Wallet is encrypted and currently locked, How can get unencrypted (unlocked) it?

Question

Wallet is encrypted and currently locked, How can I unencrypted the wallet to unlock? Because of my Bitcoin wallet not getting synchronising currently, so I could not get bitcoin balance on one of my address in wallet.

Answer 1

I do not want to rain on your parade, but this may be hard to do. These wallets are made with the idea that outsiders will not get into them.

You could try to brute force the login, but it may take longer than a lifespan to break. However, here is something that you may consider. If you have a known rule-set for your password generation, you can substantially eliminate the possibilities in your brute force attack.

I am speculating that your passwords are complex, but there may be hope here based on the fact that password generation is not truly random. Because of this fact, there are rules that you (as the password generator) or a program like keepass (as the password generator) usually follow.

We really need more information to make an informed suggestion, but let me give you a couple scenarios.

If you create your own passwords:

• Do you use spaces? Usually this is a yes or no for most people.
• Is there a special character that you tend to focus on? Does it occur at a particular place (i.e. at the end)
• Do you use words or phrases or is it always random?
• What is the range of characters in your passwords? (i.e. Always type 6-10 characters).

If you use a generator for your passwords, there may be rulesets in place that help you eliminate possibilities:

• Look at the number of characters allowed.
• Are letters, upper case, lower case, numbers etc. required?
• Are special characters allowed?

After you have answered this, and similar questions, you can begin to chip away at the total possible entries. So let us say you force at least one number and one capital letter and one special symbol and is 10 characters in length. Now, you can eliminate all possibilities that do not follow that pattern. You will not use brute force for any 9 character string, anything without a symbol, etc. Your possible result set can be reduced substantially because you inherently know the algorithm you use for password generation.

A goldmine for you is the eliminate the possibilities on a particular character in the string. Commonly, people will start or end a password with similar rules. For example, they put a $ at the beginning. Now you have reduced the search by a power factor. Keep this up with rules that you know would have been enforced and your set gets even smaller.

Now that your result set is reduced, work will be involved. Find a program to brute force a wallet, or utilize a script that you create to brute force. Most have APIs associated with them (i.e. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_calls_list).

Technically, there are tools that will help with this process, (See: Forgot wallet encryption password, are any brute force tools available? ) so you may be able to find something useful there. Otherwise, if you cannot get a hold of those tools, pitch it to some computer science students at the local university to create such an app for a project :-) It would take a little bit to code and I am not sure of your programming abilities, but it would be very possible.

Good luck and I hope you get your wallet back!

Answer 2

If you've forgotten the password you'd set for the wallet, you'll probably won't be able to unencrypt/unlock your wallet nor spend your coins.

Answer 3

Wallet can be unlocked by this PHP API function: walletpassphrase (passphrase, timeout) and can locked by this: walletlock().