Bitcoin Forum

Hello All,

  Wondering if I had an old bitcoin paper wallet QR code scanned, never recognized by a generic basic code scanner yet saved in the scanner's history as a few letters and a string of numbers, any way I can reconstruct this QR code from these letters and numbers to a QR code readable by a proper bitcoin paper wallet scanner?

Thank you,
 

I am having trouble understanding your question, but sounds like no. You need more than a few letters and numbers for a bitcoin address, whether it's for a QR code or something else you need the full address to be able to use it.

There's a topic here on pretty much the similar problem (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5312042.0).

The idea is that the more characters are missing the time (and energy) to brute force it rises exponentially easily getting beyond anything useful ( 3 * 10^13 years if 12 characters are known (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5312042.msg56179950#msg56179950) )
And if you also don't know the correct position of those characters, it gets even more difficult/lengthy.

Try this: https://merricx.github.io/qrazybox/

Do the letters and numbers have any semblance to some format you might recognize, like base58 address, private key WIF, hexadecimal, something that might look like an ID or page number, and such? ???

Without knowing it's format, you can't attempt any kind of recovery with the data.


This tool is not useful for OP because he doesn't have a damaged QR code, just a bunch of characters that came from one.

It's a letternumber;letternumber;letternumber; then a string of numbers.....

So the scanner couldn't read the code ( errored) however stored what it thought was a text QRcode in the form off a letternumber;letternumber;letternumber; then a string of numbers....
 my question is can I reverse these letters/ numbers the scanner recorded/ saw into the original QR code? and then rescan it with the proper Bitcoin paper wallet scanner to get the wallet keys?
Thank you,

I would think that given that it couldn't read the code properly... whatever it "saved" is most likely garbage data... so converting that back into a QRcode and then rescanning it, would simply yield the same garbage... "GIGO" :-\

Do you mean the first three characters could either be letters or numbers, like A1B12345 or ABC12345, or do you mean there is a number and semicolon three times such as A1;B2;C3;12345 ?

Also clarify how you managed to access the scanner's history. Is there some vendor software that shows you this (I assume you're using Windows), or does the scanner have some kind of removeable storage card that you can insert in a computer to read the history?  ???

So it’s in this format: A1;B2;C.....20 numbers....;....153 numbers
It’s on my old phone code scanner history, speaking of scanners/ printers can I somehow access/ regenerate a code from the printing history if it’s stored somewhere on an old drive??

Of course, just feed the string to any qr code generator.

You need to know how the text of the qr code is shown in the history, of course. What you have written so far does not sound like a private key.

Maybe do a few test strings with a qr code generator and your scanner app and see how the test strings look in your history.