Old Wallet Encryption Confusion

I just found my old wallet.dat file from ages ago. Ran it through pywallet and I got this message: "The wallet is encrypted but no passphrase is used." What does that even mean?

Wait, what? That sounds super confusing. How can it be encrypted if there’s no password? I mean, encryption usually means you need something to get back in, right? At least that’s how I thought it worked.

Yeah, I think it’s about how you're trying to access it. If you're not entering any passphrase, that's probably why it’s saying that. You can still see the wallet data, but the keys are encrypted until you give the right passphrase.

Isn’t that obvious? Sure, you can dump the wallet data, but the private keys are still locked up. They’re marked as "encrypted_privkey". If you use the right passphrase= option, it’ll show the decrypted keys. And hey, if you wanna save it to a file instead of just the screen, remember to add > "yourfilename.txt" at the end.