Topic: Blockchain 2014 wallet recovery if any ? (Read 329 times)

I gave him the information you gave me,just that tokens.txt list I created based on your advice and apparently Dave did a really good job at finding the password in less than three days but no we didn't gave him the name of the cousin,we only wrote the tokens.txt file as you told us with First Name, Last Name and all other characters so yes Dave has some amazing software and bruteforcing power.

Most likely my friend used Electrum and also most likely is game over because he doesn't have nor Electrum wallet.dat file nor the seed so as you say the coins are lost.I remember back at that time that we ran into Electrum after hearing some big exchange being hacked or something like that and that taught us the lesson to keep our coins not in third party wallets anymore.I guess Exodus was not that known at that time and maybe it didn't even exist I am not sure of it so at 99.99% is an Electrum wallet but unfortunately inaccessible.

This is what I gave him

Well, glad he got to the bottom of it. Impressive that Dave managed to brute force all that, but I imagine your friend must at least have given him the name of the cousin and some other formatting information, since otherwise Dave was brute forcing 12+ random characters, which is approximately 80+ bits of entropy.

Walletexplorer tells you when an address is part of a wallet in terms of other addresses which are part of that wallet. It does not and can not tell you which client (Electrum, Exodus, etc) was used to create that address (and neither can any other service). From looking solely at historical blockchain data, you will never be able to tell what software was used to create an address (except maybe in some exceedingly rare cases when a transaction spending coins from that address has some very unique technical characteristics to it).

We found the address in his emails in 2014.

The password was not in the format I gave you it was twins1991(then some random characters that made sense to my friend,then surname followed by other characters then name of his cousins followed by other random characters) here is part of the password with X letter meaning another character

 twins1991xxxdxxxxx2012xxxxaxxhxxfor

No the address with the money my friend bought them at 2014,December 2014 through Ebay at that time and he thought only Blockchain.info to have as an wallet but I remember also telling him about a more secure wallet like Electrum.I tried to see that address in walletexplorer  webpage but it doesn't show to which wallet it belongs,it just tag them with different colors.

Out of curiosity, what format did the password take? Were you close with your own efforts?

Where did you find this address? As an imported address inside your blockchain.com wallet?

With neither the wallet file nor the seed phrase, the coins are lost.

Dave was able to find the missing password of this wallet of 2014 however it had not any money on it.The only address we found to have money is another one which has 0.1044 Bitcoin but most likely it is an Electrum or Exodus wallet.
Of course my friend does not have that wallet.dat file and may be he will not be able to find the 12 words seed phrase.Most likely it is game over for such wallets in such case ?

There is a really slim chance that he may find the 12 words seed phrase but most likely he will not.

Giving this one last try before contacting the wallet recovery services if my friends agrees to do so,I believe he will agree as I don't see any other alternative for him at the moment.He also gave me another option,the name of "Ditrin" maybe is in the password and I added it in the tokens file.I don't have any hopes based on past results but let's see.

Edit:Talked to Dave and agreed with his 20% so I send him the needed files and waiting news from him now.

Unless your friend can be more specific about what combination of things may or may not be in his password, probably not. There are a couple of examples you gave above (such as "Juventus@twins1991") which do not fit the answers to the questions he gave earlier (where he said he always uses "twins@ a number"). Since it seems he doesn't really know what order he might actually have used the tokens, I would remove all the rules regarding token placements and just run with the barebones, something looking like this:


Remember to use the --max-tokens argument if you think you need it. A wallet recovery service might be able to widen the search space somewhat, but if it is a somewhat different password to what he thinks then it is unlikely they will be successful.

To add on malevolent reply, make sure you research whatever company you intend to "contract" for this service. While I never used this kind of service, I always saw positive feedback regarding the service offered by Dave[1] - walletrecoveryservices.com[2] - and if you indeed have run out of options I would have him as a possible supplier for your service. He'll only charge you (20 %) if he manages to successful recover your BTC - at the current price it would be around $5,480 USD - otherwise you won't be charged anything:

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[1]https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/walletrecoveryservices-130960
[2]https://www.walletrecoveryservices.com/

If you've exhausted all your options, giving it a try is all you can do. Maybe the recovery service is going to be able to ask better questions as to what the password could consist of (a long shot), and they're going to have more than a single 1050 Ti.

Update and bump:

Unfortunately I believe we have just scratched the impossible here and there is not much hope left,can the recovery wallet services do something here knowing that the password is not what my friend thought it was?

Trying this new token file now and if it doesn't work after this I am afraid he has used something else as a password.It most probably take another week or so to try all possible combinations and I will let you know in the results after the scan.

So you can add in the option below to the command you feed to btcrecover (i.e. not in the tokens file itself):

This will limit btcrecover to combining 4 of the 6 different lines in your tokens file, and therefore cut down on the number of valid possibilities dramatically.

