pywallet dump, partial files help.

[pissedoff]

Ok so my friend recently wanted me to help him with his lost password he said he knows most of it but there are a few characters which he has either mistyped or forgotten. But because we live far away from each other I suggested that he doesn't upload his wallet.dat on the internet and use the pywallet and dump the keys etc (so he doesn't have to worry about losing any of it)

However, I Haven't got much knowledge of what to do when I receive that information. Can someone let me know what to do with the information he gave me from the pywallet dump?

Thanks in advance.


More info: I dumped the mkey,ckey and 2 other addresses like it says over at the tech sub forum. I'm just wondering what I should do with this information (step by step guide) in order to try to scripts on it and then send my friend is password back (this way he doesn't risk storing it on a usb which can be lost and also storing it online)

[resya]

I'm assuming your friend has a bitcoin core wallet. So, instead of using pywallet dump, I would recommend to use extract scripts. It's a simple script which extract the just enough information from a wallet file (encrypted master key, salt, iter_count, and crc) in base64. The output from extract scripts can be used to search the forgotten password.

[pissedoff]

I'm assuming your friend has a bitcoin core wallet. So, instead of using pywallet dump, I would recommend to use extract scripts. It's a simple script which extract the just enough information from a wallet file (encrypted master key, salt, iter_count, and crc) in base64. The output from extract scripts can be used to search the forgotten password.

I've been in talks with a member who is the creater of btcrecovery. However, I don't think my friend wants to download a external program (even if its open source) he's not very technical and doesn't trust many programs. Therefore, he's looked into pywallet and said he trusts it to extract the pywallet contents. I already have the pywallet information and would like to be able to use it with the script I have. If anyone has information on how to actually do that, it would really help us.

I'm pretty sure he will be more than willing to tip anyone who is willing to help. I'm getting a pretty decent tip for helping however I only get it if I'm successful. the last resort if we can't get anything working is to go to the dave bitcoin which takes a 20% cut which is pretty big and we would both agree that doing it ourselves may be a better option.

Of course the next solution is telling him about the script I'm using and him using it on his wallet, but because he's not very technical I'm trying to avoid that also as that would be a very long process in explaining it to him.

[arieq]

I've been in talks with a member who is the creater of btcrecovery. However, I don't think my friend wants to download a external program (even if its open source) he's not very technical and doesn't trust many programs. Therefore, he's looked into pywallet and said he trusts it to extract the pywallet contents. I already have the pywallet information and would like to be able to use it with the script I have. If anyone has information on how to actually do that, it would really help us.

I'm pretty sure he will be more than willing to tip anyone who is willing to help. I'm getting a pretty decent tip for helping however I only get it if I'm successful. the last resort if we can't get anything working is to go to the dave bitcoin which takes a 20% cut which is pretty big and we would both agree that doing it ourselves may be a better option.

Of course the next solution is telling him about the script I'm using and him using it on his wallet, but because he's not very technical I'm trying to avoid that also as that would be a very long process in explaining it to him.

Both pywallet and extract scripts are perfectly safe, they're open source and very well trusted, there is no harm to use them, your friend should not have worried that much.  Actually they do similar things, they extract some information from a bitcoin wallet (mkey, salt etc..). But based on my experience it's easier to use extract scripts to recover a forgotten password rather than pywallet.  I did a successful password recovery on my own using btcrecover (it took 8 hours for me to find the password on 3 intel core i7 computers)

so here are what your friend should do (for bitcoin core wallet):
1. Download extract scripts at https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover/raw/master/extract-scripts/extract-bitcoincore-mkey.py
2. Make a copy of wallet.dat file into the same folder as extract scripts.
3. Run this command

Code:

extract-bitcoincore-mkey.py wallet.dat

4. He should get a message which looks like this as a result:
Bitcoin Core encrypted master key, salt, iter_count, and crc in base64:
lV/wGO5oAUM42KTfq5s3egX3Uhk6gc5gEf1R3TppgzWNW7NGZQF5t5U3Ik0qYs5/dprb+ifLDHuGNQIA+8oRWA==

That's all. When you (or someone else) try to search for his forgotten passwords, you will not need his wallet file, therefore his money is safe. You only need the output from extract-bitcoincore-mkey.py above (bolded part).

If you need more help, I can assist you.