Looking for help to recover old wallets (2009, 2010, 2013)

Hey everyone. Just a quick heads up, I’m not a pro, just an IT guy trying to assist a friend who's into Crypto. So, bear with me if I mess up some of the terms... I'll do my best to explain everything. My buddy (let's call him Jay) has some old wallet.dat files from his crypto journey over the years. He recently dug through some old hard drives he had and managed to recover a few wallet.dat files after they were formatted years ago. He used Recuva for the recovery and found these files along with their addresses. Since they were retrieved, we aren't sure about the wallets' current status. Jay mentioned that he's worked with a bunch of platforms in the past, but he's not exactly sure which one he was using when he exported the .dat files, although he thinks they might be from Bitcoin Core. He got into BTC mining way back in the day, when you could still mine coins with USB sticks and scored a 50BTC reward for it... One of the wallets is from those early mining days, but it sounds like that .dat file might be a deterministic wallet connected to three other addresses. We'll call this Wallet 1 (I think he referred to one of the addresses as an origin wallet or maybe a genesis wallet or something similar). When we looked at the main address, we saw the block reward from 2009 and a few transactions, but nothing has gone out for several years. (I’m not sure how deterministic wallets differ from regular ones, so I don’t...)

The longer these walls of texts are, the less believable the story. Here's the simple solution to your dilemma; there is no bitcoin in those wallets.  If you payed for them, you were scammed.

If giving dates in an attempt that someone might be aware of the formats used at the time, screenshots of what we are seeing and explaining what we have tried, with specific questions, equates to an unbelievable story, then I may just have misunderstood the tech support request format in the "[READ BEFORE POSTING] Tech Support Help Request Format" thread, insofar as defining the client, posting screenshots of errors or what is being encountered, etc. The wallets were not bought, believe what you will. A lot of the tools I mention are already covered on this very forum, so I have attempted to outline what has been covered already. Working in IT, we tend to believe in providing as much information as possible in an effort to not duplicate work.

You can't get those results if you open a wallet.dat via Notepad. Those are wallet dump files created by a third-party software, maybe renamed into "wallet.dat" file. If those are your wallet.dat files, it's not surprising that Bitcoin Core failed to load those. Another is the "best block" line which is 0x00, that indicates that the dumped wallet files haven't been loaded and scanned by a synced Bitcoin client. (in other word: unused) If a transaction created in 2009 belongs to a deterministic wallet, it's highly likely that it's just edited-in there (shown not as "watch-only"). You can't spend it since the wallet doesn't have the correct private key to sign. FYI, Bitcoin Core doesn't use deterministic wallet in 2009 or even until mid 2016.

Before helping him, you must have multiple backups of wallet files. You can try with [overview] Recover Bitcoin from any old storage format and come back with more details. The FinderOuter, a bitcoin recovery tool https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover/tree/master If your friend is ready with a paid recovery service, inform him about this. Bitcoin Wallet Recovery Services - for forgotten wallet password http://walletrecoveryservices.com/

ckey refers to encrypted private key, where you need mkey and the password to decrypt ckey[1]. There are many software which can decrypt/crack wallet.dat, but i'm not aware of any software which only ask for ckey and mkey data though. Middle 2016 is the correct date. To be specific, Bitcoin Core starts to use deterministic/HD wallet since Bitcoin Core 0.13.0[2]. [1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/115049 [2] https://bitcoincore.org/en/releases/0.13.0/

You don't need the Bitcoin Core program. Satoshi used the Berkeley Database structure to develop it. The information you share may be encrypted. It's important that you're given a password. You can verify this information and access your wallets very simply with python. The important thing is to access the keys of the wallets. Aim for that.

No they were not bought. They just don't exist. Deterministic wallets (your words) did not exist in those years The Berkeley/DB format of wallets from that time is not viewable using Notepad But what motivates someone to post such a hoax here?

There's really a good chance that the story is made up to seek help with the backup files he got access from somewhere unspecified ("Jay"). We often get a few of this kind of topic here where obvious lies can be observed right from the OP or in the next replies. IMO, OP's haven't reached my personal lie-detector threshold yet, but sadly, he never replied after I've pointed the errors in his detailed explanations of the story. Just to point out, OP didn't mentioned mnemonic/words backup, He's talking about Bitcoin Core and appears to be from correct based from wallet dump contents which is arguably created by Pywallet (his screenshot)