Digital Treasure Hunting: Tracking Down My Long-Lost Bitcoin Wallet
My very own treasure hunting story.
Foreword. We’ve all seen the headlines. The viral posts. The whispered rumors.
From time to time the Internet delivers another thrilling tale: the long-forgotten hard drive found in the attic, the lost paper wallet tucked away in an old book, or the panicked scramble to remember a passphrase from a decade ago. These are the modern-day treasure hunting stories—digital folklore starring ordinary people who may or may not be sitting on a fortune.
They are stories of hope, frustration, high stakes, and the tantalizing possibility of instant, life-changing wealth, all locked behind a single, encrypted barrier.
For years, I’ve read those articles with a mix of fascination and envy. I never thought I had my own to tell.
Until now.
This is my story of digital archaeology, the frantic search for a long-lost Bitcoin wallet, and the ultimate battle against encryption. Prepare for my personal journey into the realm of ‘maybe I’m a millionaire.’ I invite you to settle in, because the treasure hunt begins now.
I was copying some files to the Backup folder of my Dropbox when THIS file came to my sight. It was real. Data uploaded: 12/7/2013 11:54 PM.
I started to remember something. I was a technical university student, reading about Bitcoin in the early 2010s, of course I created my own wallet. But how much Bitcoin was in it? How to access it? What to do with this file? So many questions…
One thing is new however. The dawn of the age of AI. Let’s do some treasure hunting.
I input every single detail I could collect to Gemini (but I did not share the content of the file). The answer was surprising. Based on the meta data it could pinpoint the Android app which generated this file for the 1st try:
This is a hot track! Better than I could have imagined. After some research it was clear that
The app is not on the Play Store anymore
Bitcoin Wallet is still exists on GitHub: https://github.com/bitcoin-wallet/bitcoin-wallet
It is possible to install F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
It is possible to install the latest version of Bitcoin Wallet from F-Droid.
Cool! Since Bitcoin Wallet generated this file back in 2013, I only need to import it to decrypt. The decryption asked my password which belongs to this wallet. I had some ideas what passwords I was using 10+ years ago, but none of them worked.
Luckily I started to use password managers starting from about 2010. I gave it a try and searched for Bitcoin in the search box:
Is this my LUCKIEST 🍀day? I copied the password to Bitcoin Wallet, and…
Did not work. I tried to input manually, same. I went back to Gemini:
No issues, just lot of things happened in the past 12 years, I just need to decrypt manually:
I copied the command to the SSH terminal and crossed my fingers.
openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -md md5 -a -in bitcoin-wallet-keys-2013-12-07 -out decrypted_wallet.txt
Enter.
decrypted_wallet.txt appeared
It had some file size
And it was readable
It contained some explanation comment in English, timestamp, and the key itself
The manual decryption was successful. Now what.
Gemini told me to install the Electrum app, and just import the decrypted key starting with “K”
I went back to Gemini, how can I make sure if this is valid?
Alright, let's decode the key, drop the compressed flag, and re-calculate the checksum. The generated code worked for the 1st time.
Let’s import the new key to the wallet! THE MOMENT OF TRUTH 🍀
This is not what I expected. I mean people open wallets to put something in them, right?
I had to verify this result.
So it's true. I was sitting on my empty Bitcoin wallet for 12 ###### years. The treasure hunt is over, and with it, the dream of a massive windfall.
Afterword.
BTC current price ($92500) / BTC 2013 price ($750) ~ Bitcoin is worth approximately
120-130 times what it was on December 7, 2013
But at least, what a treasure hunt it was 🥲