Blockchain 2014 wallet recovery if any ?

[swogerino]

A friend of mine had bought at least 0.5 Bitcoin there and he used Blockchain wallet back in 2014.He only has the welcome email from Blockchain and the Id of his wallet,he doesn't remember the password and he has also lost his recovery phrase back which was kinda like a seed back then.Is there any way to recover this?

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[o_e_l_e_o]

He will first need to download his blockchain.com wallet.aes.json file. First check any emails he received from blockchain.com, as they used to send the wallet files out as email attachments to be used as a back up. If not, then he'll need to extract it from blockchain.com. The easiest way I know of doing this is by using btcrecover:

https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Usage_Examples/2020-05-08_Recovering_Blockchain_Wallet_Passwords/Example_Recovering_Blockchain_Wallet_Passwords/

Once he has downloaded the wallet file, he'll then need to run btcrecover to try to brute force the password. If he has some idea of what the password might be, then he can create a token list of possibilities to try by following these instructions: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tokenlist_file/

If he has no idea what the password is then you can try just bruteforcing from scratch, but this will almost certainly be impossible unless he used a very simple password.

[swogerino]

Thank you.We are trying the above but right now things are not looking good as we are brute forcing from scratch as he has only a vague idea what the password could be.I thought that Blockchain support could help us with the ID but it seems this is our only option.Anyway we are going to try until we get bored or if we heaven wants find anything.

[The Cryptovator]

Since resetting passwords is impossible, the only way to recover funds is through brute force as @o_e_l_e_o already described. If you don't know how to do it then you may follow this video as a guide, Brute-Force Blockchain Wallet. Since your friend has welcome mail and access to the mail, there is a hope to recover funds. Although it will take time, don't be hopeless. Try with all possible passwords.

If you failed to do it yourself then you have to trust their party. I am not suggesting using a third party, but in case you need then you may contact this developer, Bitcoin Wallet Recovery Services - for forgotten wallet password  .

One more important thing, most likely you may receive PMs from scammers to recover your funds. Don't let them make you fool. Just ask them to participate in the open discussion here. And please share here before trusting anyone in case you need to hand over your wallet credentials to others. Handover wallet credentials to scammers mean your fund will go forever.

[o_e_l_e_o]

We are trying the above but right now things are not looking good as we are brute forcing from scratch as he has only a vague idea what the password could be.

A vague idea is still better than no idea at all. Try to build a tokens file based on that idea with additional characters, numbers, substitutions, typos, etc. Also ask him if the password would have been similar/related/based on any of the other passwords he was using around the time he set up the wallet? And he's definitely not got an old computer somewhere which might have the password saved in a browser or password manager?

I thought that Blockchain support could help us with the ID but it seems this is our only option.

Although they created the wallet and the seed phrase and private keys within, blockchain.com claim that they do not have access to individual wallets so they will not help you recover any funds.

[swogerino]

So far he finally created a word list and as you can see from the picture in attach we are trying to brute force it.We are using a Core i5 9600kf processor together with a Gtx 1050 ti as a GPU to speed up the process,however it has run through billions of combinations and it is still going,should we wait for weeks and is there any real chance to find the password it based on this word list as my friend insists it is one of such related passwords?

No he does not has anything except this word list now.

[o_e_l_e_o]

What command did you use? Can you calculate a rough idea of how many passwords your token list is going to generate?

The reason I ask is that screenshot is not actually trying to brute force anything yet - it is simply figuring out all the different passwords it is going to try. ("Counting passwords") In some cases this makes btcrecover much faster, but if you are working with billions of possibilities then it will make things much slower. You might want to restart and use the arguments --no-eta and --no-dupchecks, which should speed things up.

You can read more here: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Limitations_and_Caveats/#memory

[swogerino]

I am adding the nodupcheck argument as it was interrupted one time telling me out of memory.The word list it contains 51 different passwords which everyone is my friend name and surname plus special characters so far is at 9 billion and 383 million passwords.I guess we have to wait.Here is the full command that I ran:

python btcrecover.py --wallet wallet.aes.json --typos-capslock --tokenlist C:\Users\(name of the user)\Downloads\btcrecover-master\Tokens.txt.txt --nodupchecks

[o_e_l_e_o]

--nodupchecks isn't a valid argument. It needs to be --no-dupchecks.

