Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: Invalid private key error
by
o_e_l_e_o
on 14/01/2023, 11:50:25 UTC
Unfortunately, the seller has never disclosed to me the address of my purchase hence I don’t have any clue as to what I own or I need to take into consideration before engaging third party wallet recovery.
You don't need to know an address in order to attempt to brute force. The checksum will only be valid for 1 out of every ~4.3 billion possibilities, meaning you can easily simply look up the address of any valid key that you find.

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.
None of this is relevant to you. It does not matter what type of wallet created the WIF private key you are trying to recover. It is either a valid WIF key, or it isn't. The only thing that might change is the locking script related to your private key, but you won't be able to even start thinking about that until you have successfully brute forced the private key.