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12 votes

How can I find a Bitcoin private key that I saved in a text file?

If you're programming savvy you could write a small program that searches for the regular expression of a Bitcoin private key. Bitcoin private keys have a very specific format: They are 51 keys long, ...
Murch's user avatar
  • 77.8k
6 votes

How can I recover the missing end of my private key?

TL;DR: You don't need to bruteforce anything here (at least almost), and can recover the missing last 7 characters on an average PC at home within less than 1 second using a simple Python script! In ...
Johannes Zweng's user avatar
5 votes

How to unlock private key of bitcoin

People with 86 million dollars generally don't need to ask this. People who have been tricked by con-artists are the sort of people that usually ask this. That looks like a "blockchain" ...
RedGrittyBrick's user avatar
5 votes
Accepted

How to derive the private key associated with a Coinbase multi-sig vault address

I did some digging into Coinbase's offline multisig tool to figure out what the user seed actually was and their derivation paths. It turns out the user seed is just that, a seed that is used to get ...
Ava Chow's user avatar
  • 72.2k
5 votes
Accepted

Recover Bitcoin From Transaction ID

All of the information in the screenshot is publicly available. And no, they won't be useful for recovering your Bitcoin. If you used Electrum, you either need the wallet, the recovery phrase(seeds) ...
Chak's user avatar
  • 1,301
5 votes
Accepted

How does Trezor's wallet recovery work if the private key never leaves the device?

The Trezor generates a seed offline on your device. Neither the private key nor this seed are ever shared with SatoshiLabs. In fact, you're in sole control of your private key: when you first set up ...
Murch's user avatar
  • 77.8k
5 votes
Accepted

Have I lost all my Bitcoin, having sent them to a Bitcoin Cash wallet?

Keys are interchangeable on both chains. If you export the private key of the address you sent it to on the bitcoin cash wallet , and import it back into another wallet (Exodus for Bitcoin?) , you ...
Bobo's user avatar
  • 393
5 votes
Accepted

How can 24 words allow a user to recover a public and private key?

A) For each hierarchical deterministic account path ~2 (if detached) to ~4 (if not detached) billion private keys and associated public addresses can be synthesized. If BIP 44 technology is applied ...
skaht's user avatar
  • 3,077
5 votes

Can I recover my own wallet from the public key?

This is impossible. The whole point of public key cryptography is that the public key can be shared with anybody, without compromising the private key. If there were a way to recover the private ...
Nate Eldredge's user avatar
4 votes

How does Trezor's wallet recovery work if the private key never leaves the device?

The Trezor wallet is a Hierarchical Deterministic wallet. This means that the entire wallet is derived from the seed. The seed is encoded as the 24 word mnemonic which is what you have to backup. To ...
Ava Chow's user avatar
  • 72.2k
4 votes
Accepted

If anyone with your seed phrase can generate your wallet private keys, what is the advantage of a hardware wallet?

Well, in both cases, your seed words are ultimately the key to the wallet. If you use a regular wallet, you open yourself up to a number of other attacks Malware on the device that runs the software ...
Raghav Sood's user avatar
  • 17.3k
4 votes
Accepted

Can we derive parent’s private key using child’s private key?

But not the former. Can anyone explain what he meant in the former? A child key can refer to two different things: the child private key and the child public key. With just only one of these two ...
Ava Chow's user avatar
  • 72.2k
4 votes

Can you recover seed words with passphrase on bitcoin node?

Bitcoin Core does not use a seed phrase. Your password is simply the encryption password for the wallet.dat file. No private keys are derived from the password. In order to recover your Bitcoin, you ...
Ava Chow's user avatar
  • 72.2k
4 votes

Recovery after losing wallet.dat and formatting hard disk

Your money is lost without at least one of a backup of important data from the hard disk before it was formatted a backup of the wallet.dat file a note of the private key There is no way to recover ...
RedGrittyBrick's user avatar
4 votes

Does someone know how to recovery a private key

After some health problem I have lost the private key but I still have the password. If you don't have the wallet file, the password is useless, as the password only encrypts the file. If you don't ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
3 votes

Not able to open BTC Wallet

No, private keys are randomly picked from the space of 256-bit numbers. A private key cannot be recovered from the address, otherwise anyone could take any other user's funds at will. If your friend ...
Murch's user avatar
  • 77.8k
3 votes
Accepted

How are keys for lightning channels currently created?

