Searching for a tool that cracks a seed when i give it the right words [recovery

[dissi_xD]

Hi,

i have reset my electrum wallet and now i'm facing a problem: i have the seed but the word's aren't in the right order (thought it would be a good idea to do that xD). So i have all words but i need to know the order. The seed has 24 words and to try all different positions for each word isn't an option.

The only good news i have is that i know the first 6 words.

So is there a tool which can crack the seed, when i give it all my words? Would be nice if i can also say that the first 6 words are this, this and this. So it needs less time to crack it.
The tool should be free and open source.

Thanks for your help

[ABCbits]

The only good news i have is that i know the first 6 words.

I didn't do the math, but IIRC it's computationally impossible if you don't know the order 12 words or more.

So is there a tool which can crack the seed, when i give it all my words? Would be nice if i can also say that the first 6 words are this, this and this. So it needs less time to crack it.
The tool should be free and open source/

Some users experience similar problem, you might want to check these thread
Need help with bitcoin seed phrase recovery using 3rditeration BTCrecover
Recovering a 12 word phrase
Order of Seed Phrase

[nc50lc]

You can use BTCRecover's seedrecover tool to unscramble it:

• Link: https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover
• Documentation for the token file: https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover/blob/master/docs/tokenlist_file.md
• Documentation for seedrecover: https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover/blob/master/docs/Seedrecover_Quick_Start_Guide.md

Read the documentation... then just follow these once you've installed BTCRecover:
Only do this on an air-gap machine.

• Create a "token file": containing the words with anchors for the first 6 words,
  example for 12 words + 3 known word places (refer to the documentation for the anchors),
  token_file.txt:
  
  Code:

  ^apology
  ^2^myself
  ^3^weapon
  primary
  library
  inch
  budget
  boy
  eternal   
  smart
  ability
  cactus

  
  
• Then use this command to start seedrecover.py (replace the necessary info like the address, number of words, token list file name, etc.):
  
  Code:

  seedrecover.py --tokenlist token_file.txt --mnemonic-length 12 --language en --addrs bc1qsaly7ra0lpdq6gxsxhl3alzc96kxef22tp4t7p --addr-limit 2 --dsw --no-eta

  
  
• When prompted to open a wallet file, select 'cancel', then select "Electrum 2+" when prompted for the wallet type.
  BTW, you can use that example to test if BTCRecover is working. It can be cracked (in my system) within seconds.
  But take note that 18 out of 24 words to scramble may take days or hours (but I haven't done the benchmarks, maybe months?)

[o_e_l_e_o]

btcrecover as suggest by nc50lc would be the best way to do this if it was possible, but it almost certainly isn't I'm afraid.

18 scrambled words in an unknown position gives 18! combinations = 6.4*10¹⁵ combinations. Here's a post I made a few months ago with some rough benchmarks:

With good hardware, btcrecover will descramble a 12 word BIP39 seed phrase in an hour: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Usage_Examples/2020-05-02_Descrambling_a_12_word_seed/Example_Descrambling_a_12_word_seed/. Although not exactly the same due to the checksum, lets assume that if you know 12 out of the 24 words then you could descramble the remaining 12 words in roughly the same amount of time.

If you don't know the position of 13 words instead of 12, then there are 13x as many combinations to try, so that would take roughly 13 hours.
For 14 words, 7 days.
For 15 words, 16 weeks.
For 16 words, 5 years.
For 17 words, 85 years.
For 18 words, 1500 years.

Even assuming you can rent hardware which can test 1 million combinations a second, then you are still looking at over 200 years to exhaust the search space. The amount of hardware you would need to rent to solve this in a reasonable amount of time will almost certainly cost orders of magnitude more than whatever coins you have in that wallet. Do you have any other possible way of narrowing down the search space or confirming the location of some of the other words?

[dissi_xD]

btcrecover as suggest by nc50lc would be the best way to do this if it was possible, but it almost certainly isn't I'm afraid.

18 scrambled words in an unknown position gives 18! combinations = 6.4*10¹⁵ combinations. Here's a post I made a few months ago with some rough benchmarks:

With good hardware, btcrecover will descramble a 12 word BIP39 seed phrase in an hour: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Usage_Examples/2020-05-02_Descrambling_a_12_word_seed/Example_Descrambling_a_12_word_seed/. Although not exactly the same due to the checksum, lets assume that if you know 12 out of the 24 words then you could descramble the remaining 12 words in roughly the same amount of time.

