How to Recover Old Crypto Wallet Private Keys with PyWallet
If you were among the first to dive into the blockchain idea in the early days of cryptocurrencies you might have tried mining Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC) or DogeCoin (DOGE) in their early days and since then to have forgotten about it. Just recently bumping on an old backup and a BTC wallet.dat file or a one from LTC or DOGE local wallet staying there and waiting to be revived and any coins in it to start moving again in the blockchain space.
The easiest way would be to just fire up the latest local wallet for the respective crypto coin and have copy the wallet.dat file in its blockchain data folder, wait for the wallet to fully synchronize and then see if you have any coins in it and be able to move them around. That process however can be very time consuming as we are talking about a lot of gigabytes of data and some processing time for full synchronization of years of data stored on the blockchain.
So, let us say you do that and you just end up with 0 coins left in that old wallet.dat file and all the work you have done to check would be just be for nothing. If you were able to just see the public key (your crypto address) you could easily check the transactions and balance on a BTC, LTC, DOGE or another blockchain explorer and then decide if you want to sync the complete blockchain or if it is not worth doing…
