Forgot order of my 12 seed phrase for my electrum wallet

[Forgotseedorder]

Hello,

The only way I can recover an old wallet I made 2 years ago is with the seed phrase. Ironically, I did not write the seed phrase in order just in case someone found it then they would not be able to use it, and now it’s me the one who forgot the order. I am certain that those 12 words are the ones in the seed. I searched for a similar problem and did not find anyone having this trouble. Not sure what to do now after trying many possible combinations. Is there a program that can attempt all combinations?

Thanks in advance.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Although I've not used it for such a purpose, this piece of software should be able to help you: https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover

The instructions specific for recovering seed phrases are available here: https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover/blob/master/docs/Seedrecover_Quick_Start_Guide.md

There are also some worked examples, including that of descrambling a 12 word Electrum phrase (your exact situation), here: https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover/blob/master/docs/Usage_Examples/2020-05-02_Descrambling_a_12_word_seed/Example.md

It will be much faster to run if you know an address from the wallet you are trying to access. For your own safety, you should download the repository and run it on an offline computer.

[HCP]

That fork of btcrecover is a great find o_e_l_e_o... thanks for the link. Certainly seems to be a lot more optimised than my homemade btcrecover script hacks!

[Lucius]

What I noticed is the following statement :

seedrecover.py is a seed recovery tool which can take a seed with one or more mistakes in it, and recover the correct seed if not too many mistakes have been made.

How much is actually "too many mistakes"? Would this mean that in some cases it might be impossible to come up with the correct word order or that the process would just take much longer?

[o_e_l_e_o]

How much is actually "too many mistakes"?

There is no answer to this question - it depends entirely on your computing power and how long you are prepared to wait. Much like generating a vanity address, there is no way to calculate an exact time of how long any seed or password brute forcing will take - you could get it right on the first attempt, or it might exhaust every possibility before getting it right on the last one. For example, if you are missing the last 4 words from a BIP39 phrase that gives you 2048^4 = 17.6 trillion possibilities. If you try that on a single 10 year old computer then you could be waiting years, whereas if you use dozens of high end CPUs to split the work you could break it in a few hours. The example I linked to above suggests that OP should be able to descramble his Electrum phrase on a mid range CPU within an hour or two.

The tool also supports easily splitting up the task and spreading the work over multiple devices. See here for a worked example: https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover/blob/master/docs/Usage_Examples/2020-05-23_multi_device_descrambling_12_word_seed_with_extras/Example.md

[abadon666999]

i could help you...contact me on telegram ...@sun7784

[joniboini]

i could help you...contact me on telegram ...@sun7784

Be careful with something like this. Never give your seed to some random stranger. No hard feelings but the best way to help OP is by helping him with open-source tools and guide on how to do it, not asking for a personal message.

[Lucius]

i could help you...contact me on telegram ...xxxx

Never accept help from complete strangers and avoid Telegram which is an ideal platform for all types of scams - for the simple reason that all messages can be deleted (on both sides) so you have no proof that you have been scammed.


o_e_l_e_o, thanks for the additional explanation - it all depends on what kind of computer someone has and how much he has mixed up the words, but the most important thing is that it is possible to fix such problems. Personally, I never even thought of protecting a seed in this way - precisely because I could find myself in a similar situation.

I just remembered opening a thread few months ago on this topic - there is video tutorial how to use this tool.

Recover Your Scrambled Electrum Seed - BTCRecover

[NotATether]

Given that there are 479001600 different permutations for a 12-word seed phrase, the simplest way to recover the wallet is to put all of those words in a so-called "seedlist", a file that has one word of the seed per line, and then pass that to the btcrecover fork o_e_l_e_o linked.

Which wallet software did you use to create that wallet? With that information, the derivation path the wallet software uses can be found and giving btcrecover the derivation path will speed it up.

With one derivation path searched, and according to the GPU acceleration stats, it will take at most 479001600 permutations / 134000 seed phrases per second / 60 seconds = ~59.6 minutes for btcrecover to find a 12-word seed phrase on a 1660Ti GPU. And on a i7-8750 CPU it searches at 33000 seed phrases per second and takes at most a little above 4 hours. I don't think OP needs to distribute the workload on multiple machines because it is so short, so this will be easier on them.

[HCP]

What I noticed is the following statement :

seedrecover.py is a seed recovery tool which can take a seed with one or more mistakes in it, and recover the correct seed if not too many mistakes have been made.

