Bitcoin Forum

Hey guys, my electrum wallet is no longer working with my password I set. Not really a big deal since I had the seed written down. But... restoring from the seed creates a new wallet with new addresses. Anyone have any suggestions? I've tried restoring previous versions of the wallet file itself, but the password will still not work. Would hate to lose my btc.

This is a tool (https://github.com/gurnec/decrypt_electrum_seed) that might (emphasis on might) give a more detailed error message on why your password isn't working. It simply displays your Electrum seed if the password is correct, and if not it prints one or more error messages.

If you choose to run it, post the results back here and I'll let you know what I think (it's a Python script which I wrote).

(Obviously, if it reports back any actual seed information, don't post it!)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\Downloads\decrypt_electrum_seed-master\decrypt_electrum_seed-master\decrypt_electrum_seed.py", line 217, in <module>
    seed_str, mnemonic_str = decrypt_electrum_seed(wallet_file, get_password)
  File "D:\Downloads\decrypt_electrum_seed-master\decrypt_electrum_seed-master\decrypt_electrum_seed.py", line 121, in decrypt_electrum_seed
    if unicodedata.normalize('NFC', password) != unicodedata.normalize('NFD', password):
TypeError: must be unicode, not str

https://i.imgur.com/LT51C8y.png
 ::)
https://i.imgur.com/x04vL7d.png

Is this in-development version of electrum from github? FYI github master is used for development.

nope, its the 1.9.8 release from the site non testing

Sorry about that; there was a bug related to ASCII/Unicode conversion, now fixed. Could you download a new copy and try it again?

I actually was able to (with help from a friend) get the code to work after you updated it, and my password did not work. however my password seems to show the seed on electrum now, but just with 0 words..

What are all of the error messages it produces?

I've no idea why that is....

I've blurred out the hex string, even though it just converts to garbage characters- in case there is a way that it could be used to derive the actual seed.
https://i.imgur.com/pRw8qGv.png

not sure if this will be helpful. 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=612143.0

make use to set the gap limit high enough and check your addresses.

for some reason, the seed i have written down is not the one for my wallet as it generates an empty one. not really sure why. I think an error of some sort cause it to show the wrong seed for the wallet and I did not realize until it was too late, perhaps?

can you verify that all words are in the electrum dictionary and spelled right?

That would seem to indicate that you either no longer have the correct password for the wallet file, or that multiple bytes in the wallet file have changed. Between these two options, the former seems more likely....

If only a single byte were corrupted, then at least the PKCS7 padding would be valid or the count of valid hex-encoded digits would be 16 or greater (because at least one of the three 16-byte AES blocks would still be decrypted successfully).

I can think of three things you might want to try:

1. Have you tried to run jonald_fyookball's (excellent) tool yet with a higher numberofreceivingaddresses and numberofchangeaddresses to see if any of the generated addresses are yours (if any of them exist on the block chain)?

2. Attempt to brute-force your wallet password with either an open source bitcoin password recovery tool or using one of the paid services in the Services section of the forum.

3. Attempt to brute-force your mnemonic on the assumption that one of the words is wrong or swapped with an adjacent word (although I'm not aware of any tools or services that exists to do this).

I could try to bruteforce the password, however, im still kind of confused about that.

I am as sure as I could be I am using the correct password, I keep decent track of these things and write them down physically. The last transactin I made before I was unable to access it was only a week before, so I dont think i could have somehow changed it in a week.

What I have been doing to try to use my wallet again is to show the seed from the client, or send the bitcoin to my phone wallet. Trying any password besides my own displays the incorrect password notice - but typing in the password (that I am as sure as I could be is the correct password) shows me the seed as being 0 characters long, and when trying to send bitcoin - an error. Since these dont happen with any other password I have tried, I'm fairly sure that it IS the right password but something weird is going on.


As for the seed, it's been written down and printed out and stored in my home, lol.

Also, i want to say that I appreciate all of your guys help! You are all very nice and the best

If the seed is right my utility should recover your addresses and keys.

Do you have any older backups of your wallet file?

Yeah i have one thats giving me the same error. this wasnt my cold storage, so i basically only used it to buy like, pizza and candy. (but 1.7btc worth of pizza is still quite a bit...)

alright, ill give it a try.

let us know; it will be interesting.  i remember someone else saying their wallet
had a blank seed so hopefully this will tell us if the seed is wrong or just
an issue with electrum client.

Also, if you trust me, PM me the master public key only... (not the private key!)
from the output of the program...and I will set up a watch only wallet to see if i can see any bitcoins.

