Lost BTC from 50miner, any chance to recover?

Hey all, I’m feeling pretty hopeless about getting back the BTC I mined ages ago. I’d love some solid advice to finally put this behind me. So here’s the deal: back in 2010, I dived into Bitcoin and ran 50miner for like a week. I got a couple of coins, but they were worth next to nothing, so I ditched the software. I still have my old password though.

Were you mining solo or part of a pool? Like, did you use the 50btc pool? If you didn’t withdraw your BTC, then that wallet.dat you found probably won’t have anything in it. And that password? Useless now.

I thought 50miner was strictly a pool miner with 50btc, no other options. I don't have the wallet.dat file either. Just a virtual copy of my old drive. If I never pulled the BTC out into a wallet, those coins are gone, right?

You could try using VMware or Virtualbox to check out your old virtual storage. Dig through it to find your wallet. If you find it, then you can see if there are any coins left. Not rocket science, just some basic tech stuff.

DiskDrill can help with that too, you can mount virtual disks and recover deleted files. I’ve done it before, even found old files. But no luck with the wallet.dat. Searched for 'wallet' and only found a random.jl file. Tried looking for 50miner and other keywords, but nothing helpful.

If you still have that 2010 password, you’re lucky. But backing up the wallet.dat shouldn’t have been hard. Maybe you deleted it out of frustration? If the cloning stopped before formatting, it might still be in the virtual disk image.

He was careful but didn’t back things up properly. Logging in with a VirtualDisk won’t help much since he can’t sync to see his balance now. Remember, he was with the 50btc pool. Bitcoins weren’t saved locally, but by the pool admins. Who knows if they’re still holding them?

I thought you had some backup, but I get it now. Cloning a system in real-time with VMware sounds odd to me. I’ve used VMware a lot, but this situation seems different.

I still have those old driver floppy disks from my first printer. Sentimental, right? But yeah, I never got my wallet.dat. I assumed it was created when I ran 50miner, but now I realize I need to retrieve it manually from the pool.

If I were you, I’d try generic file recovery tools or even Bitcoin recovery tools. Like, have you heard of pywallet? It can scan storage directly for wallet files. Just make sure to back up your images first.

When I first read this, I thought it was just about a lost wallet file. But after reading some responses, it looks grim. You joined a mining pool that doesn’t exist anymore, so recovery seems unlikely.

I’d fire up VMware and load your old virtual machine. Check the usual spots for wallet.dat, like "%APPDATA%\Bitcoin". You might get lucky.

Tried that, but the latest VMware doesn’t recognize my old VM. I even installed an older version, but it’s glitchy on Windows 11. Honestly, it feels pointless since I never got the wallet.dat.

So does this mean you never set up a local wallet? If the pool held your coins, they wouldn’t have gone to a wallet on your computer unless you gave them an address. If you didn’t, they’d just be sitting there until the pool shut down.

From what I remember, it’s a bit hazy. I did some pool mining back in the day, but not with the same pool you were using. Usually, a miner would have a Bitcoin address for withdrawals. You needed that to get credited for your work.