Basically I made a purchase with bitcoins back in ~2014 and I remember that I had a little bit leftover. However all documentation I have is a file labelled wallet with a huge string of characters. But when I try and access it on any application I get the non base-58 character error. There are a bunch of +'s and /'s. Does anyone have any idea what I could try to see if this is it? Sorry for not having more advance knowledge.
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How are you trying to open this wallet? What software are you using? The wallet is likely not just a base58 string. It is probably binary data containing a lot of information including private keys and transactions. It needs to be opened by compatible software, preferably the one that created it.– Andrew Chow ♦Mar 16, 2021 at 4:13
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I've tried exodus, bitcoin wallet, blockchain explorer (to see if it were a public key), and bitaddress.org. I can keep trying other programs that were around in 2014. Do you think you could glean any info if I posted the code (with letters and numbers changed, but the format the same)?– DirksonMar 16, 2021 at 4:40
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+ and / sounds like it is base64 encoding. No idea what it could be, though.– Pieter WuilleMar 16, 2021 at 18:35
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2 Answers
There are a bunch of +'s and /'s.
That strongly suggests it is data in Base64 encoding. Note that, in this case encoding does not mean encryption, just a specific printable representation of binary data.
Does anyone have any idea what I could try to see if this is it?
It seems several different wallets might use Base64 encoding, including:
Of those, I'd guess the first is most likely. But that's just a guess. There are probably numerous other possibilities.
I think I'd try the Blockchain.info recovery process first then, if that didn't work, try decoding the file from Base64 into binary and using a hex editor to look for patterns that might give some clues to the software that produced it. If the file is encrypted using a wallet password this probably would not be fruitful.
answered Mar 18, 2021 at 0:56
You can try this "dirty" trick to figure out what the data corresponds to type of wallet.
Get Python, john the ripper and hashcat. put your text in a file called wallet.json
With the run tools in JTR try the following on the strings:
python bitcoin2john.py wallet.json > bitcoinhash.txt python blockchain2john.py wallet.json > blockchainhash.txt python electrum2john.py wallet.json > electrumhash.txt
now with the hashes try your password with hashcat. if it accepts the hash and your password then you know which one it is.
for blockchain check if the wallet version is 1 or 2, they use different mode and if its v1 it will most likely fail to decrypt as both hashcat and btcrecover does not cover all v1 wallets correctly.
