Recover legacy adres Pywallet?

[junior_clk]

I mined in 2009-2010 so its a legacy adres
Don't have the wallet.dat but the compressed adress of 34 characters maybe BIP13 becouse it starts with a 3
and the secret key of 17 characters all uppercase

can I use pywallet to get this into a new wallet.dat?
Or can I convert it somehow so I get the legacy adres from it so I can sweep it to my trezor?

[apogio]

I mined in 2009-2010 so its a legacy adres
Don't have the wallet.dat but the compressed adress of 34 characters maybe BIP13 becouse it starts with a 3
and the secret key of 17 characters all uppercase

can I use pywallet to get this into a new wallet.dat?
Or can I convert it somehow so I get the legacy adres from it so I can sweep it to my trezor?

There is no way to have mined bitcoin in 2009-2010 in P2SH address, because it was introduced later by Gaving Andresen, if I am not mistaken.

I am also not aware of secrets that have 17 characters.

Perhaps you 're looking for a brainwallet, where the passphrase is 17 characters all uppercase. Do you remember anything like this?

Feel free to share the address (not the secret) here if you want.

Are you also sure that you didn't purchase this information anywhere? Because if so, it is most likely (if not definitely) a scam.

[Ambatman]

I mined in 2009-2010 so its a legacy adres
Don't have the wallet.dat but the compressed adress of 34 characters maybe BIP13 becouse it starts with a 3
and the secret key of 17 characters all uppercase

I don't understand. None of your information seem accurate
According to the start, it's a P2SH address which was developed in 2012 through BIP 16.
BIP 13 isn't an address format but URI for payment.

I have not heard of a secret key of 17 characters except you are poorly recalling or it's incomplete.

can I use pywallet to get this into a new wallet.dat?

PyWallet can't do anything since you don't have a wallet.dat
It's  for extracting keys from wallet files, not creating them from scratch.

[BitMaxz]

Never heard that there's a private key that contains 17 characters it might be mini key from casascius coins but the problem is the minimum mini keys have 22 to 30 characters long I never seen 17 characters before.

It seems that you don't have any wallet generated at that time; you might be trying to decode unknown files, and you think it's your wallet.

You better check https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_address_prefixes to know the exact format of addresses and private keys.

If you still insist that it is the key from your Bitcoin wallet, try importing the 17 characters to Armory Wallet because it supports mini keys. You can also try to check it on bitaddress.org under wallet details. Let's see if it will recognize it, and it should also give you the right address and compress/uncompress private key that you can import to any wallet.

[nc50lc]

Before it gets deleted, I'll quote this reply by OP in a quite old thread with additional "interesting" information:

Hi
I mined back in 2010 there was no blockchain you didn't need a wallet.dat
Found a txt file with a 34 character adres in it starting with a 3 and a secret key of 17 characters
the txt file was from 2010 so it's genuine, a paper/brain  wallet
just don't know how to convert it to a wallet.dat or what to use to get the true adress

If you use bitcoin 0.2 i believe and use the wallet.dat in https://privatekeys.pw/wallet-parser/bitcoin/
it states  Wallet is probably fake: Too small key pool size (1 < 100).
but still gives the correct unencripted legacy adres

There's Bitcoin Blockchain in 2010, Bitcoin Core automatically creates a wallet.dat file and it needs it to use "generate" to mine bitcoins.
The note about the "key pool size" means that your wallet.dat could be an old wallet when the default gap limit is less than 100 or during the very old times when there's no concept of gap limit.
But that can be easily reproduced even today to create a fake wallet.dat containing an address with high balance but with non-matching private key.

Since you're talking about wallet.dat file in the quote, perhaps the "secret key" is its wallet encryption passphrase.
Otherwise, that's too short to be a private key, even the smallest mini private key is longer than that.

[apogio]

Could it be a brain wallet and the 17 characters being the wallet's mnemonic phrase to be hashed to generate the wallet?

I don't know when the brain wallets were introduced and couldn't find it (easily) online.

