2012 created Electrum wallet recovery

[philipp0815]

Hi,
I am searching for a way to recover a electrum wallet which was created in 2012. I am having the 9 word seed phrase in hand - not more, a backup of the wallet.dat is still missing and potentially lost. Is there any way to recover the wallet. I tried the recovery with the recent electrum version and the oldest one I found in the download section 1.8.1.

Thx for your help in advance.

Brgs,
Philipp

[HCP]

@OP... perhaps try downloading the source from the "releases" section of the Electrum Github. This is a link to the oldest versions I can find: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/releases?after=0.59

You can "work forward" from there

Note that as there are no binaries listed there, you will need to download the .zip or .tar.gz and then run Electrum from the python sources... Also, you might run into issues with trying to find old versions of required libraries etc... and it probably needs Python 2 to run.

HD wallet has never been introduced in 2012, so electrum at the time can not be a HD wallet.

BIP32 HD wallets weren't... but Electrum has been using seeds and was a "deterministic wallet" since very early on (if not, from the very beginning)...

If you look at version 0.56 on Github: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/tree/10f41cbdfc3c8d0a7021467f629ee53a111a2f3c

The readme stats:

...
* Deterministic key generation: If you lose your wallet, you can recover it from its seed. You are protected from your own mistakes.
...

And this post on the Electrum ANN thread from November 2011 is talking about it being a deterministic wallet.

[o_e_l_e_o]

and you having 3 missing words which can be recovered by using btcrecover with high (brute-force) computing power.

Early Electrum generated phrases were indeed 12 words long, but since there was no checksum feature like BIP39 phrases or version byte like current Electrum seed phrases, it was possible for users to make up their own seed phrases, so the 9 words OP has could indeed be the entire seed phrase. See: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=358252.msg3831450#msg3831450

If OP did indeed use version 0.XX as suggested by HCP, then it is unlikely that btcrecover will be able to help him here. You are also linking to an outdated and abandoned version of the software. The up to date fork is here: https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover

I would suggest that OP tries to download an old version of Electrum and import his seed phrase to it.

Or, maybe you have the private key to the wallet, such private key will start from 02, 03 or 04 which can be easily used for the recovery.

It is public keys which start with 02, 03, or 04, not private keys.