Bitcoin Forum

Hello guys, earlier this morning I bought 20 Bitcoins and sent them to my BitcoinQT wallet on my desktop. Only minutes after the transaction was complete I tried to send a few bitcoins out of the wallet and it asks for my password..

The wallet was created 6 months ago and I can not for the life of me remember the password. I know most of it the first part is "Jonhjef****" the last 4 are digits that I can not remember. I do remember that they are numbers however.

How can I recover my wallet?? I cant stand the idea of losing this much Bitcoins for such a stupid, stupid reason. Is anyone able to bruteforce it? If someones able to fix this Id have no problem giving them a percentage of whats in my wallet. help please!

I can try. If you're sure it's 4 digits missing, that should be ok.
I send you a pm with my e-mail.

If you are positive that only 4 digits are missing, it'll be brute-forced in a matter of milliseconds, no worries.

Few minutes actually (I did a trial), but yeah that's really feasible. All depends on whether the rest of the pass is corret or not.

Really ? Executing bitcoind with the walletpassphrase switch 10000 times (considering you have the worst possible luck) takes several minutes ?  :o
Never tried, actually, so I'll beleive you, but that looks very slow.

Was about one minute for 1000 trials.

It's not wise to post your passphrase on this forum even with a few digits missing. Someone else could have done the brute force and stole your coins. :-\

Bitcoind forces decryption to take an average of 0.1 seconds, and reencrypts to make it stronger if your hardware has got faster.

Don't you also need the wallet file? Or am I confused?

You need the wallet file.

You don't even need any software to "bruteforce" it.

Just copy the part of the pass you remember into clipboard, then CTRL + V, type 0000, press ENTER; CTRL +V, type 0001, press ENTER... repeat until 9999 (or until you get it right).

It shouldn't take you more than several hours.

DO NOT SEND YOUR WALLET FILE TO ANYONE AND DO NOT INSTALL ANY "BRUTEFORCE" SOFTWARE UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY TRUST THE PERSON/SOFTWARE.

But seriously, it is hard to imagine that this is a real post. I can not imagine any adult person, who would not realize, that there are only 10000 possible password variations in your case, and that you can simply try them all, to "recover the wallet".

What I suspect this could be, is a mass-media shill posting. If someone helps to "recover" the wallet for this person, expect an article along the lines of: "a guy loses 20 BTC, but someone from the bitcoin community hacks Bitcoin to get the 20 BTC back".

Better paranoid than sorry.

Sounds very repetitive and boring! Oh, wait, I think we invented one thing to make repetitive and boring tasks for us... computers!
You're right, we don't need softwares for this. I don't consider less than 10 lines of bash script a software.

You're right, mankind has way too much free time in its hands, let's waste it! :)

Agreed.

What did you smoke?

Are you really oblivious to the colossal amount of anti-bitcoin propaganda on mass-media?

There were already tons of articles, describing how "Bitcoin was hacked", when in reality it was the users' computers which were hacked.

It reminds me of trying to open a suitcase with a number lock of which I forgot the number. Spent an afternoon trying to open it. And those had only 3 digits. Luckily I didn't use a different code on the left side than on the right side, then it would have been 6 digits.

Exactly. And would you post on the webforum asking for help on how to "recover" your suitcase?

I agree mainstream-media are often wrong, exagerated, overalarmist, etc. But nobody would confuse, how you summarized it very well, trying 10000 possible combinations with "hacking" a wallet. Hacking, whatever is technically behind the word, is often beyond the possible understanding and knowledge of the average person, but trying 10000 possibilities is definitely not.
I won't go any further in this discussion as I fear we'd enter into much less rational considerations.

If you know some guys there could easily build a machine that tries all codes in few minutes for you? I would either ask them, or learn myself how to build this machine, which in both case involve asking around for some help, much better than wasting hours. :)

If you want to avoid the trust issue with sending your wallet.dat to someone with the hope they will be able to recover your password, you could try auctioning your wallet.dat to someone who would know how to brute force it.  That way you could just open a new wallet with a password you can write down and have someone send you some fresh coins.

But of course they'd have to place their trust in you that the rest of your password is correct because cracking an 11 character password with no known characters would take a super long time :D

WTF are you talking about? :)

There were articles calling the ddos of mtgox as "Bitcoin hacking" http://www.cnbc.com/id/100615508 Bitcoin Hacked: Price Stumbles After Buying Frenzy

They would absolutely, definitely call wallet encryption bruteforcing as "Bitcoin hacking" too.

Ok, thanks for educating me.
I understand better why bitcoind is so hard to use on a heavily loaded website, too.  ;)

For everyone to know: acs26 just replied to my PM, giving me a link to download is wallet.dat. Which happends to be only a windows executable starting with "wallet.dat". You propose to help and then...  :(

As a side note to you acs26, you're really dumb trying to trick someone like that. Because when claiming you have such technical problems, you have significant chances to reach somebody not using windows (I'm on linux and don't care about your .exe), and anyway very significant chance that the person is not a moron as you might expect.