Need Help with Recovery

I mined a decent amount of Bitcoin back in the early days. I saved it on a hard drive, a flash drive like everyone else, and made paper backups. Since I had a good stash, I thought it would just grow in value, so I didn’t really mine again until around 2017. For the past six years, I've been trying to get my old wallets back. Lost the flash drive. The hard drive got damaged after moving across the country, and after more than ten years, it got complicated. I had two drives; one became unrecoverable after three data recovery attempts, and the other finally got an image from the last place I tried. The paper backups ended up being tossed, lost, or stolen over time. Some I tried to hide by splitting them up and burying them in different locations. But after all this time, it seems like most of those spots have been built over. With the hard drive, all I can really recall is that I saved the keys and other info in binary and hex formats, not as regular wallets. I was super cautious. I've managed to recover some binaries, but I’m not sure how to convert them back. I also have bits of keys from paper and text files, but not the full keys. If anyone's willing to help, I’d share 10% of whatever we manage to recover. Hit me up at: myprotonsignupemail@proton.me

I'm not buying it. There are far too many "unfortunate events" to be realistic. Besides, you couldn't easily make a paper back up in Bitcoin's early days. We see stories like this every month here.

Assuming you directly store 256-bit private key, rather than WIF or different private key format which have specific prefix/magic bytes, i don't see how anyone could do search effectively.

you are too smart for school loyce   you saw right through the OPs half cocked story. with that being said though, making a paper backup in the old days was easy. just print out your 10 or 20 bitcoin private keys. the wallets weren't HD. what's so hard about printing out 10 or 20 bitcoin private keys?

It's not like bitcoin core has a button you click and it prints out 10 neatly formatted private keys for you. Specially in early versions. You would have had to export them, format them in a way you could split it (as OP claims has done) and then print it out. Besides why do you think OP means 10-20 keys when he uses the term "quite a bit"? It may be a lot more...

i'm sure it cant be that hard. all you need is a printer and copy/paste. even if it's 100 keys, that's maybe 3 sheets of paper max. i don't think he ever even used his bitcoin. he just mined it and let it sit. so i doubt he has very many keys.

He forgot to mention that his dog ate his paper wallets.

Or like this man, his mom found the paper wallet and trash it. How do you safely keep your recovery phrase written on paper? If people are not tidy enough but careless enough, their wallet backups will be left in public places, and many people can see these backups, or these backups are left in locations that are unsafe.

maybe Loyce's dog ate his paper wallets. i might believe that...

If you have the binary representation of a private key, then you can convert that to hex and import it into a wallet. You could even generate a public address to check if there are any bitcoin in the address first.

Not sure why someone would make it up.. I wonder how many "stories" like this that you've seen every month could have resulted in you getting a significant amount of money for simply helping someone out instead of being skeptical that someone is just wasting time on the internet making up some ridiculous story. Things happen in people's lives. Not everything goes the way people plan. Plenty of people early on in Bitcoin didn't realize the value that what they were doing may have later on and forgot about it, misplaced things, or "life" happened. People do bad things to other people, especially over money. All kinds of ridiculous things happen to people that aren't talked about. I figured I'd leave the details out, but all of it is very reasonably explainable. That said, believe what you want, I'm not going to waste time arguing about it. The one thing I will say is this: The reason it has been such a pain to get this recovered and taken so much time is reactions like yours when it could have been a simple process. I guess I should have lied and said something more believable. That, and it was easy to make a paper backup back then. It was just a matter of writing down or printing a number of characters. An average English word is about 5 characters in length, so if you make a 12-word backup phrase, you're going to write out or somehow save 60 characters. A private key isn't much more difficult, if not easier. You've nicely summarized one major issue here in a succinct way. Perfect example of how "unfortunate events" or unlikely things do happen.. Yep, wasn't difficult. Or just write them out. Yep, never touched any of it. Wanted to let it appreciate. Regret it quite a bit. Mod note: Consecutive posts merged

