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Hi I desperately need help deciphering characters of a lost private ETH key, the only remnant is a blurred out image from the past.

Link for the image: https://i.imgur.com/Ub3CsCI.png

If anyone can help decipher the blurred out characters this would be great, if a character is not known please leave a # for me to brute force guess the missing characters using software which I have.

The font used is Helvetica (apple) - this may help you work out what the missing alphanumeric characters are likely to be in the image.

The first 18 characters I have along with the wallet ID.

I just need help deciphering the remaining 46 characters from the above image, with this information and the gaps (indicated by #) I should be able to recover the wallet.

Its okay if not all characters are revealed but help guessing as many as possible would be appreciated as my vision is not the best.

Many thanks

Who marked over the address with a purple magic marker? And why did they do that? just curiious.

I do not have access to that font, but it does no seem to be very difficult. There is a little confusion regarding visible parts of c/e/0/8/3/d/b like with the last character, I think you will be able to eliminate wrong guesses. At the end you may try all, it is not so much.

Have fun!

My guess is almost the same but I'm pretty sure the last character is zero (0). Common features of a zero is having a slash inside it ( not sure what that slash is actually called ) but that's how we can usually differentiate a zero from a capital letter O.
Also, second to the last character seems to be number three (3) or six (6)

Thanks but counting the number of characters in your solution its two characters short.

There are 46 characters missing. I have 18 characters in my possesion, and need to work out or guess the + 46 based on the image to give 64 total characters in length.

The solution above provides 44 including the gaps which I have counted

Two letters seems to be missing from your solution

Yes, there were 2 missing. What about that:

What is your guess? Do you have a tool to try the proposed subset of characters?

Is this even yours to beginning with? How will we know that you are the rightful owner?

There seem to be around 13 characters that are ambiguous. I would recommend that you write a script and brute force those 13 characters. Even with those 13 you do not need to go through the whole key space. Doing a brute force attack under these conditions will give you the answer in a short space of time.

Above this, I’m very curious to know how this will go ahead. I mean you have publicly posted a private key for the ETH and wouldn’t this be very bad for you if anyone cracks it? What’s the play here and why are you not afraid about this happening at all?

Also there would be thousands of combination considering the number of characters that are blurred out. I mean that’s the first challenge. And secondly I’m still curious about my first question and how you gonna tackle the same.

It's hard to solve this case, because there are still so many characters to solve. and this is really hard for me. but later I will try to solve it. but the question for me and others reading this thread is are you not afraid if someone can solved it and they will steal your assets?  are you not worried about that?

No I have the first 18 characters - just need to decipher the last 46 characters. It is my private key which I lost, the only remaining clue is this image of the last 46 characters;

https://imgur.com/Ub3CsCI

Even with gaps in the remaining 46 I can still force guess and crack the private key.

I just need to know which letters are confirmed and which ones are unknown.

---

Which 13 can you help to identify them - thanks

why did you mark out the characters with a purple magic marker? it doesn't really make any sense but i think if this was my private key i could read off most of the characters to recover it no problem.

At the time I was sharing it with someone so blurred it out, but then lost the USB where I had the raw key saved, deciphering this mark-up is my only hope of recovering my private key, I have the first 18 characters, just need help to decipher the last 46.

Hoping you can help or anyone...

Are there some any kind of reward in solving this? If you don't mine sharing us the amount in the account there could be a possible race to solve the case. You know some people here could be interested and you could talk to them how many would they get in case they solved the problem. Or you should just simply post in Services board for faster response.

Knowing about the balance is someones privacy and there's no need on asking it out.It is a wise suggestion that this should be placed on Services section and would tend to give out some sort of reward
on solving out or trying to find out those characters.Even myself did really have some headache by just looking on those crossed or blurred market with those character or numbers.
Its hard actually but those guys above had made out some good initial step.

By providing all but the first or last 18 characters, you just made it infinitely  easier for someone to crack your key.

Instead of try to guess a 64 character string, you've reduced it to 18. You have successfully defeated the security provided by having a key 64 characters long.

Once you get the key, move the tokens out of the account immediately and never use it again. Its basically compromised by posting 75% of the key here.

Not quite you need a supercomputer to crack 18 combinations

Of course, breaking 18 characters is a task for even the best computers on the planet for months or probably even years. However, the 8-10 characters can be done on a regular computer in a relatively short time. If we have doubts about some characters (as in the case from screenshot), and give some probabilities, I think that by using brute force you will be able to find the correct solution in a maximum of a few days (even with normal computer).

"h" does not exist in the hexadecimal system. It most resembles a b.

"b6c6" is actually "b6a6" (yes they are both 6's: 6 and 0 both have a narrower base and top than 3 and 8 ) because of the circular curve present at the top right which is not present in c and e letters. There's also a faint black curve at the top stretching from top right and making an arc at the top before terminating at the bottom left (c and e are connected at the top left and don't stop there).

The _ is either a 2 or 3 - there is a slight curved blackness at the top right and a slight patch of black at the bottom right which looks like the endpoint of a straight line. I went with 2 anyhow.

"23435d8" - is actually "d6" because there is a sharp vertical black edge at the bottom of the top-right corner similar to how 6's terminate. which

0 characters are narrower than 3's and 8's - which are the same width btw. 3's have a flat tail end at the bottom left but it doesn't curl up which is what an 8 would do, hence the "145037" sequence at the end is actually "145837".

Finally at the very end, the "1" is actually a 4 because there is a touch of black on the left, right next to the shaded pink.


It's not hard at all. I live and breathe Helvetica when I'm not typing away in Monospace programming.

P.S. OP (original poster / topic starter) did not reveal the first 18 characters.