degen_hodler

If you're looking in unallocated space, be aware there's a chance the file's fragmented. The old file details might be gone, and you might need more advanced tools like X-ways. Even then, recovering a fragmented file…

Just a heads up, you should check the new wallet.dat in a hex viewer. That’s easier than all the steps you were planning. And yeah, the XML is for R-Studio, so good luck with that.

X-ways is actually more advanced than R-Studio. I’ve only tried R-Studio once years ago. Maybe you should give that open-source option a try? Their regex may work differently, but it could still be effective.

Been using X-ways Forensics since 2011, it's solid for regex searches in unallocated disk space. I’d scan for wallet.dat headers there: 2009-2012 header: \x00\x05\x31\x62\x00\x00\x00\x02 2017 change:…

Definitely keep us posted on that. Curious to see your improvements!

The seed itself is a 128-bit number plus a checksum of 4 bits. So yeah, there’s still a lot of possibilities.

All this talk about fees is interesting, but are they specifically about trading fees or gas fees? That could change the whole picture.