Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

I have 3 wallet.dat files from 2018 and 2020 and I'm at least 50% sure there's between 1-3 BTC located on one of them. Given that even 0.25 BTC would be life changing for me right now, it would be incredible if I could access these wallets.

I've tried every password I can think of to no avail. This morning I've been looking into BTCRecover and finally got it running, but it's going to take a ridiculous amount of time to brute-force even a 6 character password with the hardware I have, because there's a good chance I used a combination including numbers and special characters in the original password.

Bearing the above in mind, is there someway I can extract the public wallet addresses from these wallet.dat files to know if this is something worth perusing or not? If I could at least find out what the situation was, I could then make an informed decision on the best way to proceed.

I'm 90% sure these are wallet.dat files created by Electrum Bitcoin Wallet. All are password protected (encrypted).

Thank you for time

Sincerely, badape25

If you "found" these files on the internet or worse paid for them, they are empty and fake.

99% of the Electrum history, it created a wallet file without any extensions and the content is stored simply as a human readable JSON file. .dat extension is one that bitcoin core and some other wallets use.
Specially if this is a wallet created in those two years, it is impossible to have a .dat extension.

Not quite sure why you'd automatically jump to the worst assumption. They're 100% mine and were on an old USB I was sorting through. I simply cannot remember the password I used. Many people have been in this exact situation.


Yes my mistake. I got confused because I renamed one of them to .dat to try on BTCRecover. They are indeed just standard files without any extension

It's not the worst assumption, it's the most likely assumption. It happens a lot, and is a waste of everyone's time.
If you're unsure about the balance, unsure about what software you used, and don't know the password, it sounds like something isn't right.

It would help if you're sure about what software you used. If you used Electrum, it told you to write down 12 seed words when you created the wallet. Find those words and you don't need your password.

You cannot extract addresses or public keys from a password protected Electrum wallet without knowing the password. The entire wallet file and all the data it contains is encrypted, which you can see if you open the wallet file with a text editor. If the wallet did not have a password, then all the data is stored in plain text and this is easily possible, but that doesn't help you here.

This is not how btcrecover works. You should not be renaming Electrum files to .dat files. Simply make a copy of the Electrum wallet file and specify its location to btcrecover in the command line using --wallet PATH.

Bruteforcing from scratch with absolutely no knowledge of your password will almost certainly be unsuccessful unless you used a very weak password. You will need to have some idea of what the password could be to create a tokenfile for btcrecover to work from.