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I had the pleasure of setting up a Bitcoin wallet using the Blue Wallet app and diligently noted down the 52 characters of my private key on a piece of paper for backup purposes.

Upon revisiting the paper to import my private key into a Wallet App, I discovered, that it was not recognized by the system.

It appears I may have inadvertently transcribed 2-3 characters inaccurately.

Could you kindly advise if there's a method by which I might retrieve my private key through Python, assuming the misspelling of up to three characters..?

I apologize for the lack of clarity in my explanation. I imported a private key, which was generated externally, into the Blue Wallet and subsequently destroyed the written copy of that private key.

Afterward, when I attempted to transcribe the 52-character private key from the backup tab in Blue Wallet onto paper, it seems I may have incorrectly noted down 2-3 characters.

Therefore, my inquiry is not specifically about Blue Wallet. I'm asking if there's a way to recover the correct sequence when 2-3 characters out of an arbitrary 52-character string are missing, not involving seed phrases.

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  • Hi! I checked the Blue Wallet app from Play Store. I can see only the seed words as an export option. Do you have a list of words or a random alphanumeric string? If you have the random string, where can you export it in the app? A standard private key (256-bit) should have 64 chars
    – Juha Siivikko
    Commented Mar 14 at 7:10
  • Thank you for your reply. I believe my explanation might have been insufficient. I have added more details to the main text.
    – minodo
    Commented Mar 15 at 0:05

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Yes, There is a way but it may not be 100% accurate.

52 character WIF means you have a compressed private key.

Which means the Base58 decoded byte representation of that key should have compressed byte flag 01 at exactly offset 33

WIF compressed layout:

mainnet privatekey compressed flag checksum
1 byte 32 byte 1 byte 4 byte
80 variety 01 variety

Now since you don't know which characters are wrong, we can only assume only byte offset 0 is correct and to find position where you mistyped the key it's hard but you can narrow it down like this:

Decode WIF to hexadecimal.

Check if the hexadecimal representation has 01 at position 67-68.

If not the error is too hard to correct. If yes then there is a chance but you have to analyze deeper.

I did this with someone's WIF few back and successfully recovered it but you need one of these or both:

Address
Public key
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