Test writing mistakes: please write down these private keys for me

[LoyceV]

While playing around with PawGo's StellarSolver with shifting and rotating characters of a private key, I realized this:

It would be nice to actually know some of the mistakes people have made before writing down keys, now I'm only guessing.

I'd appreciate some help with this!

1. Please write down 1 or more of the following private keys (created by Bitaddress.org) (dear Newbies, DO NOT use those in your wallet!). Do not double check your handwriting, I want to catch possible mistakes made when being careless.

1,"1LyPnHoU624ejo3Rb6nHv3GRMiDbM2Mvf9","KyHmMbp1TvBNBzi6uAAekb6DwtCsUJyYXG5CDrkDv2sCc8h4UfmD"
2,"1DJBmoEAhs3no14CCdQ3suUJiNcGg7qnWA","L4on7wrsP2vPyDkYKyTKnEudCTmU9kyH6ra6hiZXzhZWmQzM7v9g"
3,"18zBPQ64PoDhzfKNP1e3ufApGrbmQBr212","L1YqE8Y8FPn2fdBxMfe8wwU3bT5NPEfxMxLujHKpyYS7nrBLzv9K"

2. Wait a day! Don't look at this page again.

3. Type the private keys you wrote down yesterday, without checking the original in this topic. Now do double check to make sure you enter the exact same thing you wrote down. Even better if you tripple check. I'm not looking to find reading mistakes (because you can always check that again later when needed), I'm looking to find writing mistakes (which you can't correct when you're looking to import your private keys years after you wrote them down).

The goal of this topic is to find some mistakes, and see how difficult they are to recover. I'm curious to see if they match my assumptions of common mistakes.

[1714036812]

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[1714036812]

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[1714036812]

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[1714036812]

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[NeuroticFish]

I've written down the last PK. I'll try to also reply tomorrow.
I expect to have no errors (of course), but I can tell some things I've seen that can lead to errors, maybe you can add some to your list:

* 1 - l - I can be easily confused
* one can easily type small cap instead of capital or the opposite (more chances, but not limited to those where the small cap and the capital letter is written in the same way)
* v and w can easily be written incorrect
* 5 and S
* 9 and g

And, maybe I'm overthinking it, but one may also miss one letter in the middle or the last few characters that didn't fit to the first row(s) on the paper, especially after one more copying from one paper to another.

[vjudeu]

The most common mistake I did when writing private keys and addresses was writing "W" instead of "w", the shape is similar, only the size is different.

[Timelord2067]

I recall a game in High school which I *think* was called Chinese Whispers whereby students would form a circle, the teacher would whisper in the first students ear, they would repeat what was heard around the circle then the teacher would record what was said.

After a few times, various students would say their phrase out allowed and the circle was broken.  This seems to be a sililar project.  I might even give it a go...

No spam
Self-moderated against spam. Discussion is of course allowed.

Well... Look up.

[Pmalek]

I wrote down the second private key. I did it quickly without doublechecking because that's how mistakes are made. These are the possible dangers that I see with this particular private key when it comes to writing it down by hand if your handwriting is bad:

• Mistakes between uppercase 'o' and lowercase 'O'
• Thinking the letter 'o' is the number '0'.
• Mistakes between uppercase 'W', 'V', 'K' and lowercase 'w', 'v', 'k'.
• Thinking the uppercase 'V', is an uppercase 'U'.
• Thinking the number '6', is a lowercase 'b'.
• Thinking lowercase 'q' is a lowercase 'g'.

I will report back tomorrow.

[ABCbits]

1. Please write down 1 or more of the following private keys (created by Bitaddress.org) (dear Newbies, DO NOT use those in your wallet!). Do not double check your handwriting, I want to catch possible mistakes made when being careless.

1,"1LyPnHoU624ejo3Rb6nHv3GRMiDbM2Mvf9","KyHmMbp1TvBNBzi6uAAekb6DwtCsUJyYXG5CDrkDv2sCc8h4UfmD"
2,"1DJBmoEAhs3no14CCdQ3suUJiNcGg7qnWA","L4on7wrsP2vPyDkYKyTKnEudCTmU9kyH6ra6hiZXzhZWmQzM7v9g"
3,"18zBPQ64PoDhzfKNP1e3ufApGrbmQBr212","L1YqE8Y8FPn2fdBxMfe8wwU3bT5NPEfxMxLujHKpyYS7nrBLzv9K"

I don't bother take the test, but if i really want to write private key, i would split it every 4 character and 4-8 group of character on each line to reduce potential mistake.

Code:

KyHm Mbp1 TvBN Bzi6
uAAe kb6D wtCs UJyY
XG5C DrkD v2sC c8h4
UfmD

Alternatively i would convert the private key to HEX/decimal if i have bad handwriting, but it takes more time and i lost advantage of checksum which offered by WIF.

[LoyceV]

* 1 - l - I can be easily confused

Mistakes between uppercase 'o' and lowercase 'O'
Thinking the letter 'O' is the number '0'.

