How to find a lost bitcoin wallet

An alternative and more private approach to a single "Empty wallet" would be to split your overall balance over several smaller transactions made to different receiving addresses from the new wallet. This would help to disguise your balance and allow you to test the process with smaller spends. The final spend should use Tools Empty wallet so that an optimal miner's fee selection can be made and correctly zero your balance. You can also use Manage wallet Edit wallet to provide a note indicating that the wallet words are lost and you should avoid using that wallet for day to day use in the future.

Back to Table of Contents Restoring a wallet If your computer is lost, stolen or damaged, or you accidentally delete your MultiBit HD information, then you will need to restore a wallet. Step 1 - Locate your wallet words To restore your wallet and recover your bitcoin, you must have your wallet words.

Step 2 - Locate your wallet backup folder A wallet backup is an encrypted copy of your Bitcoin wallet. Provided you know your wallet words you can use a wallet backup to recover, in addition to your bitcoin: Step 3 - Start the restore process From the unlock screen click the "Restore" button and follow the instructions on the MultiBit HD screen. Frequently asked questions If I lost my wallet words why can't I recover my bitcoin with just a backup?

Sweep your bitcoin to a new wallet immediately. Here is the procedure: Create a new wallet using the Create button on the Unlock screen Make sure you write down your wallet words and date stamp as usual Unlock the new wallet and wait for sync to finish Create a new receiving address and copy it to the clipboard - you don't need an amount.

Note the first and last parts of the address. Related articles Restore a password Wallet backups Empty wallet. As the digital currency bitcoin has skyrocketed in value, many of the early adopters have become millionaires - only if, that is, they can find their bitcoins. Kenny Malone from our Planet Money team went on a virtual treasure hunt.

Syl Turner heard about bitcoin about 10 years ago, and he figured, what the heck, got a couple of coins and then saved them to what's known as a digital wallet on his hard drive. You know, at the time I didn't think bitcoin was worth anything so I didn't laughter , back anything up. To be fair, it wasn't worth anything at the time. Turner had digital pennies and then let them fall between the digital couch cushions. And so Turner is standing in his attic, staring at a waist-high layer of junk, looking for a year-old hard drive.

Jonathan Levin is co-founder of Chainalysis, a company that makes bitcoin analysis software, and the company did a study that found around 20 percent of all bitcoin is lost, out of circulation. And Levin says the confusing thing is that, technically speaking, bitcoin can't be lost.

Blockchain - big word, sure, but here's a very non-technical way of understanding what it means. Imagine with me, if you will, a massive auditorium filled with bitcoin bookkeepers. Now, Jonathan wants to send me one bitcoin. He walks on stage in front of all these bookkeepers, steps up to a microphone, and he's like Hello, entire bitcoin universe. As all of your books show, I, Jonathan, have three bitcoins to my name.

After Jonathan says this, all of these virtual ledger keepers sort of scribble this transaction down, deduct one bitcoin from Jonathan's account, increase Kenny's account by one, and that is a bitcoin transaction. Nothing is really transferred. It's more like an instantaneous adjustment across a whole bunch of ledgers.

When people talk about the blockchain, they're talking about this system where there is no central bookkeeper. Whatever bitcoins Syl Turner has, they're still there sitting in a kind of virtual vault, but he has lost the key.

He's looking for an old hard drive with a super complicated password, and it's not up here. Bitcoin was created to be this decentralized currency.