At Crypto Asset Recovery, we often hear the question "I created a Bitcoin account back in 2014, but I'm not sure where my wallet is. Can you help me find it?"
In general, we can't find it for you. We would need access to too many of your accounts (email, dropbox, etc) and possibly your computers themselves.
But, that said, with a little legwork there's a good chance you can find the account yourself. Then, if you still need help recovering your password, contact us.
As you might guess, tracking down a service that you used three or four years ago (let alone 10 or 12!) has the potential to be complicated. However, there are a couple of easy steps that you should take first. If you're lucky, one of these will work.
If these don't work, keep reading.
Blockchain.info (now known as Blockchain.com) was one of the most popular early wallet providers. So, if you have no idea what service you might have used this is a good place to start. Here are two quick ways to check whether you created an account on Blockchain:
If those two steps didn't work, there are three other possibilities:
If those first, simple checks didn't work then it's probably worth taking a few minutes to get organized. Here is the initial research that we recommend:
Many online wallets and exchanges will send a welcome email when you first register an account.
First, figure out which email accounts you might have used to create the wallet.
Next, go through each of those email accounts and search for "Welcome" emails from the following services:
The following services have been reported to be defunct. If your coin was stored on one of these services it is most likely lost, as they all appear to have shut down after suffering from crippling thefts:
The following wallets were relatively gracefully shut down, meaning that they transitioned their code to another party, gave users warning, and then stopped updating their code:
The following wallets can be considered at least partially “online” wallets, although many have mobile and /or desktop versions too:
The following are desktop and mobile-only wallets:
The following are Paper Wallets:
The BIP39 standard for 12- and 24-word recovery phrases (also called recovery seeds, mnemonics and mnemonic phrases) was adopted by a number of wallets starting in 2013. If you first created your wallet in 2013 or later, it's quite possible that your backup for the wallet is simply a 12- or 24-word phrase.
This phrase might look like this:
false resemble seminar wagon excuse holiday fragile bargain leader trip source dutch
BTW: with a few very specific exceptions, a 12-word recovery phrase tells you nothing about the wallet used to generate the phrase. This could be a phrase generated by a wallet that can manage Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. Most modern wallets use BIP39-compliant 12- or 24-word recovery phrases.
Are you still using the same computer that you used at the time you created the wallet? If so, it's possible that you saved a backup of the wallet to your computer.
Here are some typical filenames / extensions for wallet backups:
There are other wallet files for other types of crypto. For example MyEtherWallet uses a keystore file that takes the name: UTC–YYYY-MM-DDTHH-MM-SS.[46 character string]. (For example: UTC–2018-02-09T15-50-38.056Z–6c1d075eb115676ad5a9e96cc32f80d13a5a6dd5)
Might you have backed up your wallet to your Dropbox account? You can try searching for the aforementioned filenames / extensions on Dropbox.com.
There are many ways to back up your hard drive.
Macs:
There are at least two options here:
First, most modern browsers give you an option to "Manage Passwords". If you created a new account and you asked your browser to remember your username and password then you may be able to find the name of the site (and potentially your username and password) in your browser's password manager.
Second, if you created this service recently, perhaps your browser history has stored the domain name of the service that you used.
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If I know the address where I received Bitcoin can I figure out what service created that address?
The answer, unfortunately, is: No
A bitcoin address is derived from your private key. Your private key is a random 256-bit number. Every wallet uses the same process to derive a bitcoin address from a private key. Therefore, there's no way to figure out where you created a wallet based on one of its bitcoin addresses.
