How to check thousands of Bitcoin addresses

[Iamapizzabuyer]

I need to check thousands of Bitcoin addresses for balance. The reason I need to do so is because I lost a small part of my written down private key.  I paid an trustable local expert for recovery and made a contract about that for safety. Now I have a list of every possible mutation of my private key and the associated bitcoin address. Somewhere in this list is my lost private key but it‘s quite a lot to check. I‘ve been doing that for days now. I could go back to my local expert but that would be another lot of money that I would have to pay.

I am just a normal bitcoin user with little technical experience. I am not a programmer or something similiar. I know there a many possibiltys with technical experience. Is there a way I can automatically check this whole ton of bitcoin addresses?

I have read a lot about that and people say there is a programm called Bitcoin Core that can do that for me? But how? That‘s the old wallet right?

[ABCbits]

I am just a normal bitcoin user with little technical experience. I am not a programmer or something similiar. I know there a many possibiltys with technical experience. Is there a way I can automatically check this whole ton of bitcoin addresses?

Without some programming, i'm not aware of any option due to limitation from the website or server.

I have read a lot about that and people say there is a programm called Bitcoin Core that can do that for me? But how? That‘s the old wallet right?

Yes, Bitcoin Core can do that. It's not old wallet/software since it's actively updated. As for how, check this post https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5452199.msg62221925#msg62221925. Although without a bit of programming, doing it thousand time would take long time. And that exclude the fact you need to download 600GB of blockchain.

Edit: See suggestion by @LoyceV instead, which is easier and far faster than using Bitcoin Core.

[DannyHamilton]

I'm pretty sure there's a user here that has published a list of all bitcoin addresses that have a balance associated. @LoyceV was that you?

You could just download the list and then search it in your favorite text editor using the search functionality of that text editor (typically accessed with Control-F or Command-F).

However, 99%+ of the time when someone brand new comes in here wanting to search a large list of bitcoin addresses, they are either a scammer that wants to try and sell a false list for which they don't have the private keys OR they've been recently scammed into purchasing such a list and don't want to admit it so they make up a fake story about how they received the list.

It's very rare for stories like this to be true.  It's not impossible, but it's VERY sus.


EDIT:  I was right, it was LoyceV. Here's the list: http://addresses.loyce.club/

For your needs, since they're YOUR bitcoins and you therefore know how many there are, you can just use the "balance not shown, sorted in alphabetical order" list.  If you've got an address on that list, then you know which private key has your bitcoins.

[Quickseller]

If the OP needs to check thousands of addresses, using control/command F is probably not a viable solution.

The OP could parse both LoyceV's list of funded addresses and his own list of canidate addresses, convert both to sets, and find the intersection of the two sets. Depending on the hashing algorithm, there might be some false positives, but most likely, there will be few enough to make further manually checking not difficult.

[LoyceV]

I paid an trustable local expert for recovery and made a contract about that for safety.

If two people have access to a private key, it's impossible to prove who moved the coins. A contract gives at best a false sense of security.

I could go back to my local expert but that would be another lot of money that I would have to pay.

Why didn't this "expert" check the addresses for funds while he's at it? That seems like the least any expert could do for a paid job.

Is there a way I can automatically check this whole ton of bitcoin addresses?

How many addresses are you talking about? If it's a few thousand only, you can just use Electrum.

If it's millions, this works very fast:

How to use
The most likely use is to check a long list of Bitcoin addresses for a remaining balance.
On Linux, use this to find matching addresses (after extrating the compressed .gz file of course):

Code:

comm -12 Bitcoin_addresses_LATEST.txt <(cat mylist.txt | sort | uniq)

• Bitcoin_addresses_LATEST.txt: the extracted latest version downloaded from addresses.loyce.club.
• mylist.txt: your own list of addresses, one address per line.

Click the quote to read more details. But this requires some Linux knowledge. If the private key is on the same line as the addresses, you'll need to adjust the code for that.

I'm pretty sure there's a user here that has published a list of all bitcoin addresses that have a balance associated. @LoyceV was that you?

It's me. FWIW: you can't notify me by editing your post. I only scan unedited posts.

[seoincorporation]

You could share the list of addresses with the community and let us find the address with the balance, if you only share the address and not the private keys then there should be no risk for you.

What i would do is to download the list of all the addresses with balance, and then compare them with your list, simple as that. I think that is how 95% of the users would proceed because verifying each address one by one would be slow as hell.

[SickDayIn]

There's a lot of suspicious factors here, but nevertheless this can be solved with a simple python script. You require two inputs:
1. A text file with a list of private keys.
2. A text file with a list of public keys (Bitcoin addresses).