I notice as well in the examples you have given that you have the @ symbol occasionally in the middle ("Juventus@1991" for example), and not at the beginning or the end as previously mentioned. If that's a possibility, then you'll want to change the 5th line of the tokens file from this:

To this:

I also note that the number after twins is 4 digits rather than the limit of 2 I gave in the original file, so again you'll want to change the third line from this:

To this:

Unfortunately after going after a billion number of combinations for 10 days neither were correct and it gave all possible passwords.However such passwords are in the form here below

2021-11-16 04:19:43 Possible Password ==>@@nameTwins@06JUVENTUSsurname6871<== in Decrypted Block ==>{ ("_u'3PIERKEt<==
Judging from this my friend told me that his password was never that long,can you please make a simple token list file with this number of characters as follows,(I told him we are bothering the forum members and he told me he is going to reward at least 0.01 Bitcoin for your help if he finds the password and he has a good chunk of Bitcoin as he believes it should have)

You can make the token file like this based on the number of passwords he used which are:

@@namesurname1991
namesurname@1991
Twins@1991
twins1991@@
Juventus@1991
Juventus@twins1991

These are some type of passwords he usually used.As you see max number of characters is 12 to 18.He used both capital and non capital letters in the beginning of the password.I know we are scratching the impossible here but just wanna give a last try.

In the example password of course I put name and surname for privacy reasons.

I started with this token file and hopefully it will find anything,most of the time he says he uses only these type of passwords with slight variations like capital letters and adding the @ symbol at the end or in the beginning and sometimes he throws in the birth year.I will let you know if something great happens.

Ok, so based on all that, the token file I would try would look like this:


This will try one or two @ symbols at the start or the end or not at all, up to 4 digits at the start or the end or not at all, and every combination of up to one entry from each of the first four lines in every order in the middle. Just to be clear you say he only ever uses the @ symbol, and no other symbol such as $()!*[] etc?

If the "Twins@a number" is only going to be a certain number (like the year of their birth for example), then you can change those entries to that number to significantly reduce the search space. The code I have there will try every 1 and 2 digit number. You can also expand that to three or four digits if you need to, but at a 10 fold or 100 fold increase to the number of possibilities respectively

If the capitalization of any of the terms could be something other than the three examples I've included (such as JuVentUs), then we'll need to redesign things again, but we would now be bordering on the impossible.

If his password is at all different to this, even by a single character, then this will not find it.

First Name and Last Name maybe in the password but it is not 100% sure.
They could be switched
They can be lower case or capitalized.
He usually put twins@ a number in his password because he has a twin sister,it can be lower case and upper case twins as a word.
No space,100% sure.
Any other word can be juventus or Juventus as he is a fan of Juventus Turin with about 80% accuracy that this word can be in.
It can be a maximum of 4 numbers added or just two special characters and by special characters he only uses the @ symbol.
Usually the symbols are in the end but can be also in the beginning of the password,they can never be in the middle.

Thank you for your help.

The token file I gave was only an example. You will need to craft one specifically for whatever he can remember was or was not part of his password. I'm more than happy to make one up for you, but we need as much information from him as possible.

Are your first name and last name definitely both in your password?
Are in that order, or could they be switched?
Are they all lowercase, or could they be capitalized?
Could any of the characters be swapped for numbers of symbols, such as E -> 3 or t -> + for example?
Could there be a space or other character(s) between your two names?
Could there any other words in your password?
Could there be extra letters, number, or symbols?
How many?
Are these symbols all at the end, or could they be in more than one place?
etc.

Thank you.I will try this tomorrow as we have the computers at work and we will see what will happen by adding the arguments of his name with special characters as you have indicated here.I will let you know if anything happens,if it successfully recovers the password.

btcrecover does not treat a token file as a list of passwords; it treats it as a list of tokens, and uses one or more of those tokens to construct a password. If you have given it a list of 51 entries and nothing else in the token file, then all it will be trying to do is to combine 2 or more of those entries together exactly as written in various combinations.

If he thinks his password is his first name and his last name combined with some special characters as you said above, then you need to construct a token file which tells btcrecover to try these possibilities. The instructions on how to do this are here: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tokenlist_file/, as I linked above.

Let's say, for example, that he knows his password is his first name which may or may not be capitalized, then there might be a space, then his last name which may or may not be capitalized, and then up to 4 special characters that he doesn't remember, your token file would look like this:


+ means you must use one of the tokens on this line
^ means use the token from this line only as the very first token
^2^ means if you do use this token, it comes second
%s means a single space
%1,4 means between 1 and 4 characters
y is the code for any ASCII symbol
$ is the code for only try this as the last token

Such a token list would generate 2 options for the first line, 2 options for the second line, 2 options for the third line, and 32⁴ + 32³ + 32² + 32 options for the fourth line, giving you 8,659,200 possible combinations.

Well that is why I only see the number increase without success,it just has given me a huge file in size with possible passwords so far.No one of them is working so most probably we are doing something wrong.

Can we try like with 3 passwords and hopefully it won't take this long once we reconstruct our token file?