If you don't know the position of 13 words instead of 12, then there are 13x as many combinations to try, so that would take roughly 13 hours.
For 14 words, 7 days.
For 15 words, 16 weeks.
For 16 words, 5 years.
For 17 words, 85 years.
For 18 words, 1500 years.

Even assuming you can rent hardware which can test 1 million combinations a second, then you are still looking at over 200 years to exhaust the search space. The amount of hardware you would need to rent to solve this in a reasonable amount of time will almost certainly cost orders of magnitude more than whatever coins you have in that wallet. Do you have any other possible way of narrowing down the search space or confirming the location of some of the other words?

I will still give btcrecover a try, even if it sounds as there is no hope... Fortunately there are not that many coins on the wallet. Not even 1 btc

Thank you all for your answers ^---^

[nc50lc]

18 scrambled words in an unknown position gives 18! combinations = 6.4*10¹⁵ combinations. Here's a post I made a few months ago with some rough benchmarks:

Whoa, the odds is worse than I imagined, shame I haven't seen your benchmarks before.

I will still give btcrecover a try, even if it sounds as there is no hope... Fortunately there are not that many coins on the wallet. Not even 1 btc

Or you could try Dave's wallet recovery service: www.walletrecoveryservices.com
See if the guy has other methods aside from bruteforcing through all of the possible of combinations.

BTW, Electrum only generates 12 words by default, did you manually created the seed phrase using the console/CLI? Or an imported BIP39 seed?
Because it's best clarify it so you wouldn't be selecting the wrong options in BTCRecover.

[PawGo]

Check this subject for evaluation of operations on 24 words:
 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5377887.msg58773329#msg58773329
For 18 words it does not look very optimistic, as someone estimates it as work for a 1500 years.

But you may still try to use my little tool: https://github.com/PawelGorny/lostword  there is a configuration example of permutations of given words.

Are you sure 6 are correct and rest is definitively incorrect or some other words may be on a good position?


Edit: I just realized it is for Electrum seed, while my program is only for BIP39

[dissi_xD]

You can use BTCRecover's seedrecover tool to unscramble it:

• Link: https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover
• Documentation for the token file: https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover/blob/master/docs/tokenlist_file.md
• Documentation for seedrecover: https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover/blob/master/docs/Seedrecover_Quick_Start_Guide.md

Read the documentation... then just follow these once you've installed BTCRecover:
Only do this on an air-gap machine.

• Create a "token file": containing the words with anchors for the first 6 words,
  example for 12 words + 3 known word places (refer to the documentation for the anchors),
  token_file.txt:
  
  Code:

  ^apology
  ^2^myself
  ^3^weapon
  primary
  library
  inch
  budget
  boy
  eternal   
  smart
  ability
  cactus

  
  
• Then use this command to start seedrecover.py (replace the necessary info like the address, number of words, token list file name, etc.):
  
  Code:

  seedrecover.py --tokenlist token_file.txt --mnemonic-length 12 --language en --addrs bc1qsaly7ra0lpdq6gxsxhl3alzc96kxef22tp4t7p --addr-limit 2 --dsw --no-eta

  
  
• When prompted to open a wallet file, select 'cancel', then select "Electrum 2+" when prompted for the wallet type.
  BTW, you can use that example to test if BTCRecover is working. It can be cracked (in my system) within seconds.
  But take note that 18 out of 24 words to scramble may take days or hours (but I haven't done the benchmarks, maybe months?)
  

I've tried it yesterday but boy... This tool is written in python 2 while using python 3 so i spend 3-4 hours to try to update the skrypt to python 3 and there are still some errors. Exists this tool also in python 3 somewhere? Before spending another 3-4 or more hours to update the code...

---

Edit: it seems like the tool is written in python 3. But then why do i get so many syntax errors and must update it from python 2 to python 3?

Would be much easier if i know some programming language but so i google for the errors, check the line where the error occurs and try somehow to get the code right...

[pooya87]

Edit: it seems like the tool is written in python 3. But then why do i get so many syntax errors and must update it from python 2 to python 3?

Would be much easier if i know some programming language but so i google for the errors, check the line where the error occurs and try somehow to get the code right...

Just a little personal experience since I've faced the same issue before:
Make sure to test the code with a test key that you know can be recovered quickly (like with only 1 mistake) so that you can make sure that the changes you made didn't introduce mistakes. Otherwise you may spend hours trying to recover your actual key and fail but not know whether your words were wrong or the code.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Edit: it seems like the tool is written in python 3. But then why do i get so many syntax errors and must update it from python 2 to python 3?

It works just fine in Python 3 for me. Which version of Python 3 do you have installed? What OS are you using?

