Bitcoin Forum

So this was my father's bitcointalk account. There's also wallet.dat and a text file:

bitcoin.org
bitcointalk.org
The password is THE DATE
13zEUPdpCDT3JGqv4o61vXQpgWWdxMEZeX

The coins are still there. I guess I can try some dates

I've never used the old Bitcoin client. What do I do?

I'm guessing you don't have bitcoin core installed? If not, install and run it, you can then go to the following path:


Rplace the wallet.dat with the one you have and then restart your wallet.

I would start with
2009-01-09 (Bitcoin's first transaction date)
2016-05-05 (the date that wallet got funded at)

Make sure you do tests offline, or if you are knowledgeable enough, on a live OS, still offline. Hacks are really a thing and 10BTC is an overly good looking amount.
Make sure you know how your father was writing the dates (mm/dd/yyyy. dd.mm.yyyy, yyyy-mm-dd or other ways)
Beware of people that may offer you help in private, some may be scammers.
Good luck.

He could just brute-force the password with a simple few lines of script. I mean there are only so many days since Bitcoin has come into existence. If you try out them all eventually you will get it. I do not think that will even take him all night. Unless he does not know how to automate the process in which case he can still spend a couple of days trying out every date.

I mean its been 5548 days so thats what, a bit over 15 and a half hours? 2 days full-time and done. Boom, $174k. Or like 2 minutes if you automate the task...

Hopefully its not his fathers cryptic way of remembering an arbitrary date which has nothing to do with Bitcoin. Although, even if that would take you longer, it would still be perfectly do-able.

If you have minimal IT skills, try to use hashcat with a given masks https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=mask_attack or btcrecover https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tokenlist_file/
If it is date only (no time) it should be quite easy task, even if you do not know the order of date segments or separators used (if there are any).

Yeah, just use btcrecover and set up an appropriate tokens file. Even with a fairly modest GPU, you should be able to brute force 1,000 passwords a second or more for a Core wallet file.

First see if you have any other old documents from your father in which he wrote the date - letters, spreadsheets, emails, etc. - and see what format he used. If he used that format for the password, then btcrecover could try every date in the last 100 years in about 30 seconds. Failing that, then you would need to try every other possible date format. This includes two or four digit years, digits or written words for the month, including short and full names (Jan/January), as well as every possible ordering, and every possible separator (/ - . etc.) But even then, you should be able to cycle through all that for every date in the last 100 years in a couple of hours.

If there is something else in the password, such as a time, or a location, or a name, then things become exponentially more complicated.

Hello, I have a question only out of curiosity. Let's say someone could brute force. How would they go about trying the passwords ? I mean, I could for instance generate all possible dates using brute force and store them in a file. But how would I try them all ?

That's a general question that I have since I was a CS student (apparently not a great student though haha).

There are plenty of pieces of software out there which will do this. btcrecover as mentioned above is one such piece of software. You can either give it a text file listing all the passwords you want to try, or you can create what is called a tokens file which is essentially a list of instructions on how to generate passwords. In this case you would create a tokens file telling it to try something like every combination of YYYY-MM-DD within a given range, and it would generate the passwords on the fly as it tried them all. You direct the software to a copy of your the wallet file you are trying to decrypt, and it will simply cycle through all the passwords you provide and try them as quickly as your hardware will allow.

The same software can also be used to do things like brute force missing characters from private keys or missing words from seed phrases.

For now OP still didn't find "the date"  ???
Bitcoins are still here.

I wish you good luck OP ! Will follow this thread, curious to see how long time you will need to find the password ; it should be easy with btcrecover

Not that easy, he doesnt know in which format the date has been written as password. It'll technically take a lot of time while he tries to discover the format. Chances decrease if there are certian non-guessable special characters between the date.

No use, he is already inactive to provide a followup, just like the rest of the newbies. (making one post and going away).

Thanks guys! No luck so far

At some point it becomes far too obsessive and you want to try too many crazy ideas, so I'm just trying to slow down a little and not get too excited to keep my sanity, haha

Hello! Let tell you my insane ideas, just in case  :P

1. your birth date
2. the phrase "THE DATE"

I wouldn't try to find a bitcoin specific date, but I would rather start searching for an important date for you or your father.

Did you maybe try the date your father registered on this forum? Given that the text file contains the name of this forum, it may be about that date.

I don't see any reason in trying to guess the date. Just run the brute-forcing software/script an configure it to use numbers only. As there are only 10 numbers: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9 such passwords are considered unsafe and can be brute-forced easily.

P.S. What happened to your father? Is he alive?  ???

if i were u i would not even post the address here , BTC recover or Hashcat can easily guess the password if it is just numbers and if the length of the password is known , whatever you do , do not share the Wallet.dat file with anyone , best of luck

I agree with the idea but we never know.

For example, if a write "01/01/2009" in my native language and using only letters it would be :

"Premier janvier deux mille neuf"

So even a date could be hardcore to find

As I said above, with reasonable hardware and a correctly configured tokens file, btcrecover will be able to try every date from the last 100 years in one specific format in around 30 seconds. So even if you come up with multiple different ways to write out the date, this is trivial to brute force, provided it is just a date and nothing else.

