<p>This sort of question comes up moderately often.</p>
<p>Bitcoin.stackexchange.com is a self-help Q&amp;A website and has never provided Bitcoin wallets or acted as a custodian of money or as a register of Bitcoin accounts. It has always been no more than a place where people like you and I can answer other people's questions.</p>
<p>You need to do one of the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>Find a file named <code>wallet.dat</code>. Find or remember any password you might have used to protect the wallet.</li>
<li>Find a piece of paper where you wrote a &quot;private key&quot; - a string of letters and digits similar in length to <code>E9873D79C6D87DC0FB6A5778633389F4453213303DA61F20BD67FC233AA33262</code>.</li>
</ul>
<p>Without something more definite than you wrote above, your $25 is lost forever.</p>
<hr />
<p>Similar questions (not exactly identical) which also have potentially useful answers.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/60596/13866">Recovering bitcoins</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/19876/13866">signed up in 2010-now trying to access</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/66925/13866">Bitcoin Recovery Email or Hard Drive</a></li>
</ul>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-11-01T03:03:49.070Z
However the Bitcoin I received wasn't password protected.
Erica Dawn
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-11-01T03:04:23.717Z
And bitcoin stack exchange wasn't even around then.
Erica Dawn
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-11-01T03:06:05.973Z
As for the wallet.dat, it was my understanding that the wallet.dat is created when downloaded the program. But the bitcoin sent to me via ipaddress/email was just that. A private key.   There's not a wallet.dat file involved in that.
Erica Dawn
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-11-01T12:28:21.747Z
@EricaDawn if you have that private key you can download a wallet and import that key into it. See https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet
RedGrittyBrick
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-11-02T00:05:11.663Z
Well when I opened the file in question, it had some stuff like prop. And some numbers and then it said FKey or SFkey
Erica Dawn
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-11-02T00:15:23.917Z
Is there something that would prevent it from syncing? Maybe something that has been changed since then that isn’t compatable?
Erica Dawn
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-10-31T20:14:16.103Z
2020-10-31T20:19:52.137Z
2020-10-31T20:19:52.137Z
RedGrittyBrick
<p>In late 2009 maybe early very early of 2010 I was living at my parents and tryi to find a way to make money online.  It was all fairly new back then.  I remember looking at some computer coders site that spoke of stuff I didn’t understand when I found where someone was giving 25 bucks to download and run a program. I don’t recall if I clicked on a link, copied and pasted into browser. Idk. I do know that when I ran it it asked if I wanted to run it in the background. I chose yes.  And after it was all there the 25 was a huge number of bitcoin. The equivalent to 25 dollars worth of bitcoin back then.  I seen that and got irritated.  Mom told me to at least finish what I was doing.  So I did.
Later dad is annoyed at a program running that he couldn’t find.
He changed hard drives.
So years later I ask dad and yes he still has the hard drive.<br />
The only thing I can find is where I copied and pasted the url into a folder.<br />
But the url says bitcoin/stack.exchange or something like that followed by some characters.<br />
Bitcoin stack exchange didn’t form for a few years yet.<br />
Did the stack exchange have links or something to complete a bitcoin trade back then?
Does anyone remember back then how The word about bitcoin was spread? Oh and I do remember seeing peer to peer in something I was reading about the download I’d just done and I remember satoshi or something maybe even longer that began with satoshi</p>

<satoshi>
Locating bitcoin from 2009
Erica Dawn
# Locating bitcoin from 2009

(Asked by: username_0 on 2020-10-31)

In late 2009 maybe early very early of 2010 I was living at my parents and tryi to find a way to make money online. It was all fairly new back then. I remember looking at some computer coders site that spoke of stuff I didn’t understand when I found where someone was giving 25 bucks to download and run a program. I don’t recall if I clicked on a link, copied and pasted into browser. Idk. I do know that when I ran it it asked if I wanted to run it in the background. I chose yes. And after it was all there the 25 was a huge number of bitcoin. The equivalent to 25 dollars worth of bitcoin back then. I seen that and got irritated. Mom told me to at least finish what I was doing. So I did.
Later dad is annoyed at a program running that he couldn’t find.
He changed hard drives.
So years later I ask dad and yes he still has the hard drive.  
The only thing I can find is where I copied and pasted the url into a folder.  
But the url says bitcoin/stack.exchange or something like that followed by some characters.  
Bitcoin stack exchange didn’t form for a few years yet.  
Did the stack exchange have links or something to complete a bitcoin trade back then?
Does anyone remember back then how The word about bitcoin was spread? Oh and I do remember seeing peer to peer in something I was reading about the download I’d just done and I remember satoshi or something maybe even longer that began with satoshi

**Tags:** satoshi


---

## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2020-10-31. Score: 2

This sort of question comes up moderately often.

Bitcoin.stackexchange.com is a self-help Q&A website and has never provided Bitcoin wallets or acted as a custodian of money or as a register of Bitcoin accounts. It has always been no more than a place where people like you and I can answer other people's questions.

You need to do one of the following:

* Find a file named `wallet.dat`. Find or remember any password you might have used to protect the wallet.
* Find a piece of paper where you wrote a "private key" - a string of letters and digits similar in length to `E9873D79C6D87DC0FB6A5778633389F4453213303DA61F20BD67FC233AA33262`.

Without something more definite than you wrote above, your $25 is lost forever.

---

Similar questions (not exactly identical) which also have potentially useful answers.

* [Recovering bitcoins](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/60596/13866)
* [signed up in 2010-now trying to access](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/19876/13866)
* [Bitcoin Recovery Email or Hard Drive](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/66925/13866)

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: However the Bitcoin I received wasn't password protected.  
> **username_0**: And bitcoin stack exchange wasn't even around then.  
> **username_0**: As for the wallet.dat, it was my understanding that the wallet.dat is created when downloaded the program. But the bitcoin sent to me via ipaddress/email was just that. A private key.   There's not a wallet.dat file involved in that.  
> **username_1**: @EricaDawn if you have that private key you can download a wallet and import that key into it. See https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet  
> **username_0**: Well when I opened the file in question, it had some stuff like prop. And some numbers and then it said FKey or SFkey  
> **username_0**: Is there something that would prevent it from syncing? Maybe something that has been changed since then that isn’t compatable?  

---

