Bitcoin Forum

Hello.  I have 4 btc locked up via bip38 in a paper wallet
Here is the address and private key of an empty wallet that shares the same unknown passphrase as the key-pair that holds the 4 btc.
i am able to be contacted if anybody would like to take a crack at it and i can give them suggestions as to what the passphrase may be

address: 1GKZDdgN4FpbYhmEh9u4KfnzjeekLsizDb

private key: 6PfVTtheHh5vMNz9Nohc89wmeNLDrg3fwKFPpceUKF1nh3YU2Cm7FT1gc6

i would obviously make this very much worth your time.  thanks so much

 Hi i can help , read this  https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27f9zl/how_do_i_open_and_use_a_bip38_wallet/
 It will help you open your wallet. You need to download Mycelium app. Hope this helps, can i get reward.

that post is 3 years old and no longer applicable to Mycellium's standards

Use bip39-standalone if you have the full passphrase

i don't have the full passphrase lol, that's the point of this post.  i would be able to spend my btc if i had the passphrase.  i already have the keys

Good luck. I know the feeling. I have some Litecoins that are locked up from way back. I've tried everything to get the passphrase - no luck yet.

I may be wrong here, but using a Bitcoin address that was created with the same Pass phrase, will not help you at all. The pass phrase is just a small part of the encryption and it will create a different Public address/Private key, no matter what you use as the pass phrase.

There was a similar situation like this a few years back and this guy tried everything. In the end, he woke up one morning and remembered what his pass phrase was and he got access to the wallet. Good luck, I doubt if you going to be lucky, doing it this way. < Worst case scenario, some scammer offers to help you and he/she figure it out and take all the coins >

as far as i know, and i could be wrong.  i created a paper wallet with 3 key pairs on bitaddress and i encrypted all 3 of them with one passphrase.  i sent 2 btc to 2 of the addresses and none to the 3rd.  i remember the tutorial saying to do this. 

OP wants to know the password without exposing his funds.

Is this something you can post in public? Note: if it also exposes other passwords you use online, you should change them first (and use a password manager and more random passwords in the future).

It will be hard to get your pass phrase since the paper wallet is encrypted.  However, do you used Safari version 6 when making encrypting the wallet?
If not, try python cracker if your pass phrase is simple and you can also try BIP38 Brute Force Password Cracker (https://github.com/cculianu/brute38) if the python don't work out.

Did you already try to 'crack' it yourself?
You can use btcrecover [1] to do it yourself.

Additionally, without further information about the password this seems to be a hard (to unpossible) task.
Do you have any clue regarding your passwords?

• How long was your passwords? min. max. characters?
• Which chars did you use / or didn't use for sure
• Do you use a specific pattern for every password?
• Anything else you remember?

Any of those information would help recovering your password.

The best would be to write down anything you know about your password and try to use btcrecover[1] on your own.


[1] https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover (https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover)

i tried btcrecover but it's not for paper wallets.  i have a decent idea what the passphrase may be.  it's long, like 24 chars so straight brute would be impossible. 

If it is a 24 char pass with upper, lowercase and numbers it should not take that long.... Are 100% sure it is exactly 24 char? Does it have symbols like #, @,€...?

You clearly don't know BIP38 encryption, even 6 characters will be very expensive to brute-force!

Can you share this?

If his password is one 24 char word and he knows part of it im sure that a good python script wont take long to crack it.

If 6 characters are hard to bruteforce, you would need to know 18 out of the 24 chars to reach the same 'difficulty'.
The bruteforcing isn't really dependend on how good a script is written. Its mostly dependend on the algorithm itself.

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Im not saying its impossible to bruteforce this password, but its definetely going to be rough.
@OP: Can you limit the possible combinations to check notably?

Well if your looking experts OP then you should give them the privilege to access and fix the encryption code in your wallet, technically speaking it would be much of a trouble because you can never know if the one you are asking favor is trustworthy. You can try reading this OP

https://bitcoinpaperwallet.com/bip38-password-encrypted-wallets/