After starting a public account, I always feel like I have to write something every day, otherwise I’m wasting that one daily push opportunity.

    Since I posted “I recovered a Trezor wallet with 1350” a month ago, I’ve been extremely busy. Many clients have contacted me through various social channels to consult about asset recovery, and I’ve also taken on many recovery jobs, spending my days restoring all kinds of wallets.

    Among these, quite a few people have asked about recovering Bitcoin Core wallets, and every time it turns out to be a public wallet. Although I previously wrote “About Public Wallets,” because there have been so many consultations about public wallets, this article is once again about them.

    No matter who you are, you must understand — no one is the protagonist of this world. There is no protagonist’s halo, pies don’t fall from the sky, and no one will give you a Bitcoin wallet for free.

 

“My friend gave me this wallet to repay the money he owed me.”

“My boyfriend had lots of Bitcoins. After three years together, we broke up, and he gave me this wallet as compensation.”

“My younger brother passed away and left this wallet. Can I recover the Bitcoins from it?”

“I have this address and some password clues — can you help me recover the password?”

 

    I still encounter many of the claims above, but all of them come with addresses from public wallets. Here’s how to tell if a wallet is public — you can visit this website:

    https://wallet-dat.com/product/all-files/

    For under $5,000 you can buy 264 wallet.dat wallets containing 59,000 BTC. Sounds exciting, right?

    But these wallets aren’t necessarily real — some may be real, some fake — it’s impossible to tell. I can identify some fakes, but most I can’t verify. Moreover, that website already lists all the addresses; once you check them, you’ll see whether they’re public wallet addresses.

    I have all those wallets myself — if they were worth cracking, I’d do it myself. The reason I don’t is because it’s unreliable. No one will spend huge computing resources to recover the password of a possibly fake wallet; even if you succeed, you might not be able to transfer the coins.

    Therefore, I have no reason to take on other people’s public wallets. Please stop coming to me with these.

    The strangest thing is:

    One of the most widely circulated wallets — with 150 BTC — came from a certain website. The site clearly states inside the wallet file that it’s fake.

    Yet many people still come to me with the same wallet — at least 50 times from last year to this year...

    Below are the addresses from the 150 BTC wallet. If you see these addresses, you should know it’s fake.

wallet_150,366.dat

12aVP18cd5XsbcGQy8u6eywQ6UuA6Q319s : 0.00013863

1HLoD9E4SDFFPDiYfNYnkBLQ85Y51J3Zb1 : 50.01516912

1J2wEFH8jJELsfXsEeE15fkuP9ikzPMDMQ : 0.00001000

1FvzCLoTPGANNjWoUo6jUGuAG3wg1w4YjR : 50.00531755

12c6DSiU4Rq3P4ZxziKxzrL5LmMBrzjrJX : 50.34645826

total amount : 150.36709356

    There’s also this 131 BTC wallet, which is also quite widely circulated — I’ll list it here too.

wallet_131,63.dat

1EZeYuLR2ugK8sk4XeDVcyNGBT7sGPDrNb : 31.63000580

1EdrQwSXQYFKZKim3fX7jKTiR5gmjsjT64 : 50.00011127

1DFo9TYjyKT7Rwa1Nx7G3STMRHBFUC2hUB : 50.00001127

total amount : 131.63012834

    Everyone says it was “given by a friend,” but if it were a real wallet — who would give it to you? It reminds me of something that happened before:

    In November 2024, a friend asked me to crack a Bitcoin Core wallet password. When I checked the address, it turned out to be a public wallet. The key point is that he had spent 3.6 million yuan buying 20 high-end 8x4090 GPU rigs to crack the wallet. He ran them for over half a year, spending around 250,000 yuan on electricity — a huge effort.

    The machines could be resold or repurposed, so he didn’t lose on hardware — but the electricity cost was a loss, and the effort wasted. So before attempting to crack a wallet, check if it’s a public one. Most public wallets are fake — even if you somehow get the password, you might not be able to withdraw the coins.

    This friend told me it was given to him by someone he deeply trusted. When he learned the truth, he could hardly believe it...

    So stop believing that such good fortune will just fall into your lap — who would be that foolish?