Those aren't much of a problem because 0, O, I, and l are excluded.
I've had most problems deciding between S and 5.

[NotATether]

* 1 - l - I can be easily confused

Mistakes between uppercase 'o' and lowercase 'O'
Thinking the letter 'O' is the number '0'.

Those aren't much of a problem because 0, O, I, and l are excluded.
I've had most problems deciding between S and 5.

I admit I haven't written down any of these, but one common error I encounter when typing passwords and PKs is typing an adjacent key to the right of the correct one, e.g.:

i => o
s => d
e =>r
t =>y
EDIT: c => x (error from drifting left)

These are some of the more common mistakes.

Also sometimes I forget to Shift a letter, or perhaps I want to type "a" followed by some other character ("w" as a random example but it can happen with any character), instead of pressing "a" I press Left Shift (or worse, Caps Lock) and the next letter becomes uppercase.

*The probability of these errors increases inverse proportionally to the size of the keyboard/pad.

Maybe it's because I'm a QWERTY typist, but it's still good to note.

[NeuroticFish]

Maybe it's because I'm a QWERTY typist, but it's still good to note.

This can bring another problem: one may think he's on QWERTY and he's actually on QWERTZ, hence typing y and z interchanged. But this may be off topic, since it's OP asked for handwriting.

[LoyceV]

one common error I encounter when typing passwords and PKs is typing an adjacent key to the right of the correct one

Tjat ja[[ems tp ,e tpp sp,eto,se/
I mean: that happens to me too sometimes.
But my assumption for this test is that people write down the key, a pen doesn't have this problem.

[vjudeu]

Alternatively i would convert the private key to HEX/decimal if i have bad handwriting, but it takes more time and i lost advantage of checksum which offered by WIF.

You can just write in hex what you get after decoding base58, there is a checksum and version, you can just keep it. Also, in such case importing that key will be easier, because only encoding it as base58 will be needed.

Edit: Also, in case of handwriting I noticed it is much faster for me to write some hexadecimal characters with versions and checksums than typing base58-encoded private keys and addresses, it is just easier where you are a programmer and you have 16 simple characters instead of 58 and you have to pay attention on capitalization, similar characters like 5 and S, and so on. But of course in that case there could be problems between 6 and b or B and 8.

[Pmalek]

Those aren't much of a problem because 0, O, I, and l are excluded.

Sure, they are but someone new to Bitcoin wouldn't know that, and those are the people who mostly make these mistakes. Even someone familiar with the technology could overlook that and forget which letters can't be part of the private key. If you entered those characters into a wallet such as Electrum, it wouldn't allow you to proceed with the recovery, but you wouldn't know why exactly.

[PrimeNumber7]

* 1 - l - I can be easily confused
* one can easily type small cap instead of capital or the opposite (more chances, but not limited to those where the small cap and the capital letter is written in the same way)
* v and w can easily be written incorrect
* 5 and S
* 9 and g

You can solve all of these issues by coming up with a system that indicates if a character is a number, an upper case letter, or a lower case letter.

For example, you could underline every upper case letter, and overline every number (those without an underline, nor an overline would be a lower case letter by process of elimination).

You can always check to ensure you wrote down a private key correctly by typing the private key after you write it down. If the key matches, you know the private key was written correctly, and if it doesn't match, you can look to see if the error was a reading or writing mistake and make the appropriate correction.

The problem IMO with writing down a private key is that people's handwriting will generally change over time, and something you can easily read today may be illegible in several years.

[NeuroticFish]

I'm participating to this experiment because I expect that it will help the average Joe who comes here only after he no longer can import his private key.
For us, the ones who participate to this forum on a daily basis, i think that there's a much easier way to avoid mistyping the humanly-counterintuitive private key: use HD seed. The chances to mistype beyond recovery those English words are much much smaller.

[vjudeu]

use HD seed

Yes, but using HD seed is not easy in case of Bitcoin Core. You can dump your wallet to some text file and read xprv in this way, but still, this is base58-encoded. Of course in case of wallets like Electrum you can use HD seed as for example 12 words, but if you want to import that into Bitcoin Core wallet, then you have to import it key by key or use some tool that will convert it for you on-the-fly.

Also, for this topic some mistakes related to HD seeds may be relevant, like for example typing another word that is different in writing, but similar in spelling.

[PrimeNumber7]

I'm participating to this experiment because I expect that it will help the average Joe who comes here only after he no longer can import his private key.
For us, the ones who participate to this forum on a daily basis, i think that there's a much easier way to avoid mistyping the humanly-counterintuitive private key: use HD seed. The chances to mistype beyond recovery those English words are much much smaller.

I agree, I think it is far superior to use a seed in all cases, but especially if you are going to write down your backup.

If you are using a BIP 39 seed, I understand you only need the first 3 letters of a seed word to know the entire seed word (when dealing with the English word list). If you are not sure what the first 3 letters are, the rest of the word will narrow down the potential words. If you are missing information about some of your words, the number of potential seeds is much lower than when dealing with a private key.

