Are specifications for a bitcoin mining rig the same as for wallet recovery?

[Anynomous0]

I am thinking on building a  rig for wallet password recovery/cracking using approximately 2000 euro/2200 dollar. My thoughs were that for this price range two AMD Radeon VII might be a good choise, if I can get my greedy hands on them . It those GPU's are note availble I select another one from this list of mining GPU's https://www.techradar.com/news/best-mining-gpu
Does anyone have a nice build for this price range?

Furthermoreo I have some questions/considerations since I am only just reading up on the technical details of mining and wallet cracking.
Does a mining rig and wallet cracking rig have the same requirements?
If I understand it correctly, mining is done by letting the GPU perform a (double) SHA256 operation with a certain shance/difficulty to mine a block. If I red it correctly, recovering a wallet password is done by running a lot of inputs (passwords) thourgh the SHA-256 protocol to generate a hash that matches the hash in a wallet. So basically the operation is the same, right?
Am I therefore right in this assumption that a good mining rig is therefore an equally good rig for cracking/recovery wallet passwords?

[WhyMe]

Seriously ? Go in hell !

[huntingthesnark]

Seriously ? Go in hell !

Aye - weak attempt to linkbuild that article. Should be banned.

[Anynomous0]

Did I miss something... , is posting a link in a question somehow an issue?
The link to that article in my post is the number one hit on google when you search for “best gpu for bitcoin mining 2019”, so I doubt the maker of that article will need any links to their article to increase their ranking if that is what you are referring to. If there is another problem with my post, please explain.

Anyhow, I find it a bit disapointing that the first reaction to my first post on this Forum is "go in Hell" .

[grangonzo]

So what is "wallet cracking"?

Are you gonna try and steal people's coins?

[nc50lc]

If I understand it correctly, mining is done by letting the GPU perform a (double) SHA256 operation with a certain shance/difficulty to mine a block. If I red it correctly, recovering a wallet password is done by running a lot of inputs (passwords) thourgh the SHA-256 protocol to generate a hash that matches the hash in a wallet. So basically the operation is the same, right?

Quite right, yes, you can use a GPU Mining rig for cracking wallet passphrase as long as the software supports multiple GPUs and your GPU models.
But it's not logical to think that wallets uses the same method as mining, different wallets use different encryption and implementations.
In fact, I can't find any wallet that uses solely SHA256 for encryption.
That's why most wallet recovery software uses bruteforce (give random/pre-generated chracters & words until it hit the correct one) than reverse-engineering the encryption.

Example: Electrum encrypts the wallet file using AES-256-CBC; Bitcoin Core uses the same for the private keys but with an encrypted master key by the user's SHA512 encrypted passphrase with other "random" stuffs.

So, what you should research about is the most suitable GPU model that's supported by most passphrase cracking software available online.
That, I can't help you.

[nsummy]

from this article:  https://cryptoslate.com/the-private-key-to-satoshi-nakamotos-8-billion-bitcoin-fortune-is-on-this-site-and-so-is-yours/

For most cryptocurrencies, there are only 2^256 private keys in existence. This is an unimaginably big number. Attempting to crack the private key for a specific wallet, for example, would require the computation of 115 quattuorvigintillion different combinations—that’s a 78-digit number that looks like this:

115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,853,269,984,665,640,564,039,457,584,007,913,129,639,936

Even the world’s fastest supercomputer—the IBM-built Summit, which consists of 37,000 processors performing 200 quadrillion calculations per second—would take an eternity to crack the private key to a specific cryptocurrency address using 256-bit encryption.

Have fun cracking a wallet with your AMD Radeon VIIs.......

Furthermore there are plenty to security resources out there that could answer your questions better than here.

[nc50lc]

Guys guys, he must be talking about the wallet's password, not cracking a random address' private key.

There's are couple of paid "wallet recovery services" out there that uses the same set-up and it's possible if the passphrase isn't that long, complicated or there's only a part of the password that's missing.

@Anynomous0 It's best to include your intent for making such questions so others won't misunderstand you.

Did I miss something... , is posting a link in a question somehow an issue? -snip-

Most newbies that post links to external articles are usually the advertisers of those sites.
People hate that of course.

