Bitcoin Forum

Let me start off by saying that........I am an idiot.

I am usually incredibly careful when dealing with any amount of coins. Even if I know the password to my wallet, I send a few coins from it just to make sure I have the right password (it probably is a little overboard). This time, I sent 2.0 BTC to a wallet that I believed I had the password to; but sadly as you can tell by this post, I do not have the password. I remember saving it to a text file but then deleted it thinking I wouldn't need it again (for whatever reason)...

I know that it is a random 63 digit ASCII password generated from https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm (https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm). Entering one of these passwords in to their password haystacks (estimates how long it would take to brute force) gives a grim message (something like 1 trillion * 15 centuries to brute force).

I've tried some scripts I found on this site but they're outdated, they output some error about not finding an RPC server and it now uses bitcoin-cli instead of bitcoind. I replaced all instances of bitcoind with bitcoin-cli in the script but I think the syntax has changed cause I get another error.

How likely am I to get my coins back, give it to me straight. I know it's my fault, stupid stupid mistake; but 2.0 BTC is a paycheck to me.

Edit: Spelling, words.

With such a randomly generated password, you are likely to never get your coins back. As that site says, it will take an insane amount of time to bruteforce. There is nothing that can be done.

When did you delete the file? There must be a way for it to be recovered?

I've tried Recuva already, but my Windows system is on an SSD.

If you could actually remember for certain any of the characters at all that were in the password (even if you couldn't remember what order or where in the password) it would improve your odds of brute forcing.  The more you could remember about the password the more you'd improve the odds.  Remember enough and it might actually become possible.

Where there any capital letters?  Do you have a rough estimate of how many? Do you remember what ANY of them were?
Were there any lowercase letters?  Do you have a rough estimate of how many? Do you remember what ANY of them were?
Were there any numbers?  Do you have a rough estimate of how many? Do you remember what ANY of them were?
Were there any special characters? Do you have a rough estimate of how many? Do you remember what ANY of them were?
Do you remember what the first (or first few) characters were? Do you remember what the last (or last few) characters were?

Have you considered hypnosis, meditation, or other relaxation and focusing techniques to attempt to visualize what it looked like back when you used it?

As knightdk already stated: With such a randomly generated password, if you can't remember enough about it, you are likely to never get your coins back.

Honestly, you'd probably need to remember more than 80% of the password to have any chance at all with current technology.

It was a password generated by a random password...generator. It generated a unique 63 ASCII character password, which would look something like this (I just generated this using the same generator. I listed the site above): h,|F;@z=fN+Y&[O5mzI:kJ^ml6R0Z/p5=NF~R7{AV!v5~APbd_KaUe"#_LBHOGc

Is TRIM enable on the SSD? If not, it may still be possible to recover.

edit: to check, open up cmd and run:

> fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

A return of 0 means TRIM is enabled

I've used testdisk with variable success in the past (not on SSD mind you), it's my only recommendation unfortunately..
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Yep, you've got 3 options to gain access to those bitcoins...

• Somehow visualize more than 80% of the password from when you first saw it (hypnosis, meditation, etc)
• Recover the password from where you saved it.
• Find a backup of the password that you saved elsewhere.

If none of those work, then you can consider them permanently lost.

You could take a look at this service: http://www.walletrecoveryservices.com/

The guy who runs that website has helped out dozens of people recover their wallets from forgotten passwords. Obviously it's a massive long shot - you generated a random 63 character password with lower/upper/symbols/numbers and like DannyHamilton said, good luck brute-forcing something like that with current hardware and software.

Other than Wallet Recovery Services, I'd say your only option is to keep the wallet as-is, and wait a decade or so until brute-forcing passwords like that is possible, and then try to brute-force it.

Did you not write down the seed or backup when you first set up the wallet?
If you always keep a copy of your wallet seed in a safe location then forgetting your password is not a worry.

Nope.

