You can't earn trust any way from the I see it. First of all, how is anyone going to know who solves it? What would the puzzle creator do with the addresses?
The only way that would be possible would be to have a KYC for the puzzle, where everyone register in person and there is only one valid withdraw address per person and they can then enter in groups. It would be like Ready Player 1

That's great, then I can exclude that possibility.

That is my current method, I have shuffled all of the words in all possible ways.

I am sorry, I said it was 12 words for simplification. I actually have 14 words (not sure which 2 does not belong there), that's why the amount of possible seeds.
With only 12 words it would not take long at all. As it is a 4 byte checksum every 1/16 word should fit, so it is always 6.25% chance from my understanding. I've already sorted them out prehand.

I am running 24 cores (3x i7) for 4kP/s, but I am checking only valid seeds in the program, checking random seeds give me speeds of up to 100kP/s yes! (Checking valid seeds take about 15x more time)

The amount of possible seeds to check should always be (n!/(n-r)!)*0.0625 where n is the amount of words choosing from and r is the seed-word-length

I am checking against the address database, yes. I have checked every exchange, every screenshot and every document. I can't find any signs of what address I used. Also, in case of this address was deep into the account, I recon it would be better to search through all of them.
I get a speed of around 4kP/s, with 14*195000000 possible seeds. It is time consuming, but given the amount of BTC on the address, its no biggy.

Just to make sure, I cannot possibly have created a segwit wallet by may 2018 in Mycelium??

There was no duplicate words, no. I took the 12 words I was most sure about using, and added two which I was 50/50 if I had used. I have now run through 95% of the possible seeds with no success.

I took the seed, mixed the index of them with a 12 digit number I hold close to my heart, and then wrote a small text about it. In that way it could be hidden in plain sight.
Problem is I now, one year later, realize that it was pretty easy to just make up a story and accidentally throw in a couple of words that happened to be on the bip39 wordlist....

Passphrase was something that struck my mind. However I am sure I didn't do any complicated or different steps in the app other than create backup and write down the words, I see that possibility as none.

Hi, this will probably be the last topic I create for this problem.

I am bruteforcing my way through my seed words as I have forgotten the order of them. However it seem like the search is no good.

I am searching through all addresses on the blockchain as I am not sure about the address. Now I need your help to brainstorm what parameters I could have gotten wrong.

I created the wallet during fall 2017, so I recon it must be an address starting with a 1, I have also concidered that I have created additional HD wallets.
However from my understanding, I can't create a new address before using the previous one in Mycelium. If that's the case, my bruteforce should give me the result no matter how many addresses were used on the account?

Any other takers on why I am not able to find my seed?

Just a question, if it is an old wallet, what about the  last transaction during 23 oct 2018? Seem to be some faucet or similar though.

Yes, it would be valid, however it would not be found by the program as there would be no record of it in the blockchain.


Thanks for your answers! The first time I used the address was during fall 2017 generated in mycelium, from what I have read they didn't use segwit until late 2018.

I have 14 words to choose from and I am not sure about the order, so I have 43589145600 combinations to try. I have tried about 60% of them, hence my worries.

The last option I have, in order to figure out the correct address would be to crawl the blockchain and find the address that corresponds to properties I know about the wallet.
This is something I have no idea how to execute though.

Except you are hardly gonna solve the really hard ones alone, also, it's part of the fun to do it with someone else. Some of these puzzles take years to solve. Let's see you keep going when you feel you are stuck.

Sounds reasonable. Any idea about when the challenge begin? Are you working on any puzzle right now? As you said you solved 0.1 and 0.2 BTC challange on the previous one, I assume you are sufficient in basic programming and cryptography?

I have helped in the solving of some previous puzzles. I wonder, what are your experience and skills?

Hi, I have been generating and checking some billions different seeds in search for mine with the BTCrecover-tool.
It works by generating addresses from a specific seed and then checking it against a database with all addresses found in the blockchain.

I wonder if it is enough that my address have received balance, and not sent any? I am 99.9% this is the case, but after searching through half of my possible seeds, I am getting a bit nervous.
Just want to make sure that I got everything right.

Br

Thanks for your reply!

I have now solved this problem with a modification to the BTCrecover code. It now takes my custom-generated seeds as input, and then outputs if any of the addresses from that seed is found on blockchain.
It does about 25k per second, which is not lots, but it is sufficient.

What candle-interval are you using when applying your BBs?

I have now generated every possible combinations from all 14 words. It took lots of time and lots of programming.

