Losing your Bitcoin private keys can be devastating and at the same time frustrating. This is because you wouldn’t have access to your precious coins. Nevertheless, don’t lose hope. Here is a way out.
If you have the Bitcoin wallet.dat with you but do not have any public or private key, the first thing which comes to mind is to copy the wallet.dat file in the blockchain data folder and wait for the wallet to fully synchronize. This takes a long time. However once it is done, you can see your coins and transfer them too.
However, what if there is a way you can directly see your public and private keys without going into the hassle of this time consuming blockchain Synchronization? Pywallet is a solution for this.
What is Pywallet?
Pywallet is a Python program that can recover your private keys from a Bitcoin core wallet. You’ve not lost your bitcoins just because you lost your private keys. Well, there is still a way to recover it through Pywallet if you have the wallet.dat file. We will see exactly how this works and steps involved in the recovery of bitcoin private keys. The first thing you need to do is to install the Pywallet on your computer.
How to Install Pywallet
Pywallet is extremely easy to install with no technicality involved. All you need is to download and install the Python 2.7.2 for windows. You can install it in any folder, make it simple and install it at C:\Python.
How To Use Pywallet to Recover Private Keys
Once the Pywallet is installed you need to place the pywallet.py script file and the wallet.dat file in that folder. In our example we will place these two files in C:\Python. Once done, you will need to open command prompt (CMD) and type in the following command
python pywallet.py –dumpwallet –datadir=.
If there are many public addresses, you may append >Walleykeys.txt in the command so that the output is sent to the txt file.
So now you have the text file which contains all your public addresses and their private key for that wallet.dat file. That is how easy and helpful this program is. Next time your friend says that he is unable to access his old Bitcoin wallet, you will have a solution for this.
Download Link to The program
You may download the latest version of Pywallet from the below link
https://github.com/joric/pywallet
Direct Link Download : http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.2/python-2.7.2.msi