Professional advice needed: Recovering a 2010 Legacy wallet.dat (8.5 BTC) [SERIO

[YeyeMNQ]

Hi everyone, I am reaching out to the community to seek technical guidance regarding a legacy wallet recovery process. I am currently in possession of an original wallet.dat file dating back to late 2010, which contains a balance of 8.5 BTC.

So far, I have managed to successfully extract the hash from the file. Over the last 48 hours, I have been running several recovery attempts using John the Ripper and Hashcat. I started by applying the standard RockYou dictionary to see if it was a common password from that era, but unfortunately, I haven't had any luck yet.

I have the memory dumps and the pools ready, but I feel like I am hitting a wall with my current wordlists. Given that this is a "Satoshi era" legacy file, I am concerned about missing specific encryption quirks or derivation paths that were common in 2010.

My specific questions are:

Are there any reputable open-source scripts or specialized tools you would recommend for 2010-era headers besides the ones I mentioned?

Should I focus on creating custom wordlists based on personal data, or is there a more efficient methodology for brute-forcing "vintage" wallets?

Are there any known technical documentation resources specifically for early Bitcoin Core wallet encryption?

Please note: I am NOT looking for anyone to crack this for me. I will ignore all DMs. I am only looking for public technical advice, methodology, or documentation to help me move forward on my own. Any help from the experts here would be greatly appreciated.

[Cricktor]

To judge whether it's a waste of time or not, I want to ask you a simple question:
is this your own genuine wallet.dat or did you get it from anywhere?

Be honest! I don't need to know where you got it from or if you paid for it or not, if it's not your very own wallet.dat file.

Apparently the wallet file is encrypted (to be expected) and you don't have the encryption passphrase. Can I ask why you didn't backup the wallet encryption secret? Do you have any clues about the encryption secret, length, of what parts it might be composed?

[JackMazzoni]

My advice use this wordlists.  Use hashcat the newest version. John the Ripper is very slow.

Code:

https://weakpass.com/wordlists

And use this rules. I think it is the most powerful rules out there on public.

Code:

https://forum.hashpwn.net/topic/71/top-hashpwn-rules

If you know part of the password it is more faster to bruteforce it than using wordlists. Or you can make passwords from your known passwords.

Code:

https://weakpass.com/tools/passgen