Bitcoin Forum

Hello all
Sorry for my poor English
I have a little problem, I have a coinbase wallet on my android phone. My son on the computer turned wipe option on my smartphone from the Google account.
I have written down on a piece of paper 12 recovery words for application, but I do not have the first 3 words

Is there any program/python that can guess the missing words?

thanks for all the advice

3 words is relatively easily brute forcible, so you should be able to recover your funds.

The program I would recommend using would be: https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover/
There is documentation on how to use this here: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
You will need to first construct a token file with the words you do know.

An alternative approach would be to use this program: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5214021.0

Are you certain about the other 9 words? Are you certain they are in the correct order? Are you certain it is the first 3 words you are missing?

Further, do you know an address from this wallet which has sent or received any bitcoin? Preferably the very first address in the wallet, if you know it.

There are 2048 possibilities for each word.
The first word can go into one of any 12 position in your wallet seed, therefore 2048*12. The next in any of 11, and the last one is 10.

so you will have total of 2048 * 12 * 2048 * 11 * 2048 * 10, or 2048^3 * 10 * 11* 12 which eq= 1.1338714e+13


a normal computer, with 500,000 attempts per second need less than 10 Years. (worse case)

Thus, a normal computer may need a few years, but adding more physical devices may reduce that time for several months, and perhaps days. The matter depends on the economics of cost (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_cost), which is calculating costs for the physical devices and the money that exists in that seed.

If you know any letter, a place for the word, the shape of the word or part of it, you will reduce the time, perhaps a few days on a regular computer, so try to remember anything because it will reduce the time a lot.

So you have written down twelve words yet you're missing three?
Was it damaged to the point that it's unrecognizable or you are thinking that 'Coinbase Wallet' app has 15 words?

If the former, I second the the replies above.
If the latter, Coinbase Wallet only has 12 words and it should work for recovery.

Speaking of Google Account, your wallet has an option to backup the seed phrase encrypted into your Google Drive.
And AFAIK, only your device was wiped out by your son, have you backed it up using that option?
If yes, there's a recovery option for that backup: "Restore from Google Drive".

I thought btcrecover only supports Bitcoin Core, now I can see the tool has grown nicely. This is my plan that I will make a dictionary of words I know and put it through the program
I will keep you posted on the progress

If OP is accurate when he says he doesn't know "the first three" words, then it is only 2048³ possibilities, which is solvable in hours to days, rather than years.

Good thinking. Check this first OP, since it will save you a huge amount of time.

I have quite a bit of experience with the program, so happy to help out if you get stuck. Just be sure not to share any of your seed words on the forum (or with anybody else, for that matter). If you are certain it is the first three words you are missing, then your tokens file would look something like this:


Replace the last three lines with the entire BIP39 wordlist three times. This tells btcrecover the 9 words you know in their fixed positions, and then tells it to try every possible word from the wordlist as the first three missing words.

On the worst CPU it should take from 6 hours to half a day tops, which is slightly faster on a better CPU. Also with a decent GPU it could become so much faster that the required time would come down to about an hour or less. We are talking about only 8.5 billion permutations after all.

Yeah... 3 missing words is pretty trivial if the exact position of the missing words is known.

If the positions are unknown, then it becomes exponentially more difficult... but OP says:

If OP knows at least one (low index) address that is generated by this seed, it should be relatively easy to find.

Successful launch of btcrecover. With three words missing (bigtypos 3), it uses astronomical amounts of ram and the computer freezes.

I have read the instructions for btcrevocer and I wonder if it is possible to set using regex, for example words starting with the given letter "a% b% c%"?
Is it possible to enter the address, words completely from the command line ?

Computer freezing is normal since this types of application use all your CPU cores and don't leave that much to other applications. But to be honest using a lot of RAM is very strange. There isn't that much data that could be cached and reused in brute forcing a mnemonic, and when I say not much I mean 100s of bytes not even 1 kbyte!

I know you can create token files (https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tokenlist_file/) when recovering passwords but I'm not sure how to use this or the command line for mnemonic recovery.
Paging @o_e_l_e_o for help...

The speed I reported was based on the other project: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5214021.0

So you don't want to be using the command --big-typos. This is only for if you don't know how many words and/or which words are incorrect. --big-typos 3 will swap every combination of three words in your seed phrase with every possible three word combination. This will give 12*11*10*2048*2048*2048 = 11 trillion combinations, which is about 130 days at 1 million combinations per second. Since you know the locations of your three missing words, you only need to search 2048*2048*2048 = 8.5 billion combinations, which is about 2 hours at the same rate. This is likely why your computer is crashing.

It is possible to do everything from the command line. I can build a command for you to run, but I need some more info first. Please answer all of the following:

Are you certain it is words 1-3 you are missing?
Are you certain words 4-12 are correct and in the correct order?
Are you trying to recover a legacy (addresses start with 1), nested segwit (addresses start with 3), or native segwit (addresses start with bc1) wallet?
Do you know an address from this wallet which has received or spent coins? Ideally the very first address in the wallet.

I am advanced in programming, so I can run a python script, I just get lost in these arguments  ;D

As for the words, I'm sure
This is the ETH address 0x .........
This address is most likely
Oh, is the difference between seedrecovery and btcrecovery, seed is for ETH and btc for btc?

btcrecover is for bitcoin wallet password cracking. seedrecover is for unscrambling seed phrases, so is obviously the one you want. You'll need to include the argument --wallet-type ethereum since you are using an Ethereum address.

An example command for you might look like this:

Hi,

Recently I have added support for ETH addresses, you may check my program here: https://github.com/PawelGorny/lostword

I guess you are interested in 'KNOWN_POSITION' method. Check examples how to run it (especially example_21.conf for ETH).

Let me know if you need any help with running that.

Pawel

The top of the line RTX graphic cards are amazing for bruteforcing. If OP had any relevant amount of money in there, I would buy a RTX 3090 and run whatever software allows the latest RTX cards.

https://blog.elcomsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/EDPR_7ZIP_11122020-1.png

a program like johntheripper or other wallet recovery tools on Linux can help in your case i think,Linux has the best tools for this kind of work.