Electrum Sweep or Import ( old BTC wallets)

[Sunset2010]

Greetings 🙏
I have two old wallets from 2010 that I haven't accessed for over 15 years due to personal circumstances. In short, I accessed them via my old external hard drive which containing the wallets. For a month, I've been searching for the correct way to transfer them to a new Electrum wallet. I found that the best method is to Sweep them using their PKs, rather than importing them, so I don't lose my own PKs (the age-old problem). Is this the correct method, please? Each wallet contains 50 BTC. Should I increase the fee during the Sweep to prevent someone from stealing them ?
 I'm still so noob .
Thank you very much. 

[Joy_learns_crypto]

Greetings 🙏
I have two old wallets from 2010 that I haven't accessed for over 15 years due to personal circumstances. In short, I accessed them via my old external hard drive which containing the wallets. For a month, I've been searching for the correct way to transfer them to a new Electrum wallet. I found that the best method is to Sweep them using their PKs, rather than importing them, so I don't lose my own PKs (the age-old problem). Is this the correct method, please? Each wallet contains 50 BTC. Should I increase the fee during the Sweep to prevent someone from stealing them ?
 I'm still so noob .
Thank you very much. 

Telling the amount in the wallet is not essential, you are already asking a question to prevent someone from stealing your bitcoin but you are actually giving an unnecessary information that can make your bitcoin of interest to many that you don’t know.
I don’t think increasing fee will prevent anyone from stealing. your bitcoin increasing fee will make transactions and processes fast.

[Yamane_Keto]

Before doing anything, back up all your files.

Use the Electrum backup on a clean machine or learn how to boot using tails and Electrum wallet.
Open your previous wallet or enter the seed, and check your balance.
If the amount is 50 Bitcoin, it's best to buy a hardware wallet. I recommend Passport Core - Foundation Devices.
After obtaining the new wallet, go to the Send tab, then click the Max button, and check the address.

[Cricktor]

Look, you're dealing with considerable amounts of coins that require a safe environment for a wallet. If you're still a noob, then it's high time to learn how to operate a wallet safely before you touch those wallets and move coins. You don't want to make mistakes that put your coins at risk, do you?

I would highly recommend, as Yamane_Keto also suggested, to buy and do this with a hardware wallet (I don't recommend Ledger crap). Another option is an air-gapped hot/cold wallet setup (an online "hot" watch-only wallet on one device and a strictly offline "cold" wallet that is only used to sign unsigned transactions coming from the "hot wallet"). This needs some knowledge and understanding to operate safely, maybe not ideal for a noob.

Make multiple redundant copies of your wallets. They are likely old legacy wallets with a pool of random private keys or paperwallets. When you say you haven't touched them for 15 years, I would assume these aren't HD wallets, therefore no mnemonic recovery words to backup them.


I assume you want to use Electrum as wallet, best together with a suitable hardware wallet to protect and secure the private keys of your wallet.

Install Electrum only from https://www.electrum.org and don't skip to verify your download is genuine!

How you setup your hardware wallet depends on the model you choose for yourself. Foundation Passport is a good choice, I use a BitBox02 hardware wallet and would also use a Trezor Safe 5 or maybe Safe 7 even more.

Don't operate such a wallet on your daily internet shit computer. I would use a dedicated (likely used) laptop with Linux for the software part of the wallet. I would stay away from Windows OS as this is commonly the most targeted system for malware because of its dominant market share.

If I were you, I would sweep the addresses holding your coins. Just pay enough transaction fee to not have to wait multiple block for confirmation. If you're the only one in possession of the private keys, nobody can steal your coins while the transaction is waiting to be confirmed.

A safe computer to sweep the keys is mandatory because you temporarily use the unprotected private keys of your old wallets when you sweep them. The private keys for the sweep destination would be protected by your hardware wallet. The sweep of your old wallets is the critical unprotected operation which you shouldn't mess up.


P.S.
When you setup your hardware wallet, don't make digital backups of your mnemonic recovery words. Write down your recovery words on decent quaility paper, make redundant copies of your recovery words and keep all redundant backups safe!

Check and practice before you load your wallet with coins that you can successfully restore it from scratch! Use worthless Testnet3 or Testnet4 coins to practice with your hardware wallet every important steps.

[Sunset2010]

Thank you very much guys
Very good, I'm on the right track, but I still have a lot to do based on your advice.
 I greatly appreciate your efforts.

[BitMaxz]

Thank you very much guys
Very good, I'm on the right track, but I still have a lot to do based on your advice.
 I greatly appreciate your efforts.

