Quoted, but fails to verify... Note that generally, you cannot sign messages from "P2SH" (aka "3"-type) addresses. Also, you shouldn't include the <'s and >'s... it confuses most of the verification systems.

Were you using a Trezor to sign that message? (It's one of the few systems I know of that will sign using a "3"-type address)

It is probably more likely due to Windows 10 locking down the root directory of C: in an attempt to prevent viruses/malware from doing "bad things"™ to the system drive... and/or accessing privileged information (ie. other users data/info etc).

Where you running as Administrator? If not, then try that. Also, I'd recommend not trying to scan your C: unless you have a really good reason to. Try scanning a small USB thumb drive first.

the _db files are just files that pywallet will create as it is attempting to recover keys etc... I'm not 100% sure if they are bitcoin/wallet specific as such, or if they're just temp data. In any case, what you're looking for after the recover is a "recovered_wallet_xxxxxxxxxx.dat" (where xxxxxxxxxx will be a unix epoch timestamp)

That file will contain any private keys if it finds any... note that it will still create the recovered wallet.dat even if it doesn't find any and it will be able to be read/used by Bitcoin Core, it just won't contain anything.

Given that there are 2,249,750 total members... and DT1 is limited to 100... I suspect that a "Who Isn't On DT?" list would be likely to melt LoyceV's poor little abused netbook

"ERR_SOCKS_CONNECTION_FAILED" indicates that the browser on your PC is configured to run through a SOCKS proxy of some description... VPN? Antivirus/AntiMalware? Tor? Something else?

Might want to have a poke around in your browser settings to see what exactly your browser is trying to connect through... and then check that as to why it is failing to connect.

Wait... you were trying to rescue coins from a "gincoin" wallet.dat and NOT a bitcoin wallet.dat?

If so, you should probably have specified that in the OP... extracting keys from altcoin wallet.dats using pywallet requires that specific commandline options are used. Otherwise pywallet will be looking for bitcoin keys (and for obvious reasons, will fail)

I concur, while it is technically possible to use an "Electrum" (aka non BIP39 seed mnemonic) when using the "BIP39" box to generated nested SegWit addresses, I certainly would not recommend it. Because you get the "checksum failed" error even if you have typed all the words correctly, you cannot be certain you have not made any data entry errors (missing/transposed words etc). You would be in a much better position to create a "proper" BIP39 seed mnemonic, using a BIP39 wallet and then import that into Electrum. At least then you also have the backup of knowing that you've entered everything correctly.

However, even using a proper BIP39 seed has issues:

1. Electrum does not store "foreign" (aka BIP39) seed mnemonics in the wallet file. It only stores the xprv. This means that you cannot use the "Wallet -> Seed" option to recover the seed should you lose your "offline backup" of your seed mnemonic.

2. Possibility of seed mnemonic exposure while generating in one place and using in another etc.

3. Possibility of using a bad/exploited seed mnemonic generator.

4. As often noted in the Electrum dialogs, there is no guarantee that they will continue to support BIP39 in the future.


Whilst none of these are exactly "showstoppers", they are things that should be considered.

Seems that whatever the issue was, it has now been rectified... I'm able to connect with both clearnet and Tor and get past the captcha and get a new mixing session.

Yeah... it's just the stupid complicated thing you need to do when "escaping" special characters in programming languages! You can ignore all this "gobbledy gook"... it's correct.



NOTE: It appears you are confusing a wallet encryption password (aka the "passphrase" that pywallet is prompting you to enter)... for a 12 word mnemonic recovery phrase. Bitcoin Core has never used 12 word mnemonic phrases. What pywallet is asking you for when it says "Enter the passphrase for the wallet that will contain all the recovered keys" is simply a "password" that will be used to encrypt the wallet.dat file that it is going to create... this can be anything you like, like abc123 or password123 etc... but you need to be able to remember it, because if pywallet is successful in finding private keys... then to use the wallet.dat within Bitcoin Core to recover your coins (or to extract the private keys from it) you will need the password!



Anyway... onto the root cause of your current issue...
I apologise, I think I originally set you wrong with the device naming... DO NOT use the "\" char... so when you specify --recov_device, it should simply be C: or D: or X: or whatever

If you include the \ character, then the script will get confused and give you the "Can't open C:\, check the path or try as root" type error. Sorry!

Anyway, based on what you have so your command should be:



NOTE: I would recommend that you don't use spaces in directory names... that could cause unexpected results. Also, you need to make sure that the output directory that you specify exists BEFORE you run the pywallet scan... otherwise it will fail at the end with an error like this:

Actually, yes you can choose exactly which Bitcoin (UTXOs) to spend from your wallet.

