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Holy shit.. Did you mine a 50BTC block back in 2010 and HODL all this time... Well done for you if you did.. Not many people would announce that in public.
Believe me, I'm more paranoid than that fact might imply! If anybody's wondering, there's no point in tracing my address and breaking in and stealing my computers. That side of things is well taken care of. The psychology of how I managed to HODL them that long is interesting and I'm not sure I understand it myself. Sure there was the temptation to buy new toys but I wanted to hold onto them until the sum was meaningful i.e. pay off the mortgage. Does that make me more or less greedy? I don't know.
I had been intending to send a raw transaction, but what I actually did was to download Bitcoin Core and then the blockchain and utterly disable the internet for that computer. I then copied my private key over onto the Bitcoin Core wallet, which is encrypted, then I just sent the 50 bitcoins to myself. Given that the computer was not connected to the internet the transaction was not broadcast, so I get the transaction ID then used getrawtransaction through the console, then decoderawtransaction, to try to verify it. I still haven't sent it.
Would it make sense to send the transaction to a testnet? I'm not sure to what extent testnet mirrors the current blockchain?
I'm posting here for several reasons.The main one is that I don't want to make a silly mistake. The other is that I'm simply curious about what stopped this transaction working previously. There's something odd about those 50 btc. They show up happily on Blockchain but I couldn't recover them with other wallets. When I ran pywallet on the wallet they were in, it showed up the few bitcoins I had from bitcoin faucets but didn't show the 50 I knew were left from bitcoin mining. I wonder, only half in jest, whether that's what happened to all the MtGox bitcoins. Is this a well known bug?
Well it's a bloody good HODL for sure. I mined for 2 years solo never hit a block cost me about £3400 in electricity cost!
I think you should stick to advice from people like achow101 he is well known in the community and should be able to advise you on how to proceed.
As for the raw transaction you MUST be so careful doing this.
I would say get a hardware wallet Trezor / Ledger and get the coins onto that or split them into offline-cold storage paper wallet / hardware wallet / software wallet.
But like you already stated security is priority when dealing with such vast sums of money and coins.
I hope you enjoy your bitcoin fortune
and well done for the super long HODL edit : just a second thought it may be dew to older version of the software but this is just a hunch. your coins should be ok if they show on the blockchain in the correct address
ps.. watch for members like the 2nd comment they WILL try to get you to hook to a link or some "sketchy" site. Stick to Mods or even core developers for advice on this subject.