Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Merits 1 from 1 user
Topic OP
Diving into an old BTC wallet from ~2014 and found a nice surprise - what next?
by
walletdatdiver
on 06/02/2021, 13:17:58 UTC
⭐ Merited by ETFbitcoin (1)
Hi all, I'll keep this as simple as possible for brevity's sake - please ask questions if I've left any gaps in explaining my situation, as follows

I bought and traded Bitcoin from approx 2012 to 2014, using Bitcoin-qt as my wallet until I learned about Electrum and began to use it instead

I haven't bought or sold BTC since about 2015, but given the recent price spikes, curiousity has gotten the better of me. I'm fairly sure my old wallets were completely emptied of any BTC, but better safe than stupid, right?

This week I downloaded Bitcoin Core, synced the blockchain to the network (took 5-6 days) and opened the oldest wallet.dat file I had backed up

It contains my transaction history from 2012 to 2014. Even better, the wallet itself seems to contain a non-trivial amount (ie greater than 1BTC), with that amount displayed as "available" and zero BTC under pending. Great!

Yet more joy: when I went to send a test transfer (tiny fraction of BTC) to an Electrum wallet, I was able to remember my years-old password and send the transaction through

Or so I thought... That test transfer has the status of "0/unconfirmed, not in memory pool" within Bitcoin Core. I have done some reading on this (other forum posts across the years) and I'm not clear on why is occurring

Bitcoin Core itself notes in bottom right corner that it's up to date with 669,000+ blocks of transaction history. And the client has 10 active connections to BTC network

So I'm a little confused, and wondering whether the "available" balance amount shown in the wallet is a phantom vestige of many years ago, and not real... or whether there's some other way to salvage what appears to be a functioning wallet?

If you were in my situation, what would you try next?

Thanks in advance