The script would need to do the following steps, these could be used as a basis for you to take to a developer as a starting point:
1. Read the private keys from a file.
2. Read the public keys from another file.
3. Convert each private key to its corresponding public key.
4. Compare the generated public keys with the ones in the public key file.
5. Check if the Bitcoins associated with the matching public key are accessible.

I am pretty sure there is a "bitcoin" library for Python, and you should be able to use the function "privkey_to_pubkey" to convert the list you have and programmatically check for a match. I would share my script here but I'm not a great developer and haven't tested it, but regardless hope this is helpful.

[DaveF]

Is there a way I can automatically check this whole ton of bitcoin addresses?

How many addresses are you talking about? If it's a few thousand only, you can just use Electrum.

Even if it's 10s or 100s of thousands it can be done with electrum, you just have to import a couple of thousand addresses and check. If none of them come up as loaded then you delete the wallet and do it again. It's pure grunt, repetitive work but there is zero technical or programming knowledge involved. It's just cutting and pasting from a list.

*I* would not want to do it that way, it's not difficult just time consuming.

-Dave

[LoyceMobile]

Even if it's 10s or 100s of thousands it can be done with electrum, you just have to import a couple of thousand addresses and check. If none of them come up as loaded then you delete the wallet and do it again.

There's an exception to be aware of: Electrum doesn't show the "send to pub key" balance. You could be overlooking an old 50 Bitcoin block reward.

[DaveF]

Even if it's 10s or 100s of thousands it can be done with electrum, you just have to import a couple of thousand addresses and check. If none of them come up as loaded then you delete the wallet and do it again.

There's an exception to be aware of: Electrum doesn't show the "send to pub key" balance. You could be overlooking an old 50 Bitcoin block reward.

True, but for some reason I don't think that is an issue with the OP.

The other non programing option is to just import the private keys into core and then do a re-scan it's just using a command prompt and doing an importprivkey copy paste over and over as discussed.

Will take longer and you need a synced node but it's not impossible.

-Dave

[LoyceV]

You could share the list of addresses with the community

OP disappeared the day he arrived, but this isn't ideal for privacy. And since I expect OP to have a list of both addresses and private keys, it makes a mistake in copy/pasting risky.

True, but for some reason I don't think that is an issue with the OP.

Most likely. But someone else who reads this in the future may need it. I've seen people on Bitcointalk claim someone's address contained only dust, while there was 50 Bitcoin in it.

[seoincorporation]

You could share the list of addresses with the community

OP disappeared the day he arrived, but this isn't ideal for privacy. And since I expect OP to have a list of both addresses and private keys, it makes a mistake in copy/pasting risky.

You are right, there is a risk for OP to do the wrong copy-paste and share the private keys, i mean, is common sense that no one should do something like this but common sense is the less common of senses. I hope OP comes back someday and finds the solution in our answers.

I was thinking about a universal tool for this, a tool where we give a text file with addresses and it runs and verify if they have balance, maybe this is a job for Mr apogio.

The logic would be something like:

1.-We create the text fixe with the addresses.
2.-The program downloads the list of addresses with balance from LV site.
3.-The program compares the address.
4.-The programs create a new file with the address with the balance followed by the amount.

[LoyceV]

I was thinking about a universal tool for this, a tool where we give a text file with addresses and it runs and verify if they have balance

The problem with "a universal tool" is that you'll need to trust it. It needs to run on your system, which is a malware risk.

1.-We create the text fixe with the addresses.
2.-The program downloads the list of addresses with balance from LV site.
3.-The program compares the address.
4.-The programs create a new file with the address with the balance followed by the amount.

I can do all this with one line of bash script (see above). All you'll need is a Linux system, which can run from a Live DVD (or USB stick). This way you're not risking anything.

[pooya87]

Even if it's 10s or 100s of thousands it can be done with electrum

Have you ever tried this? I ask because in the past I've seen many users who complained about how slow Electrum client gets when they have a much smaller number of addresses and transaction history. Like this one with 200 addresses and 1k tx.

Lookin at the code and how the wallet works, it all looks very inefficient (Electrum doesn't need to be efficient for such cases). Wallet file is a big JSON chunk that contains all the key pairs, history, etc. which I always found a bit weird as well (it seems to waste space with duplicate data), is not the best option for 10s of thousands of inputs.

There's an exception to be aware of: Electrum doesn't show the "send to pub key" balance. You could be overlooking an old 50 Bitcoin block reward.

Electrum protocol has that capability though. You just have to send the server the correct request (hash of the correct script which would be <pubkey> OP_CHECKSIG).

[COBRAS]

I think more potential try find privkey from all blockchain and check R vaues of sighnature