If you are one of the dozens of people on this forum who have been locked out of their encrypted Bitcoin wallet, even that you're almost certain you're remembering your password right, I'd like to try to help you.
I recently, through what felt like temporary insanity, lost an important password. I ended up developing a remarkably ambitious "password typo" generator during days of desperation.
My password generator covers a wide range of small and large mistakes that could easily have altered an original password into something other than what was intended, even when it was typed twice to confirm. I believe my system goes far beyond garden variety password permutators.
I am not trying to start a commercial service here but I'd like to give password recovery a shot as a freelancer. If you're tethering on the brink of madness, locked out of a high value wallet, let me give it a shot. You don't need to send me the wallet - only the pieces necessary to crack it. You can (and should) exclude any actual addresses with money - see instructions below.
I can't promise anything but if you give me a precise description of your likely password and how it was probably formed, I think my script stands a good chance to recover your actual password. I will test a hundred thousand combinations or so. If I succeed I'd appreciate a customary 15% tip.
Example of a good password recollection description:
"I'm POSITIVE it was horse staple battery but it just won't work. Maybe I added a number somewhere or maybe the words were in a different order. I do know I didn't use any symbols, and it was all lower case."
This is a limited time offer - I don't intend to make this my day job (unless of course I turn out to be amazingly successful and everyone keeps telling me how smart and handsome I am).
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Hash: SHA1
## How to Safely Share a Wallet with a Password Recovery Service
Say you've lost your password for your Bitcoin wallet and you need to send it to a password recovery specialist. How can you send it without risking the coins inside?
Your wallet consists of many addresses encrypted with the same password. There will be some empty addresses which your client has generated ahead of time. What you want to do is to extract two of those empty addresses, plus the master key, giving away just enough to find and verify the password. The pieces you need are:
* The master key and its salt.
* The encryption algorithm used and its parameters.
* Two *empty* Bitcoin addresses from your wallet's set of reserve addresses.
If you send this, and only this, the specialist can find your password. Should a bad actor get the details and successfully crack the password, they'd only have 2 empty addresses to show for it.
### Instructions
Here's how to get the pieces:
1. Download the `pywallet.py` tool:
https://raw.github.com/joric/pywallet/b80346d4282dff804315230e1ff26aa4d86502a2/pywallet.py2. Install Python:
http://www.python.org/getit/releases/2.7.6/3. Open a command prompt. In Windows, press the Windows key + R. Then enter "cmd" and hit enter. On the Mac, type in "Terminal" into Spotlight and press enter.
4. Enter the following commands:
cd "<the path to the folder where you downloaded pywallet.py>"
python pywallet.py --dumpwallet >wallet.json
5. Open up the generated file, `wallet.json` in a text editor.
6. Scroll down to the line with `"mkey": {` and copy and paste the whole section to the closing `}`.
7. Go up and look for 2 addresses with `"reserve": 1`. Copy everything between the `{` and `}`.
The parts you copy will look something like this:
"mkey": {
"crypted_key": "3ad6dc1a1e0005bf4961c145288502a30fad2732f0d52fcb94c4fbbbb12905e9f02a22f5a0fd712
68a1aca16a72c6b78",
"nDerivationMethod": 0,
"nDeriveIterations": 40122,
"nID": 1,
"salt": "47efc45626b21ffa",
"vchOtherDerivationParameters": ""
},
{
"addr": "13gUHnjSFD5uwByAuJ3RisrPwAE6pBmspn",
"ckey": "66cf275830696f0a698722f55ce70c0c472030a27895b0bfd29b15cfee5e8a10ba8fa3ef0f6241a
50653085a0c040ebd",
"pubkey": "03fb2183f295bd4ea92b32dc5c9a8673dca4977d0b04ce759c9b26ecd101a18472",
"reserve": 1
},
{
"addr": "19o6DUEghMRPxBBDSwYtVa8m2JjdS4mA2T",
"ckey": "741b9d7a6cec9b1fafbcdc01cdaa0ed77d3637657ebbaccf8844ade333b6f6f733b090ea205c13c
a3a79a3e9004d09a7",
"pubkey": "03fdb290680879669af48b2ecd3304b2af54789793e5db6bc9cd6bca34aa1e9714",
"reserve": 1
}
(Note: if you use the pywallet version by jackjack-jj, pywallet 2.1.7, the sections will look a little different. For instance you'll see `encrypted_key` instead of `crypted_key` and `ckey` in your address will be `encrypted_privkey`.)
### What's Next?
Privately message the copied text together with every single detail you can remember about your password.
If the password is successfully recovered you need to do one last thing: get a new wallet and transfer all your coins to it (minus the generous tip to your hero password recovery specialist, of course).
The reason you must create a new wallet is that once the master key has been cracked, changing the passphrase won't "uncrack" it. You will get a new encrypted master key, but the secret it contains will remain the same. In addition, those 2 empty addresses you sent might come into use in the future if you stick with the same wallet.
Anyone who eavesdropped on your password recovery emails and successfully decrypted your master key would be able to access those previously empty addresses. What's worse, if they ever got a copy of the original wallet.dat (with all those addresses you didn't send to the recovery specialist) they could unlock everything even without knowing the new password.
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