The --no-eta option will skip this whole counting process and go straight to the brute forcing.

Up to you if you just leave it running since you are already at 10 billion, but if this is the command which crashed before because you ran out of memory then chances are the same will happen again since you haven't changed anything.

[swogerino]

--nodupchecks isn't a valid argument. It needs to be --no-dupchecks.

The --no-eta option will skip this whole counting process and go straight to the brute forcing.

Up to you if you just leave it running since you are already at 10 billion, but if this is the command which crashed before because you ran out of memory then chances are the same will happen again since you haven't changed anything.

It was a typo,I have used it as you said --no-dupchecks and it is at 17 billion right now but I am going to try directly the brute force method by adding the --no-eta and see what happen.

It is changing,now it is directly brute-forcing at 60 kps almost speed.Is it a good speed or maybe should I add another card,that's the max space I have on this pc to add another one and no more.

[The Cryptovator]

OP, did you recover the funds? I am just curious to know, you haven't updated for a few whiles. If you succeed then share how eventually did it, so others would take a lesson from here in the same problem. If not yet, then try and try, don't give it up. Otherwise, just contact the Wallet Recovery Service as I mentioned in my first post.

Best of Luck.

[swogerino]

OP, did you recover the funds? I am just curious to know, you haven't updated for a few whiles. If you succeed then share how eventually did it, so others would take a lesson from here in the same problem. If not yet, then try and try, don't give it up. Otherwise, just contact the Wallet Recovery Service as I mentioned in my first post.

Best of Luck.

I am here at this number you can see in the below picture,the problem is that the user gave me 51 passwords to check from and the recovery tool is searching for all of them that is why I am not successful so far.I will try to keep this going for maximum another week and then will narrow down to just 5 most common used passwords of the user and see what happens.It has been running for 11 days so far.

[o_e_l_e_o]

I am here at this number you can see in the below picture,the problem is that the user gave me 51 passwords to check from and the recovery tool is searching for all of them that is why I am not successful so far.

What do you mean by "he gave you 51 passwords"? What does your token list file look like? Are you trying every possible combination of 51 different strings, because that number is in the region of 10⁶⁶ and will be impossible to even scratch the surface of.

If he has given you 51 possible passwords, any of which might be close to correct one but with typos, then you either need to reconstruct your tokens file, or you need to run each password one at a time using some combination of various --typo arguments.

[swogerino]

I am here at this number you can see in the below picture,the problem is that the user gave me 51 passwords to check from and the recovery tool is searching for all of them that is why I am not successful so far.

What do you mean by "he gave you 51 passwords"? What does your token list file look like? Are you trying every possible combination of 51 different strings, because that number is in the region of 10⁶⁶ and will be impossible to even scratch the surface of.

If he has given you 51 possible passwords, any of which might be close to correct one but with typos, then you either need to reconstruct your tokens file, or you need to run each password one at a time using some combination of various --typo arguments.

Well that is why I only see the number increase without success,it just has given me a huge file in size with possible passwords so far.No one of them is working so most probably we are doing something wrong.

Can we try like with 3 passwords and hopefully it won't take this long once we reconstruct our token file?

[o_e_l_e_o]

Can we try like with 3 passwords and hopefully it won't take this long once we reconstruct our token file?

btcrecover does not treat a token file as a list of passwords; it treats it as a list of tokens, and uses one or more of those tokens to construct a password. If you have given it a list of 51 entries and nothing else in the token file, then all it will be trying to do is to combine 2 or more of those entries together exactly as written in various combinations.

If he thinks his password is his first name and his last name combined with some special characters as you said above, then you need to construct a token file which tells btcrecover to try these possibilities. The instructions on how to do this are here: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tokenlist_file/, as I linked above.