Using the "Coins" Tab (Might need to use "View -> Show Coins" if you haven't enabled the tab already). This will show you ALL the individual UTXOs controlled by your wallet:



You can think pick and choose exactly which ones you want to spend (ctrl+click, shift+click etc):



And then you can "right click" and "spend":



And your "send" transaction will be created from JUST those UTXOs:



NOTE: Electrum just uses these UTXOs as the "available" UTXOs for this transaction, it won't necessarily use ALL of them. That is to say, if the amount you want to send does not require the use of all the UTXOs to, then Electrum will only actually use the ones required to cover the amount+fee.

So, if you absolutely wanted to include ALL the UTXOs (for consolidation or obfuscation or whatever), you would need to manually specify your "change" address as well by using Electrums "pay to many" functionality and some tricky maths to work out the amounts to send to each address etc

How exactly are you attempting to create this signed message? Which wallet are you using?

While your quoted "format" is correct... the message, address and signature do not match and therefore cannot be verified. As iasenko has mentioned, you need to be very careful with "whitespace"... extra/missing spaces and/oor new line characters will break signature validation.

No. That would completely break the "trustless" nature of Bitcoin and the blockchain.

The entire concept of the blockchain is that it is an unbreakable chain that can (and should) be verified from the very first block to the very last. If you skip the beginning, you have no way of verifying if the data you are currently getting is correct.

If you are not able to run Bitcoin Core due to time/space constraints, you might be better off exporting your private keys out of Armory and using them in a "light" wallet like Electrum.

Did you download, install and run Bitcoin Core? It is a completely separate application from Armory. You would (should!) know if you downloaded and installed it!

If you haven't already, you can download Bitcoin Core from here: https://bitcoincore.org/

For Armory to work properly, you will need Bitcoin Core installed, running and FULLY synced. NOTE: this will mean that you will need to wait for it to fully sync the ~250 gigs of blockchain data.

What? Are you referring to the BIP39 passphrase? or the wallet password?

If you're talking about the BIP39 passphrase, then yes... the seed mnemonic alone is not enough... you need mnemonic+passphrase to be able to recover your wallet. If you're talking about the wallet password, that is completely irrevelant, as you can simply restore your wallet from the seed mnemonic and put whatever new wallet password that you want.

Pywallet doesn't look into directories in "recover" mode... it simply scans the entire device.

There really isn't a lot to learn if you're just wanting to scan a drive looking for potential/deleted wallet files. You simply use the options as already mentioned.

# --recover option tells pywallet to operate in recovery mode (ie. scan the device looking for wallet files)
# --recov_size options specifies the size of the device... if you have a 256gig drive, you say 256Gio... if it is an 8Gig thumbdrive, specify 8Gio (the script author used Gio for Gigabytes for some reason?) Note that if you have an 8Gig drive and specify a smaller size (ie. 2Gio), the script will only scan the first 2 gigs then stop.
# --recov_device specifies the drive letter for the device you want to scan
# --recov_outputdir simply tells the script where to place any "recovered" wallet files etc.

I don't recommend the browser interface as it will slow things down considerably for drive scanning. Also, it isn't terribly stable, is horribly outdated and may cause more issues than it solves. By using the commandline you can see exactly what the script is doing rather than having it filtered through the browser interface and other unnecessary packages.

Message Quoted with Proof of verification:

I guess some people just like to reinvent wheels

But full credit to them for going to the effort of creating their own setup... Still seems like a lot of work, for what will still likely result in a loss of money... and time Not sure I'd have the patience to have a bot running for a month!

As a sort of workaround, you can simply do what the "all" page link does on long threads.

<bitcointalk_thread_url>;all

eg: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5173810.0;all

Granted, this will include all the formatting etc... but at least you get the full thread on one page.

You're a bit late... This scam site was already reported here a couple of months ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5151130.0

Also, I had a look at that bestbitcoinmixer.org site... and saw this:


Seems like they try to make their "list" look "just updated" by setting their "last updated" date to whatever the current date is! :

Also, they say "coinmixer" and link to the old coinmixer.se thread "review" (which also indicates the service closed in 2018!)... but the link takes you to coinmixer.es

EDIT: Thanks Ninja!

You could potentially create a scam accusation here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=83.0 and/or open a Type1 flag against the user...

If you decide to start an accusation, then use the format here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=260073.0 and provide as much evidence as you can.