Have you followed the installation instructions? https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/INSTALL/

And as above, what program did you use to generate your seed phrase in the first place? Electrum does not generate 24 word phrases. Depending on whether it is a BIP39 phrase or an Electrum phrase changes what command you need to run in btcrecover.

[dissi_xD]

Edit: it seems like the tool is written in python 3. But then why do i get so many syntax errors and must update it from python 2 to python 3?

Would be much easier if i know some programming language but so i google for the errors, check the line where the error occurs and try somehow to get the code right...

Just a little personal experience since I've faced the same issue before:
Make sure to test the code with a test key that you know can be recovered quickly (like with only 1 mistake) so that you can make sure that the changes you made didn't introduce mistakes. Otherwise you may spend hours trying to recover your actual key and fail but not know whether your words were wrong or the code.

That's a good tipp, thanks

[dissi_xD]

Edit: it seems like the tool is written in python 3. But then why do i get so many syntax errors and must update it from python 2 to python 3?

It works just fine in Python 3 for me. Which version of Python 3 do you have installed? What OS are you using?

Have you followed the installation instructions? https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/INSTALL/

And as above, what program did you use to generate your seed phrase in the first place? Electrum does not generate 24 word phrases. Depending on whether it is a BIP39 phrase or an Electrum phrase changes what command you need to run in btcrecover.

To be honest i don't know. And to be really honest, i didn't created the wallet myself. It's a game of a faucet where you have to solve a word puzzle to find all the words of the seed and then bring them in the right order. Sorry for lying, i thought it's better :/

The instructions of this game tell to download the Electrum Wallet so i have thought that it was created with Electrum. The first 6 words are in the right order, told the site. And there is also a bit of a public key but not the whole. They also provided a GitHub list with all the possible words of BIP39, so i guess it's BIP39...

I think i'm running the newest version of python 3 since it said that everything is up to date when i tried to install it the second time (to be honest, i don'g know how to check it, i'm new to linux). My OS is called Zorin OS.

[hosseinimr93]

It's a game of a faucet where you have to solve a word puzzle to find all the words of the seed and then bring them in the right order.

Most probably, no combination of those words corresponds to a funded wallet.
Even if there's a funded wallet with those words, as already mentioned in previous posts, it's impossible to brute-force the seed phrase. Those who gave you the words knew this very well.

The instructions of this game tell to download the Electrum Wallet so i have thought that it was created with Electrum.

Hope they didn't give you a link to a fake website and you have downloaded electrum from its official website.

[dissi_xD]

It's a game of a faucet where you have to solve a word puzzle to find all the words of the seed and then bring them in the right order.

Most probably, no combination of those words corresponds to a funded wallet.
Even if there's a funded wallet with those words, as already mentioned in previous posts, it's impossible to brute-force the seed phrase. Those who gave you the words knew this very well.

The instructions of this game tell to download the Electrum Wallet so i have thought that it was created with Electrum.

Hope they didn't give you a link to a fake website and you have downloaded electrum from its official website.

I think it's real, it's round 6 now. The import of the wallet should be 0,001 btc. Don't worry, i downloaded electrum from the official website

[pooya87]

I think it's real, it's round 6 now. The import of the wallet should be 0,001 btc. Don't worry, i downloaded electrum from the official website

Is 0.001BTC the reward of the puzzle? That's less than $40 which is only worth spending computing power to brute force if and only if the missing words or positions were 2 or 3 not 18.
It looks like the both created an unsolvable puzzle and took the smallest risk by providing a tiny reward for it.

[nc50lc]

To be honest i don't know. And to be really honest, i didn't created the wallet myself. It's a game of a faucet where you have to solve a word puzzle to find all the words of the seed and then bring them in the right order. Sorry for lying, i thought it's better :/

That's good to know.
I thought something was off so I stopped replying after you ignored my question about how the 24-word Electrum seed is created.
(or you just missed it and only seen o_e_l_e_o's follow-up?)

Anyways, if it's a puzzle, try to find a clue that may be a hint to the words' arrangement.
That's how puzzles work, otherwise, no one will be able to win it.
Although you should continue the discussion about the puzzle in a new thread in the correct board (try 'Bitcoin Discussion').

[o_e_l_e_o]

It looks like the both created an unsolvable puzzle and took the smallest risk by providing a tiny reward for it.

It sounds like they will confirm the position of the next word periodically until someone manages to crack it. But yeah, there is no point even trying at all when you have 18 scrambled words, and for the sake of 0.001 BTC there is no point trying until you have the positions of at least the first 10 words or so. You will spend more on electricity and wearing out your hardware if you try before then than the reward is worth.