Bitcoin Forum

Suddenly, I cannot unlock my Bitcoin Core encrypted wallet. I was sending and receiving transactions only a few days ago. I am certain that I am using the correct password because I had backups of the password, and it is correct. My bitcoin remain in the wallet, but I cannot move them. I moved the wallet.dat file to another computer, but I get the same error on using the password. Is it possible that the recent upgrade to v0.15.0.1 affected the password?

By the way, my password has several special characters. I use quotes to enclose in Ubuntu, which always worked before.

Try the capital word, maybe? :(

Did you check your keyboard layout? I had a huge issue one time when I encrypted my computer but I did it in a UK keyboard format and I was typing my password with a US keyboard format. It's just an idea. If you haven't changed settings this may not be it. Just see what keyboard you're on and see if it types the password out properly in an OpenLibre doc.

It could indeed be that that is the issue, but it really shouldn't be. Have you tried degrading to 0.15 / 0.14.2?


 If not, you should try and see if that resolves your issue, but if this would be the case i'd guess that there would already be several people reporting this issue on github, which isn't the case right now.

It's more likely an issue on your side, rather the bitcoin-core client.

So I guess you use a command line then instead of a GUI?
Maybe try the GUI then if that is the case. Maybe your shell is acting differently with those special characters then it did before as maybe there was some update on it or maybe you are using a different shell then you did before.

What if you restore a backup that was made prior to the issue?  Does it behave the same way?

Thanks for all the suggestions. I finally got the wallet unlocked. I am using the Linux Bitcoin Core CLI version. The problem was that I was using an ! in the password, which Ubuntu interpreted as a command, despite the password being encased in double quotes. So in the place of the !, Ubuntu suddenly began to interpret the password with "bitcoin-cli getblockcount" as part of the password instead of the !, which was apparently the prior command I had used before setting the password. The only way I was able to discover that bizarre result was because I had made note of a strange response from Ubuntu when I originally created the password. But I never had an issue after that, until just few days ago. The password worked with the ! for many months. It was only in the last few days that the password with the ! stopped working. That was a truly amazing string of coincidences. I am going to pray the rosary this weekend, in thanks, for sure.

get a hex editor app and plug the characters of the password in, and then cut and paste into the Core password field.

You don't need to trust keyboards for this (and obscure means of entering special characters through keyboards).