Bitcoin Forum

Hi Guys i have 2 addresses not sure what the balance is, but i have the private key which begins with Letter K one has 49 characters and the other has 54 can anyone help?

I'm not sure if that address is valid, the maximum of 34 and 26 minimum in length I have seen.
Try and search it on any explorer and see for your self if it's valid

Uhuh! I thought OP was talking about an address.

A WIF private key starting with K is supposed to have 52 characters:

What's the story behind missing 3 and adding 2 characters? It's not too much to make brute-forcing impossible, but if for instance your handwriting is the cause of the mistakes, chances are there are more incorrect characters.

You may want to change the title to "private key missing characters".

As Loyce says, a private key beginning with K is a compressed WIF and should have 52 characters. Is it possible you have taken a couple of characters from one key and added them to the other? Have you tried importing the first 52 characters of the key which has 54 characters?

You could try using a tool such as The FinderOuter (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5214021.0) by Coding Enthusiast to attempt to brute force the correct private keys.

Is it still the same case you posted months ago?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1409361.msg53950859#msg53950859

Based on the OP, it looks like it's your Private keys that are missing some characters.

Anyways, for the address, try using www.walletexplorer.com (http://www.walletexplorer.com).
It has an auto-complete feature for the partial address that you will paste on their search box,
the catch is: the address should at least been used once (and not recent) for it to be registered to their database.

Example: if you search for "1BitcoinEaterAddre", it will automatically redirect you to "1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE".
More characters means more accurate search.

For the 49 chars private key you need to know the position of the missing chars, if they are the last 3 ones then you can use a command like this:


Then you can import all the private keys to a bitcoin core, that's how I would recover the coins, and if you don't know the position in the missing chars then you can forget about those coins, the number of combinations is really big in that scenario.

That could take until the end of time, specially since core needs to rescan :)
There is this thing in WIFs called "checksum" that you could have used to reduce this ridiculously big number to only one or two possible keys for 3 missing characters. Then importing them into a wallet to check becomes much easier.

Even if it's a much longer list of private keys, you can use something like bitcoin-tool to convert them into addresses and comm (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5254914.0) to check which ones have a balance. This way you can check millions of addresses in seconds.

That's 2 years ago :o OP seems to have abandoned this topic too.

@JBRai
wif missing is less then 6 at any place that can be recovered in 60min more or less. but if you missing checksum in wif it may take while but still possible.
i have made tool for cuda to practically test all possible pair with there checksum. but there are many false positive too.
my tool approach is different what PawGo coded. i use base58 decode and checksum match effort to validate it.
Do you have gpu ? i can send you app for testing.

Hello.
Can you please send me your program for testing on the GPU.
I sent you a telegram.