[Cricktor]

~~~

I found the following reasonably methodic paper Examining the Use and Abuse of Bitcoin Brain Wallets from where I read that brain wallets may have come to approximate first use somewhere around September 2011. That's based on what the researchers found as compromised brain wallet addresses due to their compiled password pool they examined for brain wallet usage. (My interpretation could be flawed.)

So, I don't think it's something used by OP when he pretends to have mined in 2009/2010. Some details simply don't add up to what OP initially posted when we look at solely a time frame of 2009/2010.

If he only has the address and no private key(s) or wallet.dat from 2009/2010, I don't see a way to recover the coins. The official Bitcoin wallet software from that early years could mine/generate coins. The official wallet used random private keys, nothing deterministically derived. The HD Bitcoin Core wallet came later to overcome backup and recovery issues with private key pool usage in wallets that used JBOK ^{Just a Bunch Of (independent) Keys}.

So, without the wallet.dat, the private keys are very likely permanently lost.

[apogio]

So, without the wallet.dat, the private keys are very likely permanently lost.

Yes, but my suspicion remains. It's highly more likely that OP purchased something, because they thought they would find bitcoin sitting in this something.
It's more likely than every other scenario where a secret key of 17 characters () exists and can unlock coins at an address starting from 3 that was somehow the target of mined coins back in 2009-2010.
It simply doesn't add up, as you said.

[Cricktor]

I'm with you that OP very likely doesn't tell the whole story. It could be reasonably likely as you say a fake wallet where he was scammed to almost 100% certainty and he just doesn't want to admit it, because he wouldn't get any contribution here to his liking. If someone doesn't want to see the truth, well, what can you do? Speak out the truth firm and loud and move on.

If he started the topic with "I got a wallet full of coins and need help to recover them", we'd only respond: "You were almost 100% scammed!"

[junior_clk]

@apogio and @Cricktor
I understand what you imply
So I did my homework this time.
When I did getaddressinfo on my "address" starting with a 3
it gave scriptPubKey a914 ****87 so I know now that belongs to a P2SH legacy address, used in the first 3 years, just what I said.

When I went over the programming from the early version of bitcoin core they mention secretKey like I said
but that is just a other name for scriptSig, and so it is needed for the SH from the legacy address.

My question remains, how can I make a descriptor for this, to put in my new legacy wallet, or new wallet in 0.29?
Or how to make a transaction with sendall? because they are all mined bitcoins, so coinbase, and I don't know the UTXO.

Thnx for any help you can give me

[Cricktor]

I'm not really familiar with early or rather first P2SH stuff. But from what I understand about inner Bitcoin "mechanics", you still need the private key which you don't seem to have, unless your 17-chars-secret is a brainwallet.

Your 17 character secret (all uppercase) could be different things, some suggestions have been provided here.

If it's a brainwallet, then SHA256(17-char-secret) would give you the "bare" private key as 32 bytes or 64 hex-chars. Do this only on an offline secure and disposable environment like a Live-Linux, Tails or similar. Don't expose "naked" private keys to an online environment which safety status you don't know or can't assess.

If it's anything else, I would say, you're out of luck as early wallets from standard Bitcoin client software were a key pool of independent, unrelated random private keys. If you don't have your wallet.dat file, you don't have the private key(s).

To construct a descriptor that can sign a transaction, you need the private key. There's no way around this, as far as I understand and know it.

Do you know why you don't have a wallet.dat file from your mining period in first years?

[junior_clk]

it was mined with java or something I believe
back then they believed PRNG was a strong encryption so the 16 characters comply with a javaprng i think

[pooya87]

it was mined with java or something I believe
back then they believed PRNG was a strong encryption so the 16 characters comply with a javaprng i think

Then you have to think back and try to remember what tool you used to create this key (if it is a key) and then reproduce the same steps (eg. hashing the 16-17 char long string you have) to get to an actual 256-bit private key that you can use for bitcoin.

After that since your address is a P2SH one you also have to figure out how that key is used to derive that P2SH script (eg. is the redeem script a multisig, locktime, a custom script,...). Because you need a redeem script to spend the coins in it, a key is not enough.