Dave's service is working well!
unfortunately i had a mismatch in my password. I contacted Dave, without knowing him and i didnt know if i could trust him, and followed his guidelines for recovery. Ive send him the info he needed and a day later he was showing me the password mismatch.
Dave, thanks a lot!
I am actually more confident that it is a scam after your post
Come on guys. When you try to recover some password using the pywallet dump, you just send him a encrypted key with no funds, so he can recovered the password but recovers a private key with no funds. Thats 100% trustless.
But in order to know that, it would take knowing things about stuff.
Password =/= Private Key
what you say usually makes sense to me. Not this time. Care to elaborate what you mean?
This is a password recovery service, not private key recovery to determine the Master Key for the wallet. This is used then (by the wallet owner to decrypt the funded private key(s).
The funded private key is not provided to the service in the portion of the modular wallet software that is sent to him for doing the password recovery.
It would not be possible to steal the coins in the wallet with just the information sent.
It uses this tool:
http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=pywalletWhat he's innovated seems to be a type of narrowed search, rainbow table, brute force cracking, with some fast hardware available to make it time-economical. The 'secret sauce' would be in the search narrowing. The ability to chop up the rainbow table by reducing the entropy based on what the wallet owner can provide from their memory is pretty important.
But this just cracks the password to the wallet. Without the private key that has funds attached to it, or the full wallet, that information is not so very useful except to the wallet owner.
He's posted the
process for sending just non-funded keys, and the master key (which is what is needed for the passphrase cracking) here:
http://www.walletrecoveryservices.com/information.htmlMike Caldwell ELI5'd it here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2555111