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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

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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.

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  • However the Bitcoin I received wasn't password protected.
    – Erica Dawn
    Nov 1, 2020 at 3:03
  • And bitcoin stack exchange wasn't even around then.
    – Erica Dawn
    Nov 1, 2020 at 3:04
  • 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
    Nov 1, 2020 at 3:06
  • @EricaDawn if you have that private key you can download a wallet and import that key into it. See bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet Nov 1, 2020 at 12:28
  • 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
    Nov 2, 2020 at 0:05

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