Bitcoin Forum

So I decided to buy some Bitcoins using buybitc0ins.com (intentional typo) without doing a lot of research first (yeah, I know... *hangs head*).  The site guarantees your coins within 7 days, but claims most come within a few hours (I'm pretty sure I thought I was using bitinstant.com, but I was obviously not paying attention).  After a few days of waiting after the deposit was made I was sure I was scammed, especially after several emails/text messages/phone calls went totally unanswered.  Dejected, I researched the site URL on google and found a lot of info about the site's owner, Bruce Wagner, and how a lot of people think he's a real scumbag.  Great, so at this point I'm completely convinced I've been scammed and wrote off the $100 I'd deposited as gone.

Cut to about 11 days post deposit: I was shocked to discover that I had an email from Brucie with a link for an instawallet that contained my bitcoins (it was a total ripoff... I've learned my lesson there)!  At this point all I wanted to do was get the coins out of that wallet before they went missing by Broooooce or some other thief since the only real security for instawallet is obscurity, so I quickly sent the coins to my local wallet.  Cool. 

Or so I thought.

It was at that point that I realized I had encrypted the wallet when I was playing around with the client (since I had 0 coins) and that I only sort of remembered the passphrase.  Crapola.  After about 100-200 manual attempts and a few tries with a Ruby script I found on this site I am no closer to recovering my locked wallet than I was when I started.

Basically here's my offer to all of you: if anyone wants to try cracking the encryption, I will be happy to send the wallet.dat file along with a fer variants of what I *think* the passphrase is.  The wallet has less than 6 BTC in it, so it probably isn't worth the time/effort, but the offer is out there.

If you do some searching on this forum (or probably quicker via google) then I think you'll find someone has a script/program that will try to brute force your password based upon what you can remember of it.

Yeah... I tried that ruby script.  Even made a few modifications to it since some of the characters can be ruled out right away and I know how my passwords are generally structured.  Still didn't get a hit after several hours of searching.  I may try again, but at some point the effort would surpass the value of the < 6 coins, so it's more likely that I'll just write it off and learn from the mistake.

I'll try for a 50% bounty, less if I find it easy.

PM me.  Thanks.