Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: Invalid private key error
by
Tofee
on 13/01/2023, 13:05:04 UTC
Hi there,
    Can anybody explain what is meant by “bitcoins found in ‘old format’ wallet” and examples of their public keys/private keys.  Thanks.
I skimmed through the pages and didn't find any mention of that phrase.
If you're talking about old wallet.dat files, the old ones are not "HD" (Hierarchical Deterministic).
Means that every key it generates are random, unrelated to each other and can't be reproduced by a master key.

For the very old ones (not exclusive to Bitcoin Core), public keys are uncompressed which have 130 characters that starts with '04',
of which WIF Private keys consist of 51characters and starts with '5'.

Examples:
  • WIF PrvKey Uncompressed: 5HpHagT65TZzG1PH3CSu63k8DbpvD8s5ip4nEB3kEsreAnchuDf
  • PubKey Uncompressed: 0479be667ef9dcbbac55a06295ce870b07029bfcdb2dce28d959f2815b16f81798483ada7726a3c 4655da4fbfc0e1108a8fd17b448a68554199c47d08ffb10d4b8
Here is the statement I am curious about:

“On March 7, 2014, Mt.Gox Co., Ltd. confirmed that an old-format wallet which was used prior to June 2011 held a balance of approximately 200,000 BTC," the statement said.”   As reported CNN money - https://money.cnn.com/2014/03/21/technology/mt-gox-missing-bitcoin/index.html.

Can anyone please help me understand the above article of old-format wallet used prior to June 2011. Thanks