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August 06, 2024, 06:48:50 PM |
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Hello! I'm fairly new to this whole cryptocurrency thing, and the reason I find myself posting here is that I have a friend who confided in me recently that a long time ago, in 2010, he believes to have purchased Bitcoin that he stored away and forgot about. Now, obviously, charting the market value of Bitcoin, I've determined that even if he purchased a small amount, it would be worth substantially more today.
The reason he never investigated it until now is because up until about 2014 or so he forgot about his minor investment, because at the time it didn't seem like anything important, and then he had a serious accident that left him hospital bound and in rehab for a long time. He hasn't told anyone else about this potential holding that he has, and as a close friend he's confided in me recently that he wonders what happened to it, and if it's still accessible to him.
Here's the problem: he doesn't remember much about it, as it was so long ago, but he's fairly certain it was Bitcoin, and that he paid for it on some website. And it was in 2010 or early 2011, and definitely not later.
He told me he doesn't remember downloading software for it, but he definitely remembers paying, for something that was called "Bitcoin".
So recently we examined some old computer drives he had, and we found two things:
- A text file on a memory stick dating back to early 2011 (filestamp) that contains a single 16-character text string with letters and numbers, beginning with a "1" and ending with an "l". He is fairly sure that this is somehow related to the Bitcoin that he purchased but he can't remember how. I tried looking this up as a public or private key but to no avail - it's not long enough or in the right format. I tried looking this up as an encrypted "brain wallet" to generate the Public / Private Keys, but the keys it generated do not reveal any Public Keys that contain funds or transactions.
- An old, corrupted hard drive that I scanned for evidence of "bitcoi*" and "walle*". It let me read maybe 1/5 of the drive before there was a hardware failure. I dumped the contents of that 1/5 onto my computer, and scanned the image for those words, and no hits on "walle*" but there is evidence of "Bitcoin Project" on the drive. He says the drive hasn't been touched since ~2012 or thereabouts, when it was damaged.
My questions to you guys:
- How available was Bitcoin to purchase in 2010/2011? It seems as if very few people actually exchanged Bitcoin for money back then, so if his story is correct, it must have been a pretty rare website or one of only a few. What is the most likely scenario if he did actually buy Bitcoin - what website would it have been, and how likely was this?
- What could the 16-character "key" possibly be? Like I said, I tried looking it up as a Public Key, Private Key, and a SHA256 "brain wallet" and nothing.
- What should I be looking for on the hard drive dump I have on that old drive if I want to recover anything related to Bitcoin? Were there specific text strings or byte markers I can look for in the data files stored by Bitcoin at the time? What is the significance of finding the string "Bitcoin Project" on portions of that drive?
- How should I proceed if I want to help my friend (and myself) retrieve whatever he may have purchased, if it's anything at all? And how possible is it for us to retrieve anything if there was anything in the first place? There's not much to work with other than his insistence that he bought some Bitcoin back then, the text string on the hard drive, and the mysterious "key.txt" string.
Thanks.
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