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June 07, 2020, 12:46:38 AM |
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Don't feel bad. My browser keeps login data and sometimes I look through it for fun and to prune some old stuff. I found a Bitcoin address that had been used to login into some wallet site or something last year and actually had several of my old addresses stored in there. Halfway through I hit one with a balance of 139 BTC. This had to be back in 2012 or maybe earlier and came from mining, back then it was not worth much. But, when I found it, the BTC price was sitting around $2000, I tried for a day to go to every site I could think of and login and never got anywhere. The site where I got the address may even be closed now, or maybe it was even Cryptsy, lol. At this moment, that would be worth $1,343,000. You figure, dumping the balance would maybe net $500,000, because it would be a harsh dump and the price would drop almost immediately, but I won't sell like that anyway. But, that is definitely enough for a very nice BTC house and car, lol. Without your wallet.dat, you can't get in, just like I will likely never find the site or wallet I had, as well as many others that I used for a minutes and dropped when the price was very small. As many people say with collision mining, the odds of hitting a working private key are so low that you might as well mine BTC.
But, one thing to think about, if you have the computer where the wallet.dat was stored and you have not completely reset your OS, there is software, and some free, that can recover lost or deleted files, and with decent luck if not much time has passed. I deleted a file that had my corporate credit card info in it, and got the files back in less than an hour, including the time to Google the software, install it and run it.
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