We Never See Nothing

​

Hey all,

I’ve been in the Bitcoin space since early 2012.

I have a situation that I would love to get some assistance with, I will explain the situation momentarily. Please do not message me and ask me for the wallet.dat file it’s not going to happen.

TL;DR

I have an old wallet.dat file from late 2012 or early 2013 from a coin I sold to a friend. Tried to recover the coins in 2018 and failed, later found out that someone had access to the computer and could have easily stole them. Would the current Bitcoin Core be able to read an old wallet.dat file, and is there any way to easily view the balance of a 2012 wallet.dat file without having to load the entire blockchain?

In the early days of Bitcoin as many of you OG’s know, the only option to securely store your coins was to use the default Bitcoin wallet in a wallet.dat file. A friend of mine was really wanted to invest in Bitcoin but didn’t know how, so I sold one to him because I didn’t want him to get screwed. I installed Bitcoin QT on their home laptop, had him write down the password on a piece of paper and had him put a backup of the wallet.dat file onto a USB.

Fast forward to when the price went to $20k plus, he calls me up super excited and said he wanted to sell his coin because he could use the money and I encouraged it because from my prior experience I knew the momentum was unsustainable and I had sold a few coins of my own.

Anyway, I go over to his house and we huddle around his computer. He tells me that he upgraded the hard drive in his computer and gave me his old one and I went back to my house to get an external hard drive reader. I came back, booted up his old drive and remembered that we would have to let it sync up in order to get the coins out, and on his internet that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. He gave me the hard drive and I went home and left on Bitcoin QT overnight and in the morning I was shocked to see that there were no transactions on the wallet. Quick note, he had the wallet password in a file on his documents titled “Bitcoin Wallet Password.txt”. smh.

I started to panic, and I realized how bad this looked on me. I called him and told him that there were no coins on there and asked if he had his USB stick and he told me he had lost it years ago. I frantically looked through all of my old wallet files to find any transaction that could link to his address, to show that his coins were still in there. After a while I realized I had sent the coins from the now defunct btc-e.com, and had no way to check up on the coins.

I did everything in my ability to try to recover lost data from the hard drive to no avail. I asked him if anyone else has had access to his computer, and then asked him how he replaced his hard drive because I know him well enough to know he wouldn’t pull apart a laptop to replace the hard drive. He told me he took it to a shop to have it replaced a few months earlier. I suspect that I’m either trying to view the wallet incorrectly or whoever replaced his hard drive snooped on his hard drive, stole the coins and replaced the wallet.dat file and generated a new one. I have to admit, I was relieved a little bit to have an explanation to coins not being there but I could imagine he thinks I may have had something to do with it. I made a few more attempts over the years whenever I was reminded of the situation to no avail.

We kind of fell out after that and haven’t spoken in a while. Recently, I saw a post on his Facebook that his wife is pregnant they are having a baby, and that’s why I’m here. I would love nothing more than to be able to message him and let him know that I have 11 grand waiting for him, because I’m certain the money would mean the world to him during such a stressful time.

Any help or insights would be incredibly helpful and appreciated.