Topic: My own Bitcoin WIF Missing Characters Help - page 2. (Read 798 times)

to be more specific with you it's not a wallet dump , my few wallets was lost in and the HDD is damaged , however  those are some of the backups in text format i made before in my 2nd HDD .

the format in the txt files follows this :

"addr": " My Bitcoin Address "
"compressed": false,
"encrypted_privkey": " Privatekey "
"hexsec": " dfgdfgfdffhfg" ex.
"label": "",
"pubkey": Pubkey ex: "0000000046556641541"
"reserve": 0,
"sec"
 "secret": " Contains a secret hash

All those Values are given so i have the enc_privkey , hexsec , pubkey , sec ( which is a full privatekey but it refers to another empty wallet address ) , and finally the secret .


Any Help will be appreciated

You need to be more specific without disclosing sensitive information of your wallet like private keys and such.

What kind of wallet is this?
What kind of dump of the wallet do you have?

If it is a Bitcoin Core HD wallet and you see as "secret" the private key that is used as seed for the HD wallet, then I think it should be possible to recreate your wallet's keys with that.
If you have a Bitcoin Core wallet dump with lots of private keys in the dump then you can import those private keys e.g. in an Electrum wallet (in my opinion the import is easier with Electrum than with Bitcoin Core itself) and see if you find any of your coins.

It's quite some time ago that I did some experiments to recover a Bitcoin Core HD wallet by using the dumped HD key from the donor wallet dump, but I don't remember the results unfortunately, sorry. Only I remember is that I had some trouble, but that might have been due to lack of knowledge with proper command usage for Bitcoin Core console or bitcoin-cli.

I'm going to assume the wallet is a Bitcoin Core wallet.

It is only possible if the wallet is not encrypted, or if the wallet is encrypted but you remember the password. If the wallet is encrypted it's probably more (theoretically) faster to just brute-force the WIF.

Thank you really for helping out

Now i have another thing despite from the wif damaged

i got the dumped wallet and it contains a secret

can i recover my wallet throght the secret ?

Only assuming? There's a chance that it's not a WIF but a prvKey in different format.
See if there's a similar format on the prvKey formats listed in this thread: [overview] Recover Bitcoin from any old storage format

I don't know why a public address would be needed at all and I know that you can derive any address type from the public key. But it's not know what kind of software they use/have modified/tweaked as their recovery tool. As I'm not active in this private key finding game, I don't know the algorithms involved and why this and that might be needed.
My knowledge is limited to some cornerstones, like (I might be wrong should I missunderstood some Bitcoin details):
* a private key and the assoc. public key likely have a unique and singular relation
* there are likely ~2⁹⁶ public addresses for every public key, simply due to the fact that the hash space is reduced by 96 bits when you take RIPEMD160(SHA256(public key))

Anyway, I have no idea why that GPU farm recovery tool would have to fiddle with a public address at all. The main playground with missing characters aka bits of a private key and its public key should be the elliptic curve stuff. For a known public key any derived address type is known and fixed, there's no ambiguity on the path public key --> public address types.
Only reason that comes up for me is that a recovery client might not know the public key as you usually don't have to deal with it. The recovery constraints for this case here imply address reuse as the public key must have been exposed on the blockchain by a previously spent UTXO from that address.

Or lack of knowledge how to verify if given public key creates desired 3… address etc.

On the other hand I do not think there are many people who created privkey backup for a single address other than legacy, as they are usually created already in “seed era”.

This is contradictory which raises suspicions. If you have the public key then you don't need the address regardless of its type, since any address type can be derived from the public key.

He just used one of BSGS or Kangaroo programs. By default they work on specified range of private keys, which is easy to find having lost end of WIF. As I wrote in my post there is Kangaroo version modified by me which allows search in more complicated cases, when missing characters are in the middle or in the beginning.
The fact if key is compressed or not, does not matter.

In a German coin forum a user has proven to be able to recover up to 20 missing characters from the end of a compressed WIF key in a rather short amount of time, but he always also needed the public key of the private key for fast success and somehow it's also restricted to P2PKH legacy addresses (he and his business friends seem to have a big GPU farm at disposal and some self-made software tools for such number or recovery crunching, no particular details regarding software tools and amount of GPUs used were disclosed). Uncompressed keys should work, too, but his claims were verified with compressed keys only.

He offered that as a recovery service. I had many doubts, especially regarding compute time. Multiple challenges have been setup for this guy starting from 18-20 missing characters at the end of the WIF key which he solved in a shockingly low amount of time.
I was really impressed.

So if @Turing0x's case meets the constraints and he's desperate enough to give it a try. Disclaimer: I don't know the user from the German coin forum personally nor can I say anything how trustworthy he and his service offering actually in a real recovery case is when real coins are at stake. All I can say: multiple challenges with 18-20 missing characters from the end of a WIF key have been perfectly recovered. No errors in any of his solutions for the challenges.

If @Turing0x is interested, I can try to contact that user and assist to establish communication. I have no business relation with that user.

First at all: 19 is a lot.
How did it happen? What do you have? Text file? How are you sure the rest of characters are correctly recovered? Do you miss beginning or end?
If there would be less characters, but maybe randomly distributed, I would say my WifSolver could help: https://github.com/PawelGorny/WifSolver
Because you have many characters missing, if you lost the beginning you may use much faster version, build for GPU: https://github.com/PawelGorny/WifSolverCuda
That program would not work if you have your characters missing at the end. Then you should try to convert problem into simple brute-force tool like BitCrack.
There is also 4th option. If you know public key (address has outgoing transaction) we may use Kangaroo, normal or modified for solving WIFs (https://github.com/PawelGorny/Kangaroo)
Let me know if you need hep with any of tools, we will try to find the best approach. But honestly speaking, as you sad you are sure 19 characters are missing, the only chance to restore it in reasonable time is to have public key and attack with Kangaroo.

Are you confusing WIFs with mnemonics?
In a mnemonic more than 3 missing words starts becoming very hard to recover but in a Base58 WIF it is still very easy to recover keys missing 5-6 characters and anything higher than that will start taking hours and exponentially become harder.

Pretty bad you have 19 missing characters from your WIF key it takes years decades before you can able to recover it and there is no maximum number of missing characters that you can recover 1 to 3 missing characters can be easily recoverable but above 3 it takes a few months or years.

Why not try to recover it there is an easy tool to use for recovering base58 encoded strings such as WIF keys.

Check this link The FinderOuter, a bitcoin recovery tool

are you saying the hard drive failed and you could only get part of the text file that's how you lost the 19 characters because otherwise why are there 19 missing character?

19 missing characters is a big chunk of key space. You're looking at having to brute-force around 40% (give or take a few percent, depending on exact locations) of the key. Searching this ~100 bit space is pretty much hopeless.

Sadly, as Charles-Tim said, you will not be able to recover it.

Sorry for your loss, take better care of your private key next time.


There's no simple answer to this one, it depends on their location. If they're randomly distributed, then I would hazard a guess that the upper limit is somewhere around 10 missing characters (would still take a lot of compute power and time though).

Alright , thank you i thought that too

what is the maximum WIF missing characters that can be recovered  ?

19 characters gone/lost already? Sorry, you will not be able to recover the WIF private key.

hello there

i have my own bitcoin address and public key and a WIF recognized as invalid

this txt file was old and recovered from my old HDD

i assume that the wif has more than 19 missing characters at known positions


 is there is any chances that i can recover it ??

any guiding help will be appreciated