Seeking solutions to a 12 year old Electrum wallet mystery

[assaywhat]

Any update on this?  I, too, have long been vexed by the mysterious key derivation bug from the older (pre-0.39) versions of Electrum. Documentation on this bug seems non-existent. I did find some comments from the developer about how very few people were using the software at that time (or something to that effect), which seemed sort of dismissive, to be honest. Even if only 2 people were affected by the bug, you would think they would at least put up some info about it somewhere to help point those two people in the right direction. If such documentation exists, I apologize. I have been unable to find it. I have also been unable to find any documentation that explains how the master keys were derived from "old" seed version (non-bip39 wordlist). There doesn't appear to be a way to export a master private key from those types of wallet. Is that not possible? Does anyone know? Sorry, not trying to hijack your thread. I hope you have had better luck than I.

[nc50lc]

I, too, have long been vexed by the mysterious key derivation bug from the older (pre-0.39) versions of Electrum. Documentation on this bug seems non-existent.
-snip-

That is because the affected versions (pre v0.34) existed before the official release of Electrum.
Only those users who are following its development and used the source code to run Electrum have experienced the bug.
So it's only normal that you cant find any documentation about the issue aside from the old release notes since it's not yet officially released at that time.

I have also been unable to find any documentation that explains how the master keys were derived from "old" seed version (non-bip39 wordlist). There doesn't appear to be a way to export a master private key from those types of wallet. Is that not possible? Does anyone know? Sorry, not trying to hijack your thread. I hope you have had better luck than I.

If it's just old seed (pre v2.0, post v0.34), then you can simply restore it to the latest versions, it will be accepted as "old seed" and it will restore the same wallet.

If it's for versions before v0.34, you may get better response by asking the core developers about how to reproduce the bug.
You can post it as an issue in Electrum's repo: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues (be accurate with the title)

[assaywhat]

If it's just old seed (pre v2.0, post v0.34), then you can simply restore it to the latest versions, it will be accepted as "old seed" and it will restore the same wallet.

If it's for versions before v0.34, you may get better response by asking the core developers about how to reproduce the bug.
You can post it as an issue in Electrum's repo: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues (be accurate with the title)

I have a bunch of different old wallets. Unfortunately I failed to include many notes at all whenever I wrote down a recovery mnemonic. I don't think I compiled that ancient version originally, but it isn't impossible. Also there arw 3rd party tools that used Electrum's codebase (specifically its key derivation) that I used that are no longer supported or maintained so I have no way of knowing exactly which version they were using.

I definitely have some pre-2.0, post-0.39 wallet seeds, for sure. For my own peace of mind, and to cover all my bases, I like to manually derive the keys from mnemonic to verify that they were derived as expected. Ever since the Bip32 "leading zero" bug that affected at least 2 wallets of mine (Copay), I have been sort of paranoid about those types of bugs. Since I still have a few addresses with unspent balances that I lost access to somewhere along the way, i have just been trying to rule out as many seeds as possible via process of elimination. It is relatively easy to do that with Bip39 wallets because there is so much literature out thrre. But with Electrum, especially version 1 and older, figuring out the technical details has proven very challenging. Granted, I'm mot the most technically competent person in the world, but I can usually learn...usually. Lol

[bobertson]

Any updates on this? Also curious to the amount of BTC in this wallet given you've spent 12-13 years on this.... I'm a full stack developer with a background in reverse engineering. I'd be willing to work on any projects anyone may have like this for a share of recovered assets.

[ElectrumHelpMe]

seems pretty easy...
i have tool