For old users: check you abandoned wallets/exchange/other service accounts

[hatshepsut93]

As Bitcoin reaches new highs, the amounts that previously could have been ignored now actually turned into dozens of dollars or maybe even more. If you left some "dust" on exchanges or other wallets 4-5 years ago or even more, it could be worth to try to claim it now.

My personal story - I just found $15 worth of alts on my exchange account that I didn't touch for years. I sold them all for DOGE and transferred it to my current exchange account, and now converted it to BTC.

If you don't remember your accounts, search your email with keywords like "withdrawal, deposit, cryptocurrency, BTC, account" and so on.

[hd49728]

If you don't remember your accounts, search your email with keywords like "withdrawal, deposit, cryptocurrency, BTC, account" and so on.

Nice advice and it is my appreciation.

If someone reads this topic, and check then find a balance in long inactive accounts, congratulations for them. They are lucky, very lucky.
Exchanges have rules in ToS that if you are inactive use your accounts for too long (6 months, one year, etc.), exchanges have rights to close your accounts.
Exchanges can sudden change policies or required by regulatory agencies and delist coins. If you are not manage to withdraw before a deadline, you lose your coin.

Please save your account details offline, and regularly log in to check out their status. If you are not a trader, do it once per month.

[avikz]

Ohh! Same experience! I have started to look at all possible areas to recover my lost funds and have successfully recovered around $40 as on date! I know there are more but the issue is that many wallets and exchanges are not functional anymore. I also have 300 units of a token that is worth $2400 at today's rate but now they have been migrated to a different contract address so I am unable to use that token. Trying to get help from Dev team but they are not helping. Pretty frustrated about it!

I used to have few thousands of Doge as well but simply can't remember where I have kept it

[hatshepsut93]

Ohh! Same experience! I have started to look at all possible areas to recover my lost funds and have successfully recovered around $40 as on date! I know there are more but the issue is that many wallets and exchanges are not functional anymore. I also have 300 units of a token that is worth $2400 at today's rate but now they have been migrated to a different contract address so I am unable to use that token. Trying to get help from Dev team but they are not helping. Pretty frustrated about it!

I used to have few thousands of Doge as well but simply can't remember where I have kept it

Tokens and bounties is another possible source of forgotten value, I too have found in the past some tokens, especially airdrops. in my ETH accounts that I didn't use for a while.

Another possible source is forgotten referral commission. Last year I found 0.17 BTC of referral commission  on a gambling site account that I didn't visit for 2 years. Good thing that this site was in my browser's bookmarks 

[hd49728]

Ohh! Same experience! I have started to look at all possible areas to recover my lost funds and have successfully recovered around $40 as on date!

Not only this, some people try to get their banned accounts with frozen inside back when bitcoin tested $20k and climbed to $37k.

Another possible source is forgotten referral commission. Last year I found 0.17 BTC of referral commission  on a gambling site account that I didn't visit for 2 years. Good thing that this site was in my browser's bookmarks 

Congrats! You are super lucky because you got one or few big gamblers from your referral list. It is easy to invite people to join a platform or gambling site but need very luck to get a big user.

And damn 0.17 BTC has a big value today.

[Broly46]

Ohh! Same experience! I have started to look at all possible areas to recover my lost funds and have successfully recovered around $40 as on date! I know there are more but the issue is that many wallets and exchanges are not functional anymore. I also have 300 units of a token that is worth $2400 at today's rate but now they have been migrated to a different contract address so I am unable to use that token. Trying to get help from Dev team but they are not helping. Pretty frustrated about it!

I used to have few thousands of Doge as well but simply can't remember where I have kept it

That’s so true! Their value got frozen after it stop trading, we might need to wait for more exchange to list them, may be in very long in future?

[irixo10]

That is quite true, because the more the price of Bitcoin grows the more those little amount left or ignored will have some sort of values, thanks for bringing it the notice of everyone because I bet a lot of people won't even think towards that angle, including me. Also, those who uses different wallets for different reasons will most likely stand a bigger chance of getting something tangible out of them all. However, the challenge that might set in could be finding the private keys or even remembering those wallet, but nevertheless, it is worth the shot. Thanks once again.

[20kevin20]

I found around $100 sitting in my old Bisq seed a while ago. Besides that one, most if not all services I've used years ago are down today or have empty account balances.

The only remaining account I am quite sure has some balance from 2014-2015 is Coinbase.. but these f**kers are requesting KYC procedures to access my account (haven't accessed it in more than 5 years) so I'd rather not do it. Probably have up to .05 sitting around there - I still have receipts on my e-mail but it's useless since I am not even allowed to see my balance without giving away personal info..

[Karartma1]

I had a few hundred dollars on bittrex but they asked for SoF, KYC documentation etc. which I am never going to undergo. The good thing is I went out of it before it was too late and I am not planing of going back. They can keep my coins, it's done now.

[bakasabo]

If you were a busy bounty hunter, then I suggest to go through you 2017-2018 post history and you might remember bounties, which rewards were held on projects dashboards. Sometimes miracles happened and forgotten projects suddenly introduce "Withdraw" button in dashboards. Just check if your altcoins are listed, check if there are buy orders and you will earn more than 20$, because Ethereum transaction fees cost a lot right now.