Alright, the seed is wrong. Either it gave me the wrong seed or i wrote it down incorrectly, but it asked me to verify it at the creation, so i think it might be something weird with electrum?

I'm going to try the bruteforcing tool lol

btw if this works ill buy everyone who posted here before this post a candy or pizza

did it give you a master public key?

yeah, it did. but didnt generate any keys that i have.

can you send it to me, let me see if i can see any balances

I know how to check and i did :V 

ok, did you set the gap limit enough though?

Mushroomed,

do you know a single address associated
with this electrum wallet?

Brute forcing for a single wrong word
will be easy, but if you don't know
the address we would have to check
balances using some API.

If you do know a single address,
we can write a simple loop to
go through 19,512 iterations
of wallets and see which seed
will generate the address you have.

yeah, i know the addresses. I can still open and see all transactions for this wallet, just cant decrypt it

ok , im writing a loop to try to brute force the seed
assuming one word is wrong...

do you know how many receiving addresses you used?

New fyookball script here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=922987.new#new

Enjoy!

Let me know if that helps Mushroomized.

Hmm it doesn't seem to be working. I think that the seed I have written is incorrect in some way, not sure how though. I appreciate the help though. I think im "Pretty Screwed"

doesnt work , how so?

Is my tool not running?

Look for misspellings, words that seem to be similar, Anglicised spellings, mis-ordered words, plural words (shouldn't be any), etc. that may have happened when you wrote it down.  You could probably write a little program based on jonald's tool that would re-arrange or use similar words until you got it?

Good luck.

good advice. 

i'm trying to determine if he even ran the tool.

Oh sorry, I ran the tool. What I mean is I think the seed I have is not correct at all for my wallet for some reason. I know there are no misspelling or plural words.

I think the question is did you run the second tool created by jonald_fyookball which assumes your seed is off by one word, and tries all possible seed combinations starting with that assumption (and takes a few hours to complete).

right...the second tool should go through all the iterations in about 5.5 hours and should spit out data to the console...
it will either say WOW FOUND YOUR SEED , or just go through all the combinations...let us know.

Also follow the previous suggestion of checking for plurals...

Unfortunately I can't really write another tool to brute force if words are out of order,
as 12! =479,000,000 combinations... will take too long.

EDIT: I suppose all combos of the 12 words aren't necessary.
Maybe we can just see if any two words are switched.

Mushroomized,

When you run my second tool...

do this first:

Go into your Receive tab on electrum, and click on the "used" tab
inside the main window; you will see all of your used addresses.
Use the first receiving used address as your "clue" in my tool.
That way we are sure to look at the right address clue.

I don't think the seed it gave me is the right seed at all and running the tool is not giving me any results. To state my issues again...
Im typing in the password I have used to create the wallet, the seed it gave me seems to be for a completely different wallet all together.

When I use my password, I get strange results like

https://i.imgur.com/LT51C8y.png
when trying to retrieve the key

and

https://i.imgur.com/x04vL7d.png
sometimes when trying to send a payment

Please verify that all 12 seed words are in the
electrum dictionary and are spelled correctly.

You can find the word list here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=933869.msg10258475#msg10258475

They are

Are you a electrum developer?

no...i just dabble.

btw, that brute force tool recently worked for some other guy
who had 1 wrong word on his seed.

im trying to think what could be wrong here...you wrote down your
seed, and all 12 words are in the dictionary, and you ran the
brute force tool?  And you made sure to use the first receiving
address? 

I think there was an issue when creating my wallet, giving me a seed for a different wallet. and showing up by making my wallet act weird now. I don't know if its going to be fixeable, lol

if all else fails and you trust me, PM me your seed and i'll try to recover it.

I may, soon. However I wish the developer would reply to my pms :~(

Sorry to necro this but I just thought I would post an update to serve as lesson learned

I started using electrum in late 2014/early 2015. I was drawn to it because I could save space on the blockchain download over the main core wallet.

What I did right
-Wrote down the seed when it prompted me at wallet creation
-kept backups of my wallet
-wrote the password down

However, I should have known better to trust an application like this with so much money (1.7btc). From now on I will be using offline generated keys to hold my savings.

I still wish that I could get refunded for this bug, however I understand that if it might have been out of the developers control. In his emails with me it did not qualify as a big enough issue to him to warrant a refund. Apparently my password check summed to something that caused the client to act strange? The big issue I have here is - why did the seed not work? I wrote it down and it just generated a new wallet. It seems like there was some issue with my created wallet from the start.

Anyway just figured if someone can learn anything from this that its not to trust anything but an offline key :P