While I have experienced the same situation as the person described in the video the information is only partially true. It is very well described in BOLT 03 how keys are being derived. The general ...
Rene Pickhardt's user avatar
3 votes

19 out of 24 words of BIP39 passphrase (brute-force last 5?)

With 4 unknown words there is around 1.76 trillion possible mnemonics and John Cantrell was able to write and setup network of CPU and GPU solvers which successfully checked 1 trillion mnemonics in 30 ...
kenorb's user avatar
  • 187
3 votes

Exporting private key from expired bitcoin address (now showing as watch-only)

It is not possible to compute the private key for an address, ever, unless there are severe bugs in the wallet that holds the key. Also addresses don't expire. For privacy reasons it is bad to reuse ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
3 votes

Is there a database of wallet addresses with lost private keys?

No, because it's not possible to prove a negative ("No I don't have the private key for that address") and I can't think of a use for that.
MCCCS's user avatar
  • 10.2k
2 votes

Trying to recover a blockchain.info wallet from 2013 w/ a 29 (or 13?) word phrase

I ended up adapting gist.github.com/fcicq/3368495 to read from a file with a hundred thousand possible passwords (which I generated by permuting the inputs I was pretty sure I used to generate it in ...
Steve's user avatar
  • 131
2 votes
Accepted

How does mnemonic recover a single private key?

Typically, they just pick the first one that the mnemonic generates.
David Schwartz's user avatar
2 votes
Accepted

"Lost" password to BIP38 encrypted private key, encrypter may be faulty (Bippy)

It turns out Bippy does have a bug in the encryption algorithm where it mixes up the public key compression flag. As pointed out, I posted this problem on reddit as well, and a solution has been ...
Pantalaimon's user avatar
2 votes
Accepted

Is having a copy of my wallet.dat file enough to recover lost Bitcoin?

Yes, but having the wallet.dat file is only enough to recover the lost bitcoins if it hasn't been compromised in the meantime (that's why it's a good idea to encrypt your wallet). There have been at ...
Highly Irregular's user avatar
2 votes

Why were private keys made unrecoverable?

By the definition. Crypto is "unrecoverable money". If you dont like it - just dont use it. Point.
amaclin's user avatar
  • 6,835
2 votes

Privatekey Recovery

No, there is no way to recover a private key using only the data generated from it. If there were, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies would instantly collapse. If you have a seed phrase (AKA wallet ...
RedGrittyBrick's user avatar
2 votes

19 out of 24 words of BIP39 passphrase (brute-force last 5?)

You have three options here: Using a GPU implementation of the Gurnec´s Seed Recovery script Use Hashcat / JTR, where PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512 is already implemented. Use brainflayer, similar to Gurnecs ...
fran2k's user avatar
  • 51
2 votes

How can I recover the missing end of my private key?

It has to be brute forced. There are a couple of ways but basically it is replacing each character by base-58 chars and checking the key. The amount of time that process takes depends on the number of ...
Coding Enthusiast's user avatar
2 votes

how do i brute force my wallet.dat to get my private key

To bruteforce a wallet.dat file you would need to follow these steps. Install python from python.org Download john the ripper from github run the script bitcoin2john.py to extract the hash get ...
SinBeTa's user avatar
  • 21
2 votes

Bitcoins purchased in 2013

I'm afraid that if you only have the addresses and not the corresponding private keys you're out of luck here. To recover a wallet or an address you need to have either the wallet.dat or the private ...
KforG's user avatar
  • 21

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