If your brother RIP was as computer literate as you claim, look through his belongings for a paper with a list of either 12 or 24 words (most likely hand written).
These would be the keys to his bitcoin that you can use to recover them from any legitimate bitcoin wallet on any phone or computer you like.
That was my first thought as well! However after going through all the notebooks and other writings, I couldn’t find anything that resembled a 12 or 24 word phrase or a private key. I am sure he would’ve backed it up somewhere, but there’s a large possibility he hid them somewhere only he would know to look.
Did you go through his books (all books)? Page by page? He could have hidden the piece of paper inside one of his books.
The books I have of his are just notebooks for writing. The majority of his belongings were dealt with by our father and some friends that helped clean his apartment. At the time I had come down with the covid plandemic and couldn’t be there to assist & lookout for things like that, so there is unfortunately the possibility that it may have been discarded if it did exist.
If he had a desktop computer, I would open the outer case and look inside as well.
I’ll double check this. Didn’t see anything the first time but I didn’t fully inspect. I don’t expect anything super complex though, he /was/ tech literate but not a Bitcoiner by any means.
Maybe then it’s on an exchange. Coinbase for example.
Hate to say it, but the bitcoin could be so many places… of course you’ll be the best judge, but if it is truly a small amount, then I’m sure time spent getting the music would be more cathartic 🫂
At the end of it all that’s what’s most important
It all depends on how literate he was with bitcoin.
This is actually the first lesson in holding your own bitcoin, and it's about securing your keys.
So if he was paying attention AND actually followed everyone's advice, he should have a paper somewhere containing his keys.
On my cold wallet there is a numerical code first, and then you enter your keys. Not trying to gum up the retrieval operation, just a caution that if there is one of those, one has to get that right in 3 attempts or be locked out.
But that's different.
In OP's case, all he needs to do is have a fresh install of a new hot software wallet and just recover the old wallet using the seed phrase. Cold wallets are an overkill for this simple recovery procedure.
