"There's shares in them wallets!"

Panning for gold, 1940. Photo by Lee Russell courtesy Library of Congress.
On multiple occasions over the previous month, I've helped some associated friends (and friends of friends), whom originally got their hands on some BTS back in the Bitshares 1.0 days (before Graphene was released), migrate their stake into Bitshares 2.0 wallets. In some cases this is an arduous process, having to replay and rescan the old chain data, regenerate keys, and create new export files. Over that time, either collaborating with fluxer555 from bitsharestalk.org or going it solo, we've managed to recover over 100,000 BTS! This is great news all around, as we reunite early participants in the experiment with their hard earned stake on the current active chain, and earn a small percentage of the recovered funds for our time.

I started thinking about it like panning for gold. We're going to go in and attempt to rebuild the wallet back to the optimal state, and export it, but if you were a tinkerer with many BTS 1.0 wallets, it's easy to lose track of some shares here and there. Do you have any wallets that make you wonder? I even found 3 lifetime account names that were old delegate accounts that I had registered through this process. "delegate.robrigo" is no longer in limbo!

In one case, we had to brute force a wallet file password that had a few characters off. In another, we had to go back to the primary source to try a paper wallet key that was scribed illegibly. It's like a fun treasure hunt or riddle game!

If anyone out there is wondering about their potentially lost stake, well wonder no longer. Lets go salvage it! Please leave a comment below or reach out to me over Telegram or steemit.chat if you would like some help in reclaiming your stake. Give it a shot yourself first, though!