If people will be glad you give them $30 or some crap for their old computers circa 2005 or what not, what about buying those up on the cheap on the off chance there is some crypto on there? Maybe they forgot about it because they are old. Maybe their nerdy crypto loving kids came home from college one day and copied the crypto on there, thinking it was a safe place, because gamps would never sell that computer? The chances of finding some seem small, but if you find even just a LITTLE on one out of every 100 computers it would seem to be profitable, no? Plus you might take all the spare parts and build some Hal 9000 mainframe or some shait lol...
FUK. Like, a personal wallet? I should be buying used wallets? Or you talking about some computer wallet thinkie where they protect their bitcoins with a password? No way to get into that if I find it on a hard drive? Thanks! And I know this was a far out thought and would not likely pan out, but had to ask!!!
I thought about buying a bunch of old hard drives and laptops from ebay at one time to search for wallet.dat I believe the early versions of the bitcoin software did not have the ability to password protect the wallet And there are services that can crack a password protected wallet.dat There are probably a lot of bitcoins that were recovered by electronics recyclers that buy old computers and parts for pennies on the $
I used to have such ideas, to dream about similar stuff, ,,What if....?" (Non crypto related), but once you learn how to play the markets - all of it goes away.
It's not a bad idea. Why not try it with 100 computers and see what you find. Might even be possible to buy a pallet of them all at once at an auction, I know people donate old computers to schools who presumably then just sell them in bulk since I can't imagine them actually supporting hundreds of different computers of different ages for use by kids.
No it is a bad idea. That would be like someone moving out of their house and forgetting to take the safe out. What are the chances of that happening? Then if there is money (hopefully over 100$) you would have to sit there and try to figure out the password to the wallet, to access an unknown amount of funds. Which could take years. And on top of that you are a bad guy trying to steal someone else's money. Just give up now.
Cracking the password to a wallet.dat file is much much easier than cracking a private key and there are services that can assist I struggled with the idea that I would be stealing from someone else which is one of the reasons I didn't buy old laptops and hard drives from ebay to do this. There are even ways to filter for best chances, i.e. older laptop model, from places that wanted are likely to have early adopters, etc. But, the reason I considered it is because there are people who died or got hurt severely that they were not able to pass those bitcoins to others. Those bitcoins are lost forever. When I spoke to my tax consultant, it's one of the topics that are discussed in their crypto conferences, lost wealth in digital assets This ^^^ There could be employees from those recycling places that have suddenly retired