How much is actually "too many mistakes"? Would this mean that in some cases it might be impossible to come up with the correct word order or that the process would just take much longer?

That's actually the original wording from the seedrecovery docs... AFAIK, that version doesn't offer "word order rearrangement", but is more suited to finding either a missing word (or two) or an incorrect word (or two)...

Obviously, the more mistakes the longer it will take on any given set of hardware... or, to put it another way, you will require more powerful hardware to be able to find more mistakes in a similar timeframe.

When you know the 12 words, just not the order... it's actually a lot easier as the total search space is a lot smaller... and you can kind of "shortcut" the process by discounting a lot of the options because the checksum will be invalid, so you don't need to bother doing any deriving of keys/addresses (which involves "costly" hash calculations etc)

[Forgotseedorder]

I found the correct order by miraculously recovering my cold storage device. However, when inputting the seed to another computer on the latest version of electrum the next button stays grey. I’ve made sure all 12 words are in https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/electrum/wordlist/english.txt and I’ve also made sure to type them correctly without making any mistakes various times. I’m 1000% sure I am putting the correct seed and that undoubtedly that seed was generated by electrum in 2018. Not sure what is the problem.

[nc50lc]

I found the correct order by miraculously recovering my cold storage device. However, when inputting the seed to another computer on the latest version of electrum the next button stays grey. -snip-

Tick "BIP39 seed" in the options.
If it say "BIP39 (checksum: ok)", then it's another seed phrase and not generated by Electrum.

At least try to continue the wallet creation to check the seed phrase stored in that "cold storage device".

[Forgotseedorder]

It says checksum:failed. Wallet was undoubtedly was created by electrum in a cold storage device in late 2018

[nc50lc]

Okay, it's grayed out if not ticked so the seed phrase must be invalid and it's not a BIP39 seed either because of the BIP39 checksum failed.
It is most likely another kind of seed from other wallets or it's also scrambled.

I'll restore old seeds from old Electrum versions to try reproduce this.
Although AFAIK, Electrum has been keeping backward compatibility with its seed phrase.

-Edit-

Seeds from old versions and not-so-old version works just fine in 4.0.2

[Forgotseedorder]

I literally type the seed as I see it from the cold storage device to another cold storage device. I go to wallet, then seed, then type password and shows my seed from the old cold storage wallet. Has this ever happened before?

[SoulMortal]

Never trust anyone with your wallet seed. Id say get some advice from professional or trust only those who deems you trustworthy. Try on your own if you can't recover then only get professional help and there are many free tools on github for recovering wallet.

[Forgotseedorder]

Has it ever happened that Electrum does not accept a seed from an older electrum version? I’m not sure what could be the problem. What if I install the same version of electrum I used in 2018?

[nc50lc]

What if I install the same version of electrum I used in 2018?

That should work since it's the same version but do not use it in your online machine.

Has it ever happened that Electrum does not accept a seed from an older electrum version? I’m not sure what could be the problem.

So the "cold storage device" is another Electrum in an Air-gap machine...
It never happened to me aside from simple unnoticed typo.

If ever this is some sort of bug, you can use the "master private key" to restore the wallet to the new version (Standard->Use a master key).
You can get it in the console (View->Show console) though getmasterprivate() command.

Safer method: Since you already have the cold storage Electrum, exporting the "master public key" in the wallet information is good enough, it will create a watch-only wallet;
you can sign the transaction created using the online watch-only wallet using the cold storage by following this set-up:
https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/coldstorage.html?highlight=usb#create-a-watching-only-version-of-your-wallet

[pooya87]

Has it ever happened that Electrum does not accept a seed from an older electrum version? I’m not sure what could be the problem. What if I install the same version of electrum I used in 2018?

it shouldn't happen because Electrum uses the same code to check if the seed you entered is an old one as it was using in earlier versions and then there is the new code on top of that to check validity of the seed with the new scheme.
but it wouldn't hurt to try the old version though. just make sure to verify the signature of whatever you download before installing it.

[Abdussamad]

electrum maintains backwards compatibility with all previous seed mnemonics generated by it. so always use the latest version. the advice to create a watch only on an online system is the right idea.

https://bitcoinelectrum.com/creating-a-watch-only-wallet/

deterministic watch only is what you want.

note electrum seeds are not bip39.