Hi All,
I acquired a few bitcoin back in 2012. I was using whatever version of the official bitcoin client was at this time. I did a lot of fiddling around with this bitcoin between different wallets, etc. Then I got busy and forgot about it for a few years.
I now realize that I should prepare to figure out how to sell this bitcoin. However it is currently might be worth A LOT of dollars (although I don't know how many bitcoin I have in these) so I don't want to screw this up.
What I have is:
1. A couple of unencrypted wallet.dat files (unencrypted by bitcoin, I've encrypted the files themselves with another app and stored them all over the place). I'm pretty sure they are intact.
2. JSON format dumps from pywallet for the file that I believe has the least (~2 BTC) bitcoin balance. I can presumably decrypt the other wallet.dat files and dump their contents with pywallet when I am confident in what I am doing.
The JSON format dump from one wallet.dat has what appears to be hundreds of addresses "addr" with associated info for "compressed", "hexsec", "private", "pubkey", "reserve", "sec" and "secret". Googling didn't really help me understand this much, but I did gather that the "sec" data is the unencrypted private key if it starts with 5.
Now I have no idea what to do to next get access to the bitcoin safely.
-Can I convert the wallet.dat file to a modern wallet file, preferably for a lightweight wallet like electrum?
-Will the newest official bitcoin wallet work read the old wallet.dat file?
-Can I import the JSON file into some sort of modern wallet file?
-Can I do any of these steps on an offline computer to ensure that if I make a screwup I can just start over?
Another concern I have is retaining access to the bitcoin cash version of these bitcoin as well as both versions from the upcoming fork.
-Will I loose access to bitcoin cash and the new forks depending on how I try to recover these old bitcoin files?
Any advice is hugely appreciated. I imagine that there are man others in the same boat as me.
Thank you so much.