Now I really need your help in order to get this into addresses. I want a efficient way to input seeds and get addresses from them.

Any takers? I will make sure there will be a reward for contribution. I am really tired of this right now 

Thanks both of you, I really wish I had gone into linux, however I am still on Windows. Which means I have no clue how to do anything of what you just said, even if it looks simple when you put it that way.
I just have no idea how to fetch the addresses from the blockchain. If I would have that I could probably figure something out.

BTCrecover from Python is really solid, already got all addresses, already got the generating program, does 18k addresses through blockchain per second with a wallet depth of 10
All I need is to figure out how to feed it my own set of privatekeys/seedlist.

Which would mean at MOST
7 hours with 12 words,
4 days with 13 words,
28 days with 14 words,
140 days with 15 words and 17 terrabytes of seeds.

I could live with that.

EDIT: That would be including all with wrong checksum, the correct checksum would only be 5% of these.

EDIT 2:
Day 14 of problem solving.

I have now started to generate all combinations. I settled with the 14 words I am most confident about.
This give me 43 589 145 600 combinations, I have three words I am certain about, which brings the combinations down to about 20 000 000 000 combinations.
This totals at some 1.6 Terrabytes of data. Only problem left is to feed it to btcrecover.

Damn I wish I was more fluent in programming. Right now I am using the blockchain.info API to check balances, which is totaly retarded. As you said, I need to check all used addresses on the blockchain instead.
I was reading about crawling and saving all addresses from the blockchain? But there are over 300 million of those, so yes, I would need a bloom filter (as I understand it, it basically reduces size?)

So there are two approaches, either crawl the entire blockchain, and search through it every time.
Or crawl it to find the public key so I dont have to search through a database.

Please explain what you mean by save the time of encode58?

Br

Hi, thanks for your answers.

I used the btcrecover repo to get all public keys from the blockchain (about 300 million lmao) into a database of some sort.
However I haven't yet figured out how I can get btcrecover to use my own lists of seeds to read from, instead of btcrecover trying to do it itself.
Btcrecover seed is fairly simple as it just assumes 4 mistakes in the seedwords. But that is not  my issue here. I want to use BTC recover for its speed, but not the seed generation part.

I have now generated all possible word combinations of 12 words, which is around 479 million combinations.
After checking the checksum of all of these combinations I am down to 30 million valid seeds. I think BTCrecover can check around 10k addresses per second. Would only take an hour to go through if I manage to pull that off.

So I can't simply search in the blockchain with simple commands which addresses have been used when etc? I recon the top100 address site is able to check the balance at least.

What I would love to do is scan through the entire blockchain

If(balance>2 || balance<1):
disregard addresses
If(transactiondate > april2017||transactiondate < january 2017)
disregard addresses
print(whateverisleft)

Then I would probably be able to pinpoint the wallet. There shouldn't be too many wallets that has only been used during some months, haven't been touched for months and still contains 1+ BTC

Hi again.

Just throwing an idea out there, maybe someone could tell me if it is doable.
Let's say I know there are around 1-2BTC in the account. There should only be around 300000 addresses within this range.
If I know certain dates of transactions, or the last time it was touched, I should be able to narrow it down and find my address.

I've been searching for a way to look through all addresses on the chain. Should be able to get them from a fully synced node?

Here is a clarification. I generated the 12 word seed. Then I though I had a bomb method to rearrange them. I show an example with 6 words.
word 0, word 1, word 2, word 3, word 4, word 5
I then though of a number that was important to me, lets say 142201
So then I would first write down word 1, then word 4 etc. Giving me
Word 1, word 4, word 2, word 3, word 0, word 5.

At least, this is how I though I did it. But after having checked most of these possibilities I am starting to wonder where I fudged up.

Then I wrote a story to conceal the words.
Bla bla bla word 0, bla bla bla word 4, bla bla bla word 2, bla bla word 3 etc.
And by accident, I put in words in my story that was also part of the BIP39 word list.

I have ruled it down to 14-15 words now. I could take different approaches in how to solve this, either by simply bruteforceing all of them, or trying to make out the arrangement which they were ordered in.

However, when I do this I need to be able to check the fastest way possible, hence, asking for your help. I hope that the checksumed ones would be less than 5%, but that's the number I got after generating some millions of scrambled 12 word seeds. Another thing I might look into is as you said, try to find a corresponding address so I have any clue which address I am looking for.

TLDR; Yes, I am an idiot, I did not only screw up the order, I put in additional words