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I lost 4 out of 12 recovery phrase I even cant remember public address is there a way I can find them back please help me thanks a lot

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The BIP39 English wordlist contains 2048 entries so, since words can be repeated, you need to try (corrected) 2048 ^ 4 combinations which is 117,592,186,044,416 different phrases to try. If you could test a million guesses a second, that would take up to 204 days.

The first stage of testing would be that the checksum condition is met. This ought to be fast. I imagine the second phase involves using the phrase to generate some reasonable number of HD addresses and checking against a local copy of the blockchain to see if any generated addresses appear in any transaction outputs.

Some wallets use a different wordlist - I think Electrum is one. Obviously you need to use the right wordlist for your wallet or attempted recovery is a complete waste of time.

There are tools that can help with this, one is btcrecover. I would use this sort of tool only on a new airgapped computer that has no WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet or other networking capability.

Obviously you need to be extremely careful about where and how you obtain this sort of tools. There must be many fake or maliciously altered copies around that send your recovery phrase to a thief (before or after recovery).

There is the option of adding a user passphrase to the recovery phrase. If you did use that and can't remember anything about it, I doubt the wallet is recoverable.

Useful resources

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  • thank you for clear guidance. however I need to try 2039*2038*2037*2036 options since 8 words are already in the phrase. my question is when I try random phrase at iancoleman.io/bip39 it say Invalid mnemonic. therefore most of these options would be invalid. how can I omit these invalid option form this possible option. and what is the rule for being valid or invalid mnemonic??
    – looking for hope
    Commented Jan 5, 2021 at 10:59
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    There is a checksum computation thus if the last word does not fit the checksum you don't need to test this
    – Rene Pickhardt
    Commented Jan 5, 2021 at 11:45
  • Answer corrected/updated accordingly, thanks.
    – RedGrittyBrick
    Commented Jan 5, 2021 at 12:14
  • how does this checksum computation work? how can i access it or what is the structure behind it
    – looking for hope
    Commented Jan 5, 2021 at 16:31
  • @lookingforhope: see last link in answer
    – RedGrittyBrick
    Commented Jan 5, 2021 at 16:36
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I created a python script to try exactly this. Check it out here: https://github.com/SachinMeier/MnemonicRecovery

There is certainly no guarantee that this will work, and it's definitely not optimized for speed yet, but if you're only missing four words, it might just work. Currently, it only supports P2PKH addresses. You'll also need to install a virtual environment or have the python bitarray library installed.

The python script has no network functionality, so there's no way I can steal your seed, but you should still run it offline.

Please dm me on twitter @sachinmeier if you need help. I will never ask you for the seed or any bitcoin.

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