Let's say, for example, that he knows his password is his first name which may or may not be capitalized, then there might be a space, then his last name which may or may not be capitalized, and then up to 4 special characters that he doesn't remember, your token file would look like this:

Code:

+ ^Firstname ^firstname
^2^%s
+ Lastname lastname
+ %1,4y$

+ means you must use one of the tokens on this line
^ means use the token from this line only as the very first token
^2^ means if you do use this token, it comes second
%s means a single space
%1,4 means between 1 and 4 characters
y is the code for any ASCII symbol
$ is the code for only try this as the last token

Such a token list would generate 2 options for the first line, 2 options for the second line, 2 options for the third line, and 32⁴ + 32³ + 32² + 32 options for the fourth line, giving you 8,659,200 possible combinations.

[swogerino]

Thank you.I will try this tomorrow as we have the computers at work and we will see what will happen by adding the arguments of his name with special characters as you have indicated here.I will let you know if anything happens,if it successfully recovers the password.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Thank you.I will try this tomorrow as we have the computers at work and we will see what will happen by adding the arguments of his name with special characters as you have indicated here.I will let you know if anything happens,if it successfully recovers the password.

The token file I gave was only an example. You will need to craft one specifically for whatever he can remember was or was not part of his password. I'm more than happy to make one up for you, but we need as much information from him as possible.

Are your first name and last name definitely both in your password?
Are in that order, or could they be switched?
Are they all lowercase, or could they be capitalized?
Could any of the characters be swapped for numbers of symbols, such as E -> 3 or t -> + for example?
Could there be a space or other character(s) between your two names?
Could there any other words in your password?
Could there be extra letters, number, or symbols?
How many?
Are these symbols all at the end, or could they be in more than one place?
etc.

[swogerino]

Thank you.I will try this tomorrow as we have the computers at work and we will see what will happen by adding the arguments of his name with special characters as you have indicated here.I will let you know if anything happens,if it successfully recovers the password.

The token file I gave was only an example. You will need to craft one specifically for whatever he can remember was or was not part of his password. I'm more than happy to make one up for you, but we need as much information from him as possible.

Are your first name and last name definitely both in your password?
Are in that order, or could they be switched?
Are they all lowercase, or could they be capitalized?
Could any of the characters be swapped for numbers of symbols, such as E -> 3 or t -> + for example?
Could there be a space or other character(s) between your two names?
Could there any other words in your password?
Could there be extra letters, number, or symbols?
How many?
Are these symbols all at the end, or could they be in more than one place?
etc.

First Name and Last Name maybe in the password but it is not 100% sure.
They could be switched
They can be lower case or capitalized.
He usually put twins@ a number in his password because he has a twin sister,it can be lower case and upper case twins as a word.
No space,100% sure.
Any other word can be juventus or Juventus as he is a fan of Juventus Turin with about 80% accuracy that this word can be in.
It can be a maximum of 4 numbers added or just two special characters and by special characters he only uses the @ symbol.
Usually the symbols are in the end but can be also in the beginning of the password,they can never be in the middle.

Thank you for your help.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Ok, so based on all that, the token file I would try would look like this:

Code:

Firstname firstname FIRSTNAME
Lastname lastname LASTNAME
Twins@%1,2d twins@%1,2d TWINS@%1,2d
Juventus juventus JUVENTUS
^@ ^@@ @$ @@$
^%1,4d %1,4d$

This will try one or two @ symbols at the start or the end or not at all, up to 4 digits at the start or the end or not at all, and every combination of up to one entry from each of the first four lines in every order in the middle. Just to be clear you say he only ever uses the @ symbol, and no other symbol such as $()!*[] etc?

If the "Twins@a number" is only going to be a certain number (like the year of their birth for example), then you can change those entries to that number to significantly reduce the search space. The code I have there will try every 1 and 2 digit number. You can also expand that to three or four digits if you need to, but at a 10 fold or 100 fold increase to the number of possibilities respectively

If the capitalization of any of the terms could be something other than the three examples I've included (such as JuVentUs), then we'll need to redesign things again, but we would now be bordering on the impossible.

If his password is at all different to this, even by a single character, then this will not find it.

[swogerino]

I started with this token file and hopefully it will find anything,most of the time he says he uses only these type of passwords with slight variations like capital letters and adding the @ symbol at the end or in the beginning and sometimes he throws in the birth year.I will let you know if something great happens.