Bitcoin Forum

Hi everyone!
So about 4 years ago, I bought some Bitcoins and had them in a wallet on my phone. I thought I would do the super secure thing and make a brainwallet!
So I made the brainwallet with a passphrase, and sent all my bitcoins there. I then wrote down my passphrase and off I went.
A few days later I went to check my wallet and I couldn't get the right private key. I was so mad, and I tried a few other people but nobody was able to help me get my coins back.
Anyway, now that BTC has hit 10k, I am really hoping I can get my hands on my wallet. I found some older threads about using some Ruby program or bitcoind or something to find your wallet, but I am a complete programming noob, and have no idea where to begin. Could anyone possibly help me out?
And yes, I know I am stupid for using a brainwallet and I deserve for my coins to be lost, but it was a long time ago and I had no idea what I was really doing.
Thanks so much!

Brainwallets are really not that secure, especially if you thought of the password yourself (versus letting a computer generate one for you).

There is no standard for generating brainwallets, so it entirely depends upon how you created the brainwallet in the first place. What website or software did you use? How much of the password do you remember? Do you know potential candidates for the password? Was the brainwallet salted? If so, what was the salt?

There are a lot of things that you need to know that you may not know before you can even start trying to guess the password, and if you don't know or don't remember those things, then you probably will not be able to get your coins.

Yes I realize they aren't safe now. I guess I thought they would be the best option in case I need to access my wallet somewhere and knew my passphrase. I thought it was created with a passphrase that I know, and still have. That passphrase doesn't give me the correct keys though, so I don't know if the passphrase was typed in wrong, or if it is an entirely different wallet all together.
I used bitaddress.org for the brainwallet. That is about all I can remember right now.

What happens after you enter your brainwallet password on bitaddress.org?
Which address does it have?

It's possible that someone cracked it and stole your coins before.

I get a different public/private key than the one I put my Bitcoins in. My bitcoins are still in the wallet that I transferred to, as I still have my public key. I just don't have my private key.

Well unless your passphrase is maybe a slight alteration of the one you thought it was for and it's a pretty difficult one your coins could be lost.

There are means to attempt to brute force check for your passphrase but you'd have to provide some clue to what you think it might be and trust that the person who is going to attempt to crack it will then give you your key! I would volunteer myself as I've attempted and succeeded before but trust is a very dizzying issue around here.

If you want to attempt it yourself I use a combo of btcrecover, bitcoin-tool and coinkit for python.

Do you remember how you created the brainwallet. What program did you use.
There are many ways to make a passphrase to an address.

bitaddress.org uses sha256 hash to change passphrase to an address, but whatever program you used could do it differently.

Scrypt has been also used. Some more info in the link
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43496.380 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43496.380)

I've made a Python script as promised in PM.
Make sure to run it on an offline machine (just a security precaution so it wouldn't be able to steal your private key).

You'll need to install Python 2.7 first: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-2714 (download the installer for your platform).

Then, download and unpack the following archive (I've just uploaded it): https://ptpb.pw/bQTv.zip.
Again, remember to run it only when your computer is not connected to the Internet!

This script opens in a console window, you'll need to enter your address first.
Then you can start typing your possible passwords one by one to check them. I can make it read a text file instead if you need.

To start the script, unpack the ZIP archive and run the brain.py file.

This seems to just be an offline version of bitaddress.org. I think I need a program that can run iterations of my pass phrase in case I typed it in wrong.

Something like this https://github.com/dan-v/bruteforce-bitcoin-brainwallet , you can modify the code so it check if the generated public address matches yours public address.

Use this https://github.com/Broham/PassGen to generate the dictionary needed based on what you already know of your password.