Need help recovering lost bitcoins from a crashed computer's wallet file

Question

Hi so a few years back I purchased 25 bitcoins, after I purchased them I placed them in a wallet, my computer crashed and I got a new one forgetting about the bitcoins, now seeing the high price for the coins I want to know if there is any way to recover them or if they are lost forever.

Answer 1

Is there anyway I could find the wallet I used?

Well, if you do not know the name and dont have your history from that device, your screwed.

I want to know if there is any way to recover them or if they are lost forever.

Well, from what I have seen of this post, you do not have any information of the wallet whatsoever, you may have lost them forever if you dont have a backup.

However, if you have any of your old computers files, we may be able to recover it. If not, sorry mate.

Answer 2

It sounds like the wallet was set up using software installed on your local computer, perhaps the Bitcoin-QT (aka Bitcoin Core) client, Electrum, or maybe Multibit. You'll need to obtain the private keys for the addresses that received the bitcoins (unless they were stored with an online wallet service, in which case you'd be wanting a website login and password, if the service still existed).

In the case of Bitcoin-QT, there is a file generated called wallet.dat that contains the private keys. It may have been encrypted with a password to protect against hacking.

If you can recover the file, and get through the encryption that may be enabled, you would probably be able to recover the bitcoins by reinstalling the Bitcoin Core client (see bitcoin.org) to open the wallet (assuming it was a Bitcoin-QT wallet, otherwise you'd use a different client).