How to pass passphrase to BTCRecover?

Question

I try to use BTCRecover, because I can not recover my old Copay app. All I have

• 12 word
• a BTC address
• passphrase (a good guess on it)

Checking this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q65eqpf4gE

https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover

Installed the environment.

I did not found any example where all the 3 info is passed. Usually script input is

• 12 word
• a BTC address

But when I installed years ago Copay, I did set a password also. As I remember. :)

My expectation is to find out what was the derivation path at that time with Copay, maybe it was different then now. Basically I would validate all the 3 source are ok.

1: Am I on the right track? 2: Which scipt / setting I need to pass the passphrase?

I started based on this example:

python seedrecover.py --wallet-type bip39 --addrs bc1qv87qf7prhjf2ld8vgm7l0mj59jggm6ae5jdkx2 --mnemonic "element entire sniff tired miracle solve shadow scatter hello never tank side sight isolate sister uniform advice pen praise soap lizard festival connect" --addr-limit 5

Answer 1

Passwords and Pass-phrases

I have [...] passphrase (a good guess on it)

...

when I installed years ago Copay, I did set a password also.

I'm not 100% certain that you mean two different things by the words I highlighted. People play fast and loose with these words.

Password or Pass-phrase can refer to the same thing or to different things.

1. A Password or Pass-phrase can be used to protect the wallet. Typically by using it, directly or indirectly, as an encryption key to encrypt the wallet contents. This is not needed when using the seed-phrase to recover control over money and create a new wallet.

2. A BIP-39 pass-phrase is, as I understand it, simply additional words appended to the seed-phrase. This pass-phrase is chosen by the user, the seed-phrase is typically generated randomly by the wallet, not chosen by the user. The seed-phrase is sometimes called a recovery-phrase or backup-phrase.

So if your pass-phrase is just a multi-word password, as in case 1 above, you can ignore it.

BTCRecover

See https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover/blob/master/TUTORIAL.md

BIP-39 Passphrases
Some BIP-39 compliant wallets offer a feature to add a “BIP-39” or “plausible deniability” passphrase to your seed (mnemonic),

It seems to me that you use the bip-39 option and just add the BIP-39 pass-phrase to the token list, but a careful study of the documentation ought to make this clear.

Answer 2

If you are trying to recover passphrase, use btcrecover.py as per the examples here https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Usage_Examples/basic_password_recoveries/