Quote from: retroverseworld on July 10, 2022, 06:47:12 PM

Here is one of the transactions, see what you make of it and let me know.49b17aaeb9308d2d314438baf6321033af09f62c0e9914e5b01ac4d7ba481a4d bc1qmuuc762cw02gg9j7fmqrw0wcmr0ffm5xkxjnln 10.78134

For clarification, you had 10.78134 mBTC which is actually only 0.01078134 BTC.

Quote from: retroverseworld on July 10, 2022, 06:47:12 PM

To address the questions raised. I bought anything between 500 and 1500 BTC back in 2009 or 2010, can't remember the amount exactly. I downloaded electrum on my PC, and spent a couple of days teaching myself to transfer between wallets. I wrote down the seed words for each wallet in a note book and once I was successful in making a few transfers I totally forgot about Bitcoin; until 2016 when the price of Bitcoin started rallying like crazy.

Then I spent 5 years searching for the notebook and eventually found it. I restored the wallet but it was empty and showed no transactions ever taking place in the history.

Hmm... The dates are off, but at least earlier than Electrum v0.3 so this could really happen.
When restoring a funded old seed (made before v0.31 and v0.34) to the latest version, it will really result with an empty wallet due to an old "seed derivation bug".

More info here: /index.php?topic=5379817.msg59046928#msg59046928 (read page 2 to 3 for the potential solution).

Quote from: retroverseworld

Either my money has been stolen or we've found the first ever key collision in the history of Bitcoin and that's worth the Bitcoin Foundation paying off my kids' student loans and some.

That's not how to identify private key collisions, you'll have to present two different prvKeys that derive the same address.
If that how it works, then every "hacked" coins can be claimed as a collision.

And "Bitcoin Foundation" isn't some sort of a centralized body that governs Bitcoin,
it's not affiliated with Bitcoin and specially can't intermediate with the funds, no one can, Bitcoin is decentralized.