Electrum wallet bitcoins lost forever?

[mickshake]

I need help, or at least sympathy. Looks like I may well have lost access to all my BTC in an Electrum wallet. They're still there, but I can't send them anywhere as I have no password.
Here's the story. I installed Electrum in January 2016. As I was going through the installation, I got to the display of the seed and the password prompt, but opted not to set a password as at this point I had no intention of sending coins out from the wallet, but simply of transferring my existing coins from an old QT wallet and storing them long-term in the new Electrum wallet. I had assumed (wrongly it would seem) that if at some point the future I wished to send coins I would be then be prompted to set a password which would in turn enable me also to access the seed if I needed to. It seems unbelievable that you can send any amount of BTC to an un-passworded Electrum wallet and lose it forever, without being warned not to do so, nor prevented from doing so. I should add that leaving the password prompt blank when trying to access the seed doesn’t work!

So we have a situation where almost certainly no password was set. If I had set a password it would always have been meticulously recorded in my passwords file (where I compose all my passwords before copy/pasting them).  I have checked my passwords file from January 2016, and tried all possible variants in it without success.

And as for the seed, I would have made no record of it, as I had assumed that this could be revealed at some future point upon creation of a password.

So no password, and no seed. Just the wallet file. Not looking good is it? Is there any way out of here? Or is it finally bye-bye Bitcoin?  

[ebliever]

Once you have a valid public key, there is nothing in the bitcoin protocol that is going to prevent you from sending bitcoins to that key. That's not the fault of Electrum or any other software.

It sounds like you should reach out to the Electrum developers. If you didn't set a password it seems likely to me that you should be able to access your coins.

[crwth]

I think that's why Electrum let's you write the seed because it is important. More important than the password because that's how you recover it if it's lost. For the prompting of the seed, you should've understand and read what is written. That you need to record it, it's your own negligence that lead you to this point. I think you can no longer use it. I'm no expert but recording the seed, that's what I know that you should do.

[HI-TEC99]

As I was going through the installation, I got to the display of the seed and the password prompt, but opted not to set a password as at this point

Maybe your wallet file got corrupted, but try these instructions in case your problem is due to a bug.

If you didn't set a password then open your wallet file in notepad and look for the wallet seed. It should be written in plain text near the bottom next to the text "seed":

If you installed electrum rather than used the portable version your wallet file should be in a hidden folder called appdata. To see it click the windows orb, then type %appdata% into the search box and press enter.

Inside appdata open the roaming folder, then the electrum folder inside that. Your wallet file should be in a folder called wallets.

[mickshake]

Many thanks for this HI-TEC99. You have given a man hope! OK, this so far: I've opened the wallet file and found the word "seed", next to which is a long line of 128 alphanumeric characters. Would this be an encrypted version of the seed?  I understand that, with the seed, I can back up my wallet.dat and delete it, then start Electrum and it'll give me the option to restore from seed. But can I enter the seed in this apparently encrypted form? And sorry for asking yet another newbie question, but I assume there is no risk to the Bitcoins themselves with this process?

[HI-TEC99]

That must be an encrypted version of the seed. If it was unencrypted it would be a series of English words.

Are you sure you never set a password at any point?

Either it's caused by a bug or you set a password (which deletes the English words and replaces them with one long line of characters).

[mickshake]

I'm pretty certain I didn't set a password, as when I set new passwords I always copy/paste them from alphanumeric combinations I compose randomly in Word (my passwords file, backed up onto a USB stick), and then copy/paste them as necessary. Likewise with seeds (I still have old seeds in that file btw). I did a search for Electrum in documents and it returned zero, ie there is no trace of Electrum passwords having been recorded anywhere. And I would never come up with a password in my head, hope to remember it and not write it down :-(

[Abdussamad]

You definitely set a password. Otherwise your seed would not be encrypted.

When setting a password you are supposed to enter it twice. How could you not remember doing that? Did you enter some sort of dummy password because you were in a hurry? Like 123 or something?

You didn't note down the seed and you entered a password that you can't remember. This is all very irresponsible.

[mickshake]

OK, well assuming that I did enter a password but didn't record it anywhere (and have no idea of what it might be), would that mean that the only solution would be to try to brute force it? ? Not looking good is it?

[Abdussamad]

OK, well assuming that I did enter a password but didn't record it anywhere (and have no idea of what it might be), would that mean that the only solution would be to try to brute force it? ? Not looking good is it?

Yep but that only works if you have some idea what the password might be. So first try to recall what the password might have been. There have been many discussions on this forum about bruteforcing passwords. I suggest searching the electrum section here.

[Coin-Keeper]

Yep, Thomas the developer of Electrum has always stressed retaining the unencrypted SEED.  When I first started using Electrum years ago you could copy the seed words to your clipboard upon the first presentation of them in Electrum.  Then when you went to the second confirmation page you could just paste the clipboard in and they would be accepted.  The problem was that many would copy and paste via the clipboard but not actually save the SEED separately.  Now Electrum automatically CLEARS the clipboard between those screens so you MUST paste them from the first screen to "someplace", and then you can copy them back to the clipboard to paste on the next screen.  In other words you MUST purposefully proceed in order not keep the seed words.  It was a small change in the code but at least Electrum users now cannot claim it all happened too fast.

[mickshake]

Oh well, looks like bruteforcing is my only hope, and a thin one at that. Does anybody know if walletrecoveryservices ("Dave Bitcoin") are still operating? Any recent experiences you would be happy to share?

[HI-TEC99]

Oh well, looks like bruteforcing is my only hope, and a thin one at that. Does anybody know if walletrecoveryservices ("Dave Bitcoin") are still operating? Any recent experiences you would be happy to share?

I think this is the walletrecoveryservices thread. You could ask there.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=240779.0

[mickshake]

Thanks HI-TEC99. The good news is I have managed to establish contact with Dave and he's seeing what he can do for me. Thanks for your help too 

[Abdussamad]

mickshake i suggest upgrading to the latest version of electrum and trying again. first backup your wallet file though. It's located here:

http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html#where-is-my-wallet-file-located