[kryptqnick]

I suppose you're right, but I just feel lazy to do that now  
I remember that I had some altcoins on about three exchanges, and maybe some of them are still alive, but I don't think I had anything significant or that it could rise significantly, so I don't feel motivated to find those accounts and passwords. Especially since the fees are pretty high right now, so I'm likely to lose about half of the profit (if there's any) on them. The most significant thing is that I still have 0.5 LTC somewhere, and I guess I'll try to find that one, but not those scraps of alts. Although I did have some DOGE in 2017, and the price went up significantly, so maybe I should look for that as well.
Edit: I've found that LTC from 2017, glad to see it's still there 

[Kakmakr]

Also check your old wallets for some fork coins guys.... I had about 5 old Bitcoin addresses that I swept a while back when the price hit about $25 000 US and I kept them.... I then remembered that it also contained forked coins like Bitcoin Cash ... so I imported it and got some small cash. (this covered my exchange cost and some of my taxes I had to pay for capital gains)

I also visited some of my old faucet sites with withdrawal limits and I was able to withdraw that, because it was much higher than the limit, due to the increase in the price. 

[buwaytress]

Thanks for the reminder. I definitely do have dust on a number of services. Problem with the price increase is that it hasn't at all affected withdrawal fees on these places. It's really segwit/batch/Lightning I'm waiting for, but given how slow exchanges have been in adopting these upgrades or implementing them, not sure I'll ever see the day I can get my balances out. Exchanges probably easier (exchange for a smaller alt with cheaper fees) but yeah, all that dust worth a LOT of money now!

[RokokGudangGaram]

You are pretty right here especially if you still know some of credentials of your accounts or you have some ways to recover your old account. In my case, I wasn't able to recover my pretty old wallet account and upon checking via explorer I see that there are good amounts that was left there base on the current price but I don't have ways to recover it so I just consider it as my losses.

There are some old wallets also that receives some big airdrops so you should check your old wallets especially if it was create way back 2014 and below.

[serjent05]

I did this stuff last week, I checked my old addresses both Bitcoin and ETH address.  And to my surprise, I found some token that has no value back then and still no value until now .  I also remember the time when I failed to sell my tokens at its peak, Nimfa reaches $20 back then crashes, I have around 3k sitting on my ETH wallet, darn this brings back memories of the 2017-2018 altcoin craze.  anyway, got some dust BTC here and there.  It is really good to do some checks on our previously used addresses every now and then.

[The Cryptovator]

Surprising how both of us our minds become the same regarding this matter? Honestly, I am just wondering to take look at all of my accounts including wallets exchanges and so on. But I was lazy to open my notebook where I have written all the details about accounts. Not sure if I would find a few funds, but definitely I will search for them.

But thanks for remind it, hope other users would encourage to recheck their wallets and exchange.

[DooMAD]

I know I've got a friend with some funds still stranded on Poloniex.  Their stupid automated KYC thing kept saying the picture of their photo ID wasn't clear enough.  I'll have to remind them to try again now that the value of their holdings has significantly increased.  I was lucky in that my account was older and for some reason wasn't subject to the same conditions.  I got mine out ages ago.  Never touching that site again, though.

I'll check to see if I've still got some alts on any other exchanges.  It's likely just some Byteball/Obyte, though.  I'm 99% sure everything else I had on exchanges got dumped for BTC and withdrawn over a year ago.

[Argoo]

If you were a busy bounty hunter, then I suggest to go through you 2017-2018 post history and you might remember bounties, which rewards were held on projects dashboards. Sometimes miracles happened and forgotten projects suddenly introduce "Withdraw" button in dashboards. Just check if your altcoins are listed, check if there are buy orders and you will earn more than 20$, because Ethereum transaction fees cost a lot right now.

This morning, I was just checking and organizing my old wallets and the presence of tokens in them, which began to be traded and can be sold. Of course I found something. Each type of token now needs to be assessed individually. There are those that are worth selling immediately, while others still have growth prospects. If soon we can wait for the altcoin season, then we shouldn't sell everything.

[ChrisPop]

This is a good tip. Just think about how much money is lying there on old exchange accounts. I'm also wondering if there is any statistic regarding the permanent loss of bitcoin wallets. Chainanalysis showed some time ago that there are over 4 million Bitcoins lost. Try looking on old casino accounts as well, you might have some change from free rolls or old deposits there.

[tbct_mt2]

This is a good tip. Just think about how much money is lying there on old exchange accounts. I'm also wondering if there is any statistic regarding the permanent loss of bitcoin wallets. Chainanalysis showed some time ago that there are over 4 million Bitcoins lost. Try looking on old casino accounts as well, you might have some change from free rolls or old deposits there.

This chart is stopped in March 2020 and I don't know why it was stopped to update. In March 2020, the chart shows 21.65% of bitcoin UTXO was inactive >5 years. If it was not changed from March 2020 to Jan 2021, it can be an evidence of loss on those bitcoin. The 21.65% of current circulating supply is about 4 million of bitcoin and I guess it is the figure you are talking about.

If those UTXOs won't be spent in the next one or two years, it will be a more solid evidence of lost bitcoin.

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