Bitcoin Forum

As bitcoin price hit new low it is getting hard to justify selling bitcoin to pay for GPU rentals - so I'm trying to think outside of the box for finding public key for damaged WIF backup (see post#https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5380095 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5380095)) that happened approx. an year ago -

but Since the address in question (P2PKH) contains newly generated block rewards from solo hashing over a good period of time, but none of which were spent (unfortunately, and neither do I have an signed message for this P2PKH address) - is there any reason why scriptSig from generation transaction recorded on main net not providing me my public key?  maybe the offset I'm copying is incorrect - or it is just impossible all together

The other place I think May be of help is digging thru stratum blocks logs on the server - which had been sit dormant for about an decade in storage - but this opens up whole range of new issues (log analysis, damage to hardware not used for long time, etc)

Since it's P2PKH and not P2PK, it's impossible.

Even if it's from multiple coinbase transaction output,
Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash still wont show the public key until it's spent, only the PubkeyHash.
Pay-to-Public-Key on the other hand, is basically straight-out send to the public key.

I completely forgot about that problem! But as you see in the replies to the OP, it was one of reasons why WifSolverCuda was wrote. It was one year ago... uhh.
How did you try to recover the WIF? How much work has been done?
Of course having public key would made the problem trivial, but without... not easy.

what you have asked is not possible. (address to pubkey)
the search space for 11 missing characters is bigger than 2^64.
your best chance is with random search
i have calculated the time required for my GPU's to search the whole space and it was roughly 80 years....
if you agree and ofcourse trust me i can let my gpu's to search in random mode for 3 months.
if the key is found i will take 10% of it's total value, the rest will be transferred to your chosen address.
But again the chances are very slim.. only 0.3% in 3 months.
I saw that there are few people here with proven community reputation, but only for forgotten password. (someone correct me if i'm wrong)
And the most important thing, be careful with who you share your partial WIF, even if it takes a long time brute force it some shady people have access to more powerful machines.

It's possible that the offset you are using to access the public key from the scriptSig of the generation transaction is incorrect, which could be causing issues. It's also possible that the scriptSig from the generation transaction does not contain the public key, and that there is no way to recover it.

In terms of digging through the stratum blocks logs on the server, this could be a possible solution, but it would require a lot of work and may not yield any results. The logs may have been damaged or lost over time, and even if they are still intact, analyzing them would require a lot of technical expertise and time. Additionally, if the server has not been used for a long time, there may be hardware issues that would need to be addressed before the logs can be accessed.

It is important to note that recovering a lost or damaged private key is a complex and difficult task and there is no guarantee that you will be able to recover it. Additionally, the complexity and uncertainty of your situation, it's recommended to consult with a specialist in the field of data recovery or consult with a legal expert if it's possible to track the damaged WIF backup.