Before I start banging on I've sent you pics on email.

Went looking for the external harddrive today & the manilla folder that should have my name on it along with a piece of paper re. BTC/wallet/keys. Neither could be found in the "liveable" section of the house/garage. Had roughly 2 hours spare to get as much done as possible after a kids party that finished at 1.30pm. Then had to get my misses to the shops before they shut by 4.30pm with drive time taking up a solid hour between.

Came across one plastic container filled with paperwork from that era that look forever to go through page by page. Fairly certain its a "home" base container not the one from "work". Managed to find a series of the larger SD cards, one older laptop that's not early enough, a heap of phones one iPhone particular that may have an image of the piece of paper & a small USB that just doesn't look right.

All that said there is still a "storage" section that hasn't been checked but to get this done its going to be an absolute nightmare. No chance I could do it by myself in a day. Just looked at it & why me. Feel it's necessary to mention today's events.

Anywoo last night I boot up one of the random drives I already had & transfered the majority of the files unrelated to media (music/video). One of the folders contain a series of public keys but funnily enough an Armory wallet screenshot I don't even remember from 2014. Screenshot has a box with eighteen random 4 letter combinations & a QR to regerated the wallet. Sent pics to CryptoJ0hn on email & will also send them to you.

Done some more thinking & what's not making any sense to me now is why would PGP keys have been used in 2010 if there's no reason to encrypted a message when simply buying & transferring coins to a "wallet" with private/public keys that are in a different format. I'm pretty sure after find other people's public keys along with the Armoury wallet that I didn't learn/explore PGP encryption until 2011 possibly later & had no reason to use it till 2014.

So now my theory is there was basic keygen software. Software created two keys with 8 words & a password.

Keys could then be stored in a "vault" that were encrypted with same password.

A series of words were given incase you forgot your password to access the encrypted keys but then you would have to change your password to have the ability to decrypt the keys or those words themselves may have been enough to do the decryption.

My guess is any piece of paper for that era may have been printed & contain a QR plus the encrypted keys printed on it aswell. I suspected that this piece of paper/wallet may have just been turned over then all I did was write the master key on the back. How a master key comes into play along with a public/private key has got my miffed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/n2hup6/help_with_possible_nonbip39_8word_key_phrase/?rdt=37418

That dude seems to be the only scenario I can find that's similar accept he's missing the password. He's also missing the program that stores the encrypted keys same as I am.

Now I'm wondering if a "brainwallet" could be generated super easy then printed on a piece of paper making it a paper wallet without the use of anything other than basic keygen software. I remember the whole move the mouse non sense for entropy for keys & I just don't think I used it. Instead I picked another option where 8 words & password did the samething using an algorithm.

The whole wallet.dat concept for me is over. Has nothing to do with my story whatsoever. The simple fact that a series of words were given to me for password recovery in 2010 rules out the Bitcoin Client & there was no other option.