Let's say you have "two thousand nine" and "two thousand and nine" for the year. 2 possibilities. For the day/month, you could have "January first", "January the first", "First January", or "First of January". 4 possibilities. You could put the year first, or the day/month first. 2 possibilities. 2*4*2 = 16, meaning you can try every date in the last 100 years with every combination of those possibilities in 8 minutes.

Even if you come up with 500 different possible formats to write the date, you can brute force them all in a few hours.

I would just like to add here that do not share your dat file with anyone. There will many people try to connect you and help you guess password but they are all scams. Do no trust anyone. Learn stuff yourself and try to brute-force. Try other data of your father and study his pattern. You got plenty of time.

I think this is another reason why we all must learn to carry our family along in our bitcoin activities, I searched the wallet address shared in the OP and 10 bitcoin sitting there since 6 years ago, I want to believe that the father to the OP have passed away probably without the family knowing that he such amount of money in bitcoin, as well as in bitcoin cash, now his son(in the person of OP) is left with no choice but to find a way to get into wallet, otherwise, those bitcoins(and what's ever its worth be now and in the future) will remain there forever.

@OP, this might be a lame suggestion but from the explorer, i saw that the 10 bitcoins currently in the wallet was received on the 5th of May, 2016, if you haven't already, maybe you can try that and see if it works..

Goodluck all the same.

This is good suggestion but wallet was created before receiving coins so most probably date will be different from this one.
I want to add there is no guarantee that date is from past. It can also be a future date. So OP should try some future years as well. Maybe your father thought to gave you or your siblings wallet on any of your specific birthday etc.

Hey guys, no luck

The problem is I didn't make any plan and tried so many I actually don't remember which ones

I've also spent too much time thinking it's some kind of puzzle but it definitely doesn't look like one

I've checked out btcrecover but it's way out of my league

There are ways to generate hash of your wallet.dat file and ask others to find password for you. If they successfully find password then you can share some rewards with them. You can ask more about it by asking for help in this forum.

There is a pretty straightforward installation guide here: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/INSTALL/. Setting up the tokensfile itself will be the trickiest part, but we can help you to do that. I would suggest you give it a try. Once set up you will be able to check thousands of passwords a second, far more efficient than anything you are trying manually.

Or as bnbstorm says, you can extract the bare minimum information from your wallet.dat file using the instructions here (https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Extract_Scripts/), and then share that extracted file with someone else who can attempt to crack the password for you without any risk to your coins. I can give it a shot for you if you want.

Does it really say that? THE DATE?
Have you tried some obvious things like your dad's birthday, the day you were born, the day you turned 18, your graduation date, your parent's marriage anniversary, or any other dates you know about and obviously your father thinks you should know about, hence the hint? The day he bought you something special, when he got his first grandchild, etc.

OP have you tried asking for THE DATE some other relatives (your mom for example).

Perhaps they could guide you into finding an important date that you miss.

Trying individual dates like this or asking relatives for any meaningful dates is utterly pointless. You will spend far longer doing this, with a far lower chance of success, than simply setting up btcrecover. Even if you want to expand the search range to every single day +/- 5000 years from today, then you can exhaust that space in half an hour for a single date format using btcrecover.

I've even offered to set up the tokens file or even try cracking it myself for free. If OP still just tries randomly guessing individual dates manually, then he's really got no one to blame but himself.

I wonder do people actually buy this kind of wallets or all those posts are just scams?

What you mean ? What is the link between with your topic and bought wallet.dat files ?

Well, I did my best, I stopped trying a long time ago. It's basically just a file for me at this point. If people say they can crack it in half an hour, okay, no problem, but I'm not going to click any links or send anything up front.

You can totally do this on your own, Just read these instructions[https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/TUTORIAL/#installation (https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/TUTORIAL/#installation)] for btcrecover carefully.
First, create your own list of passwords in a text file. You only need to test 365 keys for one year, and only 365 x 50 for fifty years. Then, change those passwords to different formats, like DDMMYYYY, DDMMYY, DD/MM/YYYY,  DD-MM-YYYY or other format, and repeat the process. I can help you create those password lists in a text file or guide you step-by-step. Don't worry, there won't be any links to click on, and you won't need to send me anything upfront. Contact me up on Telegram at @Panadawn

I understand, but you have one of the most trusted and reputable member of this community who offer his help for free.
If you are ready to give up, why aren't you ready to be assisted / helped by a trusted person ?

I would be extremely wary of a brand new account with no history here asking you to contact them privately. He might be perfectly legit, but this is also exactly what a scammer would ask you to do.

I have already offered to help him create a tokens file for btcrecover in public in this thread, which is a far safer option than talking to anyone in private, me included, but especially a newbie account.

If OP is wary about downloading btcrecover, then he can review the source code here (https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover/) and can also do it on an airgapped computer so there is no way it could steal his wallet file.