Bitcoin Forum

I have a Dash wallet from years ago and I can't find the password to it. I was able to dump the hash (parts between periods have been substituted):


Is it possible to use an ASIC miner, like an old Jalepeno, to crack the hash? I'm using btcrecover and it won't work with my GPU, and hashcat wants a bitcoin hash to begin with $bitcoin$96, so I'm looking for other options. I figured since the password I'm trying to crack is SHA-256 based, maybe an ASIC miner could help?

just think about it
if anyone is able to crack the password of any wallet file of a blockchain then the blockchain and all these cryptocurrencies would not even exist in the first place
so the answer is NO
you cannot

It's pretty common:

https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover

https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=example_hashes (search for "bitcoin")

It's not like anyone can just crack your bitcoin password. They at least need the wallet password hash, which I have, and unless it's a weak password, they need to have educated guesses as to what the password is (which I do).

Since there are ways to solve these hashes with CPUs and GPUs, there must be a way to use SHA-256 ASIC hardware to solve SHA-256 password hashes much faster than CPUs or GPUs. I just don't know how and am hoping someone here does and can point me in the right direction.

I guess the answer in general is here:

Why Bitcoin mining ASICs won't crack your password (https://rya.nc/asic-cracking.html)

In other words it should be some particular ASIC especially designed for passwords' bruteforce. Random old ASIC-miner unlikely would be suitable for this since it basically works according to another scheme.

Thanks - that answers it perfectly and explains why a miner can't be used for password cracking. It wasn't the answer I was hoping for but at least I know I need to look in another direction  :)

What sort of value is in the wallet?  Is it significant?  If so it might be worth spinning up an AWS instance to run hashcat.

I think that if the password is long, more than 14 characters, then it is a waste of time.
Any passwords can be cracked on video cards, but it takes a lot of time and energy costs.
Although these resources are best used for mining other coins.

I don’t get why everybody thinks you can use ASICS to crack passwords. I remember years ago I had an old ASIC for sale. I think it was an Antminer S3 for something like $50 each. I stated in the ad it’s more for hobby purposes and that you won’t get your $50 back due to energy costs unless you hold the Bitcoin to $10K (this was a long time ago).

Anyways there was this one kid who asked if he can “crack private keys” with the Antminer. I told him you can only mine Bitcoin or other Sha256 coins. He then came over and bought it and said he will “hack the firmware” and make it so “it can crack private keys”.

Luckily I never heard from him again. Wonder if he managed to crack any private keys with my old Antminer S3.

Back on topic, no you can’t use an old ASIC to do anything else other than mine Bitcoin or other sha256 coins.

The best thing to do is wait quantum computers, any sha256 wallet will be cracked in days, hold your wallet.dat safe and by then who knows how much btc will cost.