[n0nce]

Those aren't much of a problem because 0, O, I, and l are excluded.

Sure, they are but someone new to Bitcoin wouldn't know that, and those are the people who mostly make these mistakes. Even someone familiar with the technology could overlook that and forget which letters can't be part of the private key. If you entered those characters into a wallet such as Electrum, it wouldn't allow you to proceed with the recovery, but you wouldn't know why exactly.

How can they mistakenly write a 0 instead of an O if both do not ever exist in a base58check encoded string? There is no way they can swap these 2 even if they have no idea that neither is part of the base58check alphabet. They don't need to know to be protected, I hope it's cleared up a bit

use HD seed

Also, for this topic some mistakes related to HD seeds may be relevant, like for example typing another word that is different in writing, but similar in spelling.

I am pretty confident such words have been intentionally excluded exactly because of this. The different wordlists are all thoroughly chosen. As an example, from the Italian wordlist rules:

11. If 3 of the first 4 letters are already used in the same sequence in another mnemonic word, there must be at least other 3 different letters.
12. If 3 of the first 4 letters are already used in the same sequence in another mnemonic word, there must not be the same sequence of 3 or more letters.

Rules 11 and 12 prevent the selection words that are not different enough. This makes each word more recognizable among others and less error prone. For example: the wordlist contains "atono", then "atomo" is rejected, but "atomico" is good.

[Coding Enthusiast]

Alternatively i would convert the private key to HEX/decimal if i have bad handwriting, but it takes more time and i lost advantage of checksum which offered by WIF.

Your comment woke some old ideas in me, how about converting the key to human readable words? It is easier to write down, typos occur but are less common and easier to detect, it also has a checksum.
An example can be seen below, the private key's binary form is encoded using the same BIP39 scheme which can be converted back to a WIF using the same scheme in reverse.

Code:

L28Peud5cQcijrtMthAdUS8FynpM8PKZtnoUZb1VAio9WxKoebHt
mystery omit wheel view great lemon describe output march trend govern envelope confirm delay woman sweet arrange host waste tourist impose artwork predict crack

I made a new option for it in Denovo, the first two options are for this conversion and the second two are dealing with versioned WIFs (BIP178 and what Electrum briefly used).

[NotATether]

Maybe it's because I'm a QWERTY typist, but it's still good to note.

This can bring another problem: one may think he's on QWERTY and he's actually on QWERTZ, hence typing y and z interchanged. But this may be off topic, since it's OP asked for handwriting.

This is actually a related problem, because people are inevitably going to type their private keys on some airgapped device (for storage purposes) without writing it down.

I haven't seen any QWERTZ keyboards these days, but perhaps a more common problem is if you are attempting to type on a compact laptop keyboard, or some keypad on a mobile device, as opposed to a regular keyboard.

[LoyceV]

How can they mistakenly write a 0 instead of an O if both do not ever exist in a base58check encoded string? There is no way they can swap these 2 even if they have no idea that neither is part of the base58check alphabet.

Even though their key can still be recovered, they'll need to figure out the problem before doing so.

If you entered those characters into a wallet such as Electrum, it wouldn't allow you to proceed with the recovery, but you wouldn't know why exactly.

This would be a great feature for Electrum to add: automatically replace non-existing characters by the likely equivalent instead of graying out the Next button.

As for the HD seed discussion or marking upper case: that's great advice if you're creating a new cold storage now, but it doesn't help you if you're stuck with a written down private key (the hand written key I received 3 years ago still has a substantial amount of money in it).

Here's the typed version of my own handwriting:
1. KyHmMbp1TvBNBzi6uAAekb6DwtCsUJyYXG5CDrkDvzsCc8h4UfmD (I was in doubt: the z could have been a 2)
2. L40n7wrsP2vPyDkYKyTKnEudCTmU9kyH6ra6hiZXzhZWmQzM7v9g (the k could have been a K)
3. L1YqE8Y8FPn2fdBxMfe8wwU3bT5NPEfxMxLujHKpyYS7nrBLzv9K

I've typed all keys twice in an editor, then used CTRL-C to check if they match. Key 1. didn't match my second typing: I had omitted the green 5 the first time.

Now for the real comparison:
1. KyHmMbp1TvBNBzi6uAAekb6DwtCsUJyYXG5CDrkDv2sCc8h4UfmD original
1. KyHmMbp1TvBNBzi6uAAekb6DwtCsUJyYXG5CDrkDvzsCc8h4UfmD typed after writing it down
This confirmed my susicion.

2. L4on7wrsP2vPyDkYKyTKnEudCTmU9kyH6ra6hiZXzhZWmQzM7v9g original
2. L40n7wrsP2vPyDkYKyTKnEudCTmU9kyH6ra6hiZXzhZWmQzM7v9g typed after writing it down
I didn't notice this while typing, but it's not something that's hard to detect.

3. No differences between the original and what I typed in after writing it down.

Conclusion: I hate writing But so far this shouldn't be hard to figure out and restore when needed.
Note: when using CTRL-F, tick "Match Case".