallet based on that information.  Other complications, I don't know that the wallet isn't over written, and or that the oxide on the platters hasn't degraded and flaked away over the years.  So, even if I sent it into a forensics lab that had a clean room and could perform various recovery services, I don't know definitively that they could recover it.  Thank you for the suggestion though.

Thank you HCP and others that have helped on this.

[walletrecovery]

I know.  I'll take it into consideration if the amount in there is worth pursuing.  I did look up the hash speed from the archives, next I have to figure out the earnings, I've seen charts that show the network difficulty back then.  Kind of ironic, if I had known a way to look it up before all of this I would've done it that way, then investigated what would be involved in recovering the wallet based on that information.  Other complications, I don't know that the wallet isn't over written, and or that the oxide on the platters hasn't degraded and flaked away over the years.  So, even if I sent it into a forensics lab that had a clean room and could perform various recovery services, I don't know definitively that they could recover it.  Thank you for the suggestion though.

Thank you HCP and others that have helped on this.

If you mined in solo mode, then when at least 1 block is found, you should have 50 bitcoins in your wallet.

[Someone_2]

Anyoen know the specifics to the formula used for finding the block rewards?  The hash rate was roughly 1.1 mhs and the difficulty back then was roughly 25.  The block reward was 50 back then.  I'm trying to figure out how far it would've gotten in ten hours of running, roughly. Perhaps it didn't even find a block, it was solo mining not pool.

I've tried using google and everything is aimed at the idea of USD profits and pool mining rather than what I'm doing.

[DannyHamilton]

Anyoen know the specifics to the formula used for finding the block rewards?

1. Build a valid 80 byte header (the mining software would typically have done this for you).

2. Calculate the SHA-256(SHA256(header)) hash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2

3. Check to see if the result is less than the current target value.

4. If it is not, increment the 4 byte nonce and return to step 2

5. If it is, broadcast the block to all connected peers, and return to step 1

The hash rate was roughly 1.1 mhs and the difficulty back then was roughly 25.

I believe the difficulty was only "roughly 25" for 9 days back in 2009.

If I've got my values correct, it was:

• 19 from June 23, 2010 through July 5, 2010
• 24 from July 5, 2010 through July 14, 2010
• Above 45 ever since July 14, 2010

So, if you are confident that the difficulty was "roughly 25", then you now know that the exact window of time during which you would have been mining was between July 5 and July 14 of 2010.

By October 2010 GPU mining was becoming popular, and CPU mining quickly became useless.

If you only had 1.1 mh/s then you must have had a pretty weak CPU.  I think a Pentium Dual-Core CPU which was common at the time had a CPU hashing power of more than 2.2 mh/s

At a difficulty of 24, and a hash rate of 1.1 mh/s, you'd solve an average of 1 block for every 26 hours of continuous hashing (or a 3.85% chance of successfully finding a block in any given hour of hashing).

In 10 hours of hashing, you'd have less than a 50% chance of getting lucky enough to have solved a block.