[swogerino]

I think the OP is trying to recover his wallet but it is not smart to do so by spending 2200 dollars if the wallet has not inside it at least double the amount and still it will be very difficult to crack it.

I don't want to suggest a wallet recovery service either unless you absolutely know them in person.

[huntingthesnark]

Did I miss something... , is posting a link in a question somehow an issue?
The link to that article in my post is the number one hit on google when you search for “best gpu for bitcoin mining 2019”, so I doubt the maker of that article will need any links to their article to increase their ranking if that is what you are referring to. If there is another problem with my post, please explain.

Anyhow, I find it a bit disapointing that the first reaction to my first post on this Forum is "go in Hell" .

I think the title: “best gpu for bitcoin mining 2019” should tell you all you need to know - mining btc with a gpu hasn't been a practical approach for many years. Anyway, what you've looking for is called Hashcat.

[Anynomous0]

So what is "wallet cracking"?
Are you gonna try and steal people's coins?

Sorry for not clearly stating my intentions. No, I will definitely not try to crack/hack other peoples wallets unless they ask me to do so and I am definitely not stupid enough to attempt to brute force find any privatekeys .
What I want to do is help other people recover their wallet password/passphrase after successfully recovering my own wallet recently using btrecovery. I know brute forcing is only feasible if the password is very short, so I  want to help people who have at least some idea of what their password might have looked liked, so using dictionaries or patterns to try possible passphrases.

In my case I did managed to find the passphrase purely using my CPU but it took some time and I realize in most cases some powerful GPU's are needed. My interests in bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies have been sparked since I recovered my passphrase, and I would like to understand more about the core technologies as well as possibly become a service provider myself. I realize I still have to learn more before being able to help others to recover their wallet unless its a simple case of typos.

Quite right, yes, you can use a GPU Mining rig for cracking wallet passphrase as long as the software supports multiple GPUs and your GPU models.
But it's not logical to think that wallets uses the same method as mining, different wallets use different encryption and implementations.
In fact, I can't find any wallet that uses solely SHA256 for encryption.
That's why most wallet recovery software uses bruteforce (give random/pre-generated chracters & words until it hit the correct one) than reverse-engineering the encryption.

Example: Electrum encrypts the wallet file using AES-256-CBC; Bitcoin Core uses the same for the private keys but with an encrypted master key by the user's SHA512 encrypted passphrase with other "random" stuffs.

So, what you should research about is the most suitable GPU model that's supported by most passphrase cracking software available online.
That, I can't help you.

Thx nc50lc, this was the kind of information I was looking for. So yes it is more complicated than just running input passwords though SHA512 encryption. So I should check which mining GPU's are best supported by btrecovery and hashcat

[Anynomous0]

After some more searching I found this nice website that shows all WPA2 hashrates for all high-end GPU's using hashcat https://tutorials.technology/blog/08-Hashcat-GPU-benchmarking-table-Nvidia-and-amd.html
Apparently when you run Linux it is easier to setup the drivers for most Nvidia cards than for AMD, for Windows both works fine.
Find below the top performing GPU's and their hash rates using hashcat from the link above.

RTX 2080 Ti            758700 hash/s
Nvidia RTX 2080 Founders Edition   571400 hash/s
Nvidia GTX 1080Ti   576000 hash/s
Radeon VII 16GB   534000 hash/s
Nvidia GTX 1080   396800 hash/s
GeForce GTX 1070   285000 hash/s
Radeon RX 580   224000 hash/s
Radeon RX 480   185000 hash/s
Radeon R9 390X   200000 hash/s
Radeon R9 380X   145000 hash/s
Radeon R9 295 x2   347000 hash/s
Radeon R9 290X   163000 hash/s
Radeon R9 290   147000 hash/s


Unfortunately, no such overview exist for btcrecover (my favourite wallet recovery software).
The manual for btcrecover gives instructions on how to setup drivers for GPU support on Windows but not on Linux.
Although the algorithms are different it appears good mining GPU's also work well for wallet cracking. This excludes bitcoin Armory wallets which are GPU resistant