His password is more than 410 bits of entropy.  A bitcoin private key is only 256 bits of entropy.  Each additional bit of entropy takes twice as long to brute force. That means that it would take 2.3 X 10⁴⁶ times longer to brute force his entire password than it would to just brute force a Bitcoin private key.  It will NEVER be possible to brute force a private key, therefore it will 2.3 X 10⁴⁶ times never be possible to brute force his entire password.

It might still be worth hanging on to the wallet though.  While it will never be possible to brute-force it, weaknesses in ECDSA, RIPEMD-160, and SHA-256 could be discovered in the future.  If enough weaknesses are discovered in the next few decades, then perhaps it might be possible to gain access to the bitcoins without brute-forcing anything.

Maybe I'll be a millionaire in the future :).

Nope.

OP stated that he used bitcoind.  bitcoind is a non-deterministic wallet. There is no seed.

If you are willing to pay me 0.4 BTC I will try to recover the coins on your wallet.dat file.
You pay only if I recover your coins. (It may take some weeks, if possible, and I'll need the wallet.dat file)

I can't promise I will get them, but I'll do my best.

It's already been stated as impossible with his password, so go scam elsewhere.

The only way this would ever be recovered is if the address was also used pre-encryption, and then some old wallet data with the keys were found in free space by scanning the entire hard drive raw.

Edit: additionally, if TRIM was supported by the SSD and the hard drive controller, the deleted file blocks would have been cleaned by the drive.

I think I can extract the password hash from the wallet.dat, I've seen it in another thread; I would def give you .04 BTC.

Good luck then, man :)

I'm asking 0.4 BTC because that's the 20% of the wallet, and I would not try it for less, sorry. And tbh, it's not easy to get that hash, but I wish you the best luck, man.

Thanks, I do respect you too. Why would I be a scammer for offering what others do? which is to try to recover his password.

Anyway, thanks for being such a nice guy. And yes, I love you too.

Oooppps sorry I meant I'd definitely give you .4 bitcoin, added a zero on accident.

Excelent then! I'll PM you now. (Thanks in advance for your trust)

I bet Microsoft has got a copy hidden in their cloud, if you were on Winows of course. :)

1st of your not an idiot, im sure there is not one of us on this forum who has done something stupid at least once in our life time.  The whole point of your security was to make this wallet unbreakable, so i am 99.9% sure it cant be done, and if you do manage to get it by some sort of brute force or hack then i would be incredalby worried. 

some times we just gotta learn from expensive lessons...... :-\

Exactly this. I don't think you'll be seeing those coins again, unless ofcourse you somehow recover the file that contained the password because that long a password can't be remembered or brute forced, don't know what the guy who's trying to do that is thinking.

Wow Google Chrome persisted this sites cookie through an operating system shutdown from the battery running out on my laptop...Anyway...

I figured I'm not seeing that money anytime soon, maybe in the future like other people said.

Thanks to everyone that made a suggestion or comment, I pretty much knew this from the beginning but I figured it doesn't hurt to at least ask.

I don't manually run TRIM on my SSD's, does it run automatically? I tried using testdisk (as suggested) but it is unusable on my system for whatever reason. The partition type keeps coming up as Linux even though it is an NTFS partition. My SSD's are in RAID0 though so that may be what's throwing it off I don't really know too much about how all that works.

Have you tried this idea?


That's a quick and easy way to test to see if TRIM is enabled on your SSD's.

Unfortunately, it is enabled.

I'm sorry for your loss...

Then you should have paid closer attention, there is no getting that back and you know it yourself.  I love when people talk about "cracking" a password on wallets.  You do realize that "mining" is just hacking the hash for the transactions and that you might as well use the same computer to mine as to try to crack a wallet password.

I am also sorry for your loss, instead of wasting time meditating I highly advise you attempt to recover the lost password file if you saved it, only bet mate.

Good luck.

If you are using online wallet just check it in your pc. There is one paper wallet while you initially start the wallet you can get that. If not due to security concern we can't find out the password as it is.

What exactly are you talking about? I am confused.

Oh and btw, I am not the one who lost the coins, if you read the OP, you'll know who he is and what actually happened.