There's a forum rule that doesn't allow multiple consecutive posts unless you are allowed (by another forum rule) to bump a thread even when the last post is yours. You can perfectly answer and cite multiple other posts in just one of yours. It's no rocket science... Now to your topic: You don't provide any details how you mined your coins and which software you used. What assistance do you expect with such poor details? So you had no useful or verified backups. Even if you actually mined until 2017, I'm surprised how careless you treated your private keys. Anyway, you know that yourself. If it was so easy, then where are your "easy" backups? Bitcoin Core doesn't use mnemonic recovery words. Other HD wallets do. What kind of wallet did you use for your mining address(es)? Do you actually know which address(es) hold your mined coins? What kind of mining gear did you use for mining? Which mining software was used, which mining pool did you use? Come on, how serious are you? No details provided by you mostly at all, btw.

I don't know, you tell me! You just did. Sure, blame me for your own mistakes. There you go again, making things up. There were no 12 word seed phrases "way at the beginning". OP goes on Ignore. My best guess is he's hoping to earn Merit.

OP never say he managed to recover 256-bit of private key or binaries which represent private keys though. Besides, you'll need to convert the binary to WIF which is supported by more wallet these days. In this case, there's little you could do. Performing sliding window (with 1-bit window) on entire HDD to get list of 256-bit of data would generate trillions of private keys if my calculation is correct.

If you check a million keys per second, it still only takes a few weeks.

Three rules about it. I can not help you to recover your wallet but this lesson is a hard and big one for you. In future, when you back up your wallets, don't do a hard and complicated way, that costs you big loss like this. A more complexity you do with your wallet backup, a possible more problems you will get with wallet recovery in future and a bigger risk that you will fail in wallet recovery. How to back up a seed phrase

Frankly, I don't quite buy this, too. If someone is paranoid that his precious can be lost or discovered or whatnot, then you likely don't do stuff that exposes your private keys as much as possible. Nor do paranoids have basically no backups. To convert private keys to binary and hex formats you literally have to store them unprotected and naked, convert them with tools (are those safe?) to binary and hex. Now what, leave them unprotected on an online machine that needs to be constantly online for mining? Hardly believable... Yes, I'm aware this all could've happened on another secure environment/machine, but then there likely would be more places and backups to store your precious, or not? I'm also aware that sometimes people do the craziest things. That's life. Still, if you say, you were pretty paranoid, I would've expected you to have more backups. Or did you think more backups would've exposed your precious more and more? In my opinion, too few concrete details, too much guesswork, somewhat unlikely plot. I don't care much if your story holds truth or not, I just think there's not enough concrete details to assist.

Good Lord.. Not made up. It's just bizarre how people want to assume it is. Good point, though, wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for the stupid things I did back then, won't argue with that. I'm just surprised at the level of, and focus on skepticism as opposed to desire to earn a lot of money for helping out. I'm fully aware there were no seed phrases back then.. My point was that it was as easy as writing down a phrase, just a comparison of the difficulty of writing it down. Details I will provide in direct communication with people able to help out, so if you're interested, email me. Don't intend to be posting here once I finish what I'm doing, so I don't value getting any merit out of it. I've just got a lot going on, not checking this every day. I know mnemonics weren't around back then. If you read it again, the point was a comparison of the difficulty of writing down seed words vs a private key. I'm going to just refrain from going into the details as now I feel like I have a pretty good idea of where the conversation will go. The more I say the more there will be to jump onto with the "story" angle. I made some incredibly stupid mistakes back then and I've regretted it ever since, and I'll leave it at that. I used a regular PC. This was early 2009. That should answer the other questions in large part. The rest I'll answer if anyone reaches out via email. My apologies for wasting anyone's time, not trying to argue. If anyone has the skills to help, please reach out by email. For the insightful and genuine responses of those hoping to be helpful, I appreciate it.

I sent you 2 messages to your email but you never reply, so when you going to reply? I was offering help as some others, is this a joke.

That's true and FWIW there are brute-force software which can generate hundred million or even billion address per second. But i expect it would be slower considering, 1. Speed to generate private keys from the binary data. 2. Speed to check the generated address against list of address with non-zero balance. More importantly, AFAIK there's no software which fulfill all OP needs. As reminder, there's possibility your email falsely filtered as spam where OP didn't check his spam folder.