Recovering my old bitcoin wallet As far as I can tell, my old bitcoin wallet got corrupted. It was created in Bitcoin Core in the 2014/2015s, and I'm trying to recover it. Bitcoin Core doesn't accept it anymore (and doesn't give an error message), so I'm trying another way.
I managed to read the contents using walletools (https://github.com/akx/walletool), and here is what I have :

a long list of &quot;tx&quot; items, containing mostly binary data
quite a few (probably 50 ish) &quot;ckey&quot; items, with the public key and encrypted private keys
a single &quot;mkey&quot; item, with the 'nID', 'encrypted_key', 'salt', 'derivationMethod', 'nDerivationIterations' and 'otherParams' fields containing data
two &quot;name&quot; items containing 'hash' and 'name' fields
a number of &quot;pool&quot; items with 'n', 'nVersion', 'nTime', and the 'public_key'
lots of empty &quot;keymeta&quot; items
a &quot;version&quot; item : 150001
a &quot;bestblock&quot; item, with a &quot;key&quot; field
a &quot;minversion&quot; item : 130000
a &quot;orderposnext&quot; item (empty)
a &quot;bestblock_nomerkle&quot; item (empty)

From there, I imagine the important data is the mkey. What is its encryption algorithm and what Python lib could I use to decrypt it (assuming I remember the password ! ) ?
I think the least &quot;intense&quot; option here would be to look up each of the wallet addresses from your ckey items on a node (i.e. blockchain.info blockchair.com btc.com etc) to see which ones have any value in them.
Once you have a list of the wallet addresses that are &quot;worth recovering,&quot; you will need to take those ckey items' encrypted private keys (possibly along with data from the mkey item) to attempt to manually decrypt/recover your private keys to those wallets.
If you're experienced with programming, you could read through the code from the version of bitcoin core you used in 2014/2015 to figure out how it was encoded. Otherwise, you may need to find an experienced programmer you can trust, to help here.
As a post-note:
Have you tried re-compiling a copy of that older version of bitcoin core on a sandbox system? It's just a try, but maybe the file just got caught by a reverse-compatibility issue!