You are in Electrum section; the suggestion above is a good option but if you want the easiest part, if your wallet is already exist from that hardware with Electrum, then my suggestion is instead of sweeping the private key, use the existing wallet in Electrum from your hard drive. Make sure you open it in an offline environment.
If this wallet can be opened offline, your next step is to make a watch-only wallet. Follow the procedure provided above; you can make a watch-only wallet on a PC or on mobile. For mine, I'm using mobile since scanning QR is easier, but if a camera doesn't exist on your PC/laptop, you can also try to learn how to safely make an offline raw transaction (unsigned) from your online Electrum watch-only wallet to an offline wallet that exists on your hard drive. You'll need a USB drive to transfer the raw transaction to offline and online drives.
Once you learn how to do an offline transaction, if you do it on a daily basis, you will think that it easy to do. For now, you are confused since you are a newbie, but if you know how to do it, that is the best you can do without bringing your keys outside that hard drive it is the safest way to transfer Bitcoin or even use it for daily transactions; it won't compromise your wallet.
I tested these with two separate wallets and two different phones, offline and online devices. There are a lot of things to do at first setup, but once you've done them and set them up well, making offline transactions is easy.  

[nc50lc]

I have two old wallets from 2010 that I haven't accessed for over 15 years due to personal circumstances.
-snip-
I found that the best method is to Sweep them using their PKs, rather than importing them

Interesting... I have some questions:

• Are those private keys included in your backup from 2010?
• Have you exported those from the wallet using Electrum's old GUI?

Should I increase the fee during the Sweep to prevent someone from stealing them ?

You must have read those topics or articles about "puzzle stealers" for you to be concerned about getting it mined as quick as possible.

That shouldn't be an issue for full-range private keys and nevertheless, not a solution to it either. (setting to '1 block away' or '<1mb from tip' should be good enough)

[Cricktor]

My current assumptions based on OP's so far disclosed details are:

• likely two old legacy Bitcoin-GUI wallet.dat wallets
• likely two mined blocks from 2010, indicated by the amount of coins (block subsidy in first difficulty epoch)
• maybe it's only one wallet.dat and two receiving addresses?
• if it's an old legacy wallet.dat from 2010 then it's likely a wallet with a limited pool of random and unrelated private keys (having sufficient backup files is mandatory; never work with the original backups and better not delete old backup files)

OP's old wallets can't really be Electrum wallets as Electrum's initial release was somewhere at the end of 2011.

If the two wallets are wallet.dat files from old legacy Bitcoin-GUI and those wallets aren't fully synced, I would advise OP to check at https://mempool.space if his coins are still available and "sitting on the receiving public addresses" (likely legacy P2PKH public addresses that start with a 1...).

OP can enter his receiving public addresses in the search box (top right corner of mempool.space on a desktop browser) and mempool.space should then display balance and transactions involving the searched public address. This also works with a public key as the search item on mempool.space, but I don't assume OP has his old coins "sitting on public keys (P2PK)"!

OP, kindly confirm that your coins are still there, so we don't waste our time here. You don't need to disclose your public addresses. But I ask for a confirmation because you wouldn't be the first one who thinks he has mined some old blocks in the early days when those mined blocks were never included in the accepted blockchain.

ATM, I don't question OP's story if it's true or not.

[Sunset2010]

My current assumptions based on OP's so far disclosed details are:

• likely two old legacy Bitcoin-GUI wallet.dat wallets
• likely two mined blocks from 2010, indicated by the amount of coins (block subsidy in first difficulty epoch)
• maybe it's only one wallet.dat and two receiving addresses?
• if it's an old legacy wallet.dat from 2010 then it's likely a wallet with a limited pool of random and unrelated private keys (having sufficient backup files is mandatory; never work with the original backups and better not delete old backup files)

OP's old wallets can't really be Electrum wallets as Electrum's initial release was somewhere at the end of 2011.

If the two wallets are wallet.dat files from old legacy Bitcoin-GUI and those wallets aren't fully synced, I would advise OP to check at https://mempool.space if his coins are still available and "sitting on the receiving public addresses" (likely legacy P2PKH public addresses that start with a 1...).

OP can enter his receiving public addresses in the search box (top right corner of mempool.space on a desktop browser) and mempool.space should then display balance and transactions involving the searched public address. This also works with a public key as the search item on mempool.space, but I don't assume OP has his old coins "sitting on public keys (P2PK)"!

OP, kindly confirm that your coins are still there, so we don't waste our time here. You don't need to disclose your public addresses. But I ask for a confirmation because you wouldn't be the first one who thinks he has mined some old blocks in the early days when those mined blocks were never included in the accepted blockchain.

ATM, I don't question OP's story if it's true or not.

The BTCs balance are available and everything is ready; they actually exist on the blockchain. I did everything before asking here. Of course, the old wallet, wallet.dat, is from 2010; there was no Electrum. I'm flying to Dubai tomorrow to sell them tax-free because I'm in a country where dealing in and selling cryptocurrencies is illegal. That's why I only had this question. I'm still noob now, but I've learned a lot, and now the picture is clear. Note that these BTCs were a fixed mining reward at the time.  I don't want to waste anyone's time my question was simple and I'm all set now.