Bitcoin Forum

I'm a programmer; I got into bitcoin in early 2011; and was smart enough to keep a sizeable stash (several hundred btc). When bitcoin started really going through the roof I spent a bunch of time 'protecting' that wallet with a long passphrase; and though I opened it several times, I waited like 4 months to get into it and when I tried, I couldn't get in. I tried and tried and tried.
I eventually wrote a naive cracker that tried about 5 million attempts in little bursts over the next couple months, never successful. I was getting ready to give up when I was referred to dave. I was hopeful but far from optimistic.
Within 72 hours of contacting dave; he had cracked a 50+ character password, with everything you are supposed to have: symbols, numbers, upper and lower case, words and random gibberish. He had the opportunity to steal, if he chose 57 btc from me worth at the time of writing something like ~34k usd. He didn't!

I obviously gave him the info needed; he wasn't acting blind. 

Dave, you fucking rock.

what did you pay him?

sounds like a decent human being. i think i've heard of this service from multiple people. i wouldn't hesitate to use their services if i had a few BTC that i didn't have access to.

Congrats on your newly re-found bitcoin!

a hefty, but fair reward

was it up front or contingent on success?

contingent on success; i didn't pay anything upfront.

and how much of the passphrase were you able to give him/how much of what you gave turned out to be correct?

i was very, very close.  if i had used in my own cracker the basic notion of checking shift-casing the different chars i would have found it myself eventually.  i gave him a lot of info; but actually  most of it was "wrong" in the sense what i told him it most likely looked like was not what it actually was.

i did provide him everything though, an essay on my thought process as well as the source code to the cracker i wrote; not sure if he used the ruby scripts at all though

Have fun with your refound hundreds of btc! You were very lucky you found them again! :)

I am very happy to have been able to help you!
Thanks for the nice write-up. I've mentioned you to Stephanie Murphy (from the show Lets Talk Bitcoin), who may be doing a segment about walletrecoveryservices.com shortly. Perhaps you will get a mention too?
Regarding your ruby scripts - no, I didn't use them, except for some reference info.

Cheers
Dave

Try reading before posting garbage. He only had 72 BTC in there.

"only"  lol

I figured you would not have run them, but just looked in them for some notion of how I thought the password might have looked

you're the one posting garbage buddy.. no one said anything about 72 btc, ever.  dave unlocked my whole wallet; which indeed had several hundred btc in it.  i had just sent him a single addy with unspent coins; so he never had access to the whole thing.

congrats on recovering your BTC :)

Wow!! Man lucky for you.. Dave great work... You'll be in very demand now...