You wrote down a list of words, and the passphrase is some combination of those words
You thought you knew your password, but perhaps it involves different numbers or different capitalization than you remember
Also worth noting that the sequence of random words is a pattern that has only been standardised over the last few years. There are plenty of random zip-encoded (etc) files around from before this.
It sounds like you’re talking about BIP39 which is a fairly new idea. A Bitcoin wallet is actually a 256-bit random number (the private key) and a corresponding public key (which is derived from the private key).
Before BIP39, people would generate private keys by hashing passwords. Which is probably what this article is referring to.
Actually no, the private keys were generated randomly but the wallets were encrypted with a password. Private keys hashed from regular passwords don't have enough entropy. This encryption made sure that in case a hacker gets access to your wallet file, they can't access it without the password.
The wallet seed is a list of 12 words, which can be used by any wallet to restablish ownership. But many wallets allow you to export an encrypted backup, protected by a user generated passphrase. In this case, you don't need the seed.
I have been procrastinating on this for a long time, so I might as well ask here:
I own a very old wallet.dat[1]. It is from a time when you had to compile some C files to a command line tool which downloaded the whole blockchain [2] to your computer locally.
I'm pretty sure I have never had to specify a password (or 12 random words). I remember this because it seemed odd to me back then.
What is the easiest way to check if this wallet.dat is intact and what is in there? [3]
I'd prefer if it would be possible to check without transferring it to a service (like Coinbase, or similar), but I'm open to that, if it is safe.
[1] Actually I have two different versions of it with slightly different sizes and couldn't figure out which is the most recent.
[2] I think it must be in my backups as well, but it is probably not of much use.
[3] I have a pretty good idea what should be in there and even know the Bitcoin address used. Still I would like to verify independently if my memory serves me right and if I could transfer the Bitcoins if I wanted to.
> First you make many copies of that file, to different disks and usb-memories.
This is exactly what I've done with it so far, haha.
> Then you can load one of them into bitcoin-core wallet and you are done.
Sorry, I'm completely out of touch with Bitcoin by now. In the beginning there was not much info and everything was low risk anyways. Nowadays there is so much noise and I'm never sure what to trust.
I think you can also import them in "light" wallets like Electrum. That way you don't have to download the whole blockchain. You may be leaking the information that somebody with your IP address has Bitcoins, though.
Never had time to wrap my head around forks. If I have a wallet from the time before forks existed, do I have to do anything to not lose my money in case a fork "wins"? Or is this the wrong way to think about forks?
I personally would only import that wallet.dat on a fully offline/airgapped computer (which you've synched to the BTC blockchain first), prepare the transaction to move those coins to a safe address (like an hardware wallet), put that transaction on a USB stick, put that stick in an online computer and broadcast the transaction.
But first and foremost: buy a hardware wallet, learn how it works, make sure to have copies of the seed (24 words probably), "warm" you address by having a friend send you 0.01 BTC on it or something, move these coins to another address (you really want to be sure this address works and everything is smooth). This costs some money (a hardware wallet + the fees to "warm up" the addresses / test how it all works) but if you have an old wallet.dat with some or a lot of BTCs, it's worth it.
And also: move the most valuable coins first. So BTC first, then BCH, then BSV. I'm not kidding with this. So many scams with the forks / executables to synch the forks etc. Don't even think about moving the BCH/BSV etc. before having moved all the BTCs.
Re- forks: depends on what you mean by "winning". BTC "won" over BCH if you take the market price (45 K vs 500 USD) but BCH lives on. So if your wallet.dat predates that fork, you'll have both. Once again: do not ever try to move the BCH before moving the BTC... For you want to minimize the places where you import that wallet.dat for the most important coin.
Now if by "winning" you mean: one chain wins and the fork dies a sad death, the point is moot as there's no other fork/chain and hence coins there are worth 0.
If you have an old wallet.dat, you'll have coins on the BTC chain, the BCH chain, the BSV chain, the BTG Gold chain, etc.
If you purchase a hardware wallet, make sure you buy it directly from the company making them, and read the official instructions.
There have been scams where people sell hardware wallets with seeds that the scammers provided, and once the victim uses the hardware wallet with the scammer-provided seed, the scammer steals the victim's coins.
Those random words are the master seed. Usually you don't enter the master seed to use your wallet. Your wallet encrypts the master seed and unlocks it with a password of your choosing. I suppose they are talking about the password to the wallet, not the Bitcoin keys.
No you don't have to remember the master seed. You should write it down and hide it somewhere, though. You need it if you lose access to your wallet. (It's a bit like a backup of the encryption keys for your hard disk, if you have enabled disk encryption).
The wallet password depends on the wallet of course. I guess you often create it yourself or it may even be optional.
I wouldn't recommend that approach for storing large amounts.
you may already know this, but there's a little under a month left to secure recovery of about 20% (at today's market price) of whatever you had there.
I've been involved with it since the beginning, when the process was less formalized then it is now, so I don't know what the steps would be for someone just starting the process right now. However you need to register a claim with the trustee handling the case in Japanese Court. I was under the impression that the window for initiating a claim under normal channels has passed, but I have heard of other claims still somehow being recognized.
Beyond this second hand info I couldn't help you. As I suggested to another commenter, check out r/mtgoxinsolvency on reddit.
Regarding the vote, the answer is yes - but you cannot vote without having an approved rehabilitation claim, which confers a claim balance that weights the impact of your vote.
How does one establish the ownership proof for class action lawsuits? I lost my holdings at Cryptsy, but I don't know how I would produce a proof of ownership. I do recall the net worth of my holdings.
I wanna know this too. I had some small amount of coins in there too, that I’d completely forgotten about until I was notified of the class action. I’m sure they were barely worth anything, but are you supposed to do in that situation?
Many people will have addresses saved at places they exchanged bitcoins with, like an exchange. And it only takes one customer with proof of stolen funds to ruin their reputation, and with that the whole business. It makes much more business sense to be honest and take the 20% commission, unless someone comes with a wallet with far above the usual number of bitcoins inside.
You’re expected to hand over as many of your passwords as possible, and explain how you generate them. The company then attempts to use variants of your passwords, by changing capital letters and numbers.
They claim they’re making decent profits and have a 27% success rate. Good for them and their clients if true, but a lot of the early adopters who would require their services would presumably be tech-savvy enough to have tried some of their techniques themselves and be skeptical when expected to have “100% trust in the process”.
So I doubt we’re getting a thriving cryptocurrency recovery cottage industry any time soon.
Given that their approach to recovery includes extensive collaboration with the owner, i.e. the individual who created the password, I doubt those types of scenarios would apply.
The original owner gone, close relatives often have some inkling of account passwords.
They also know best how the original owner thought.
A lot of people have passed on, leaving crypto behind! A non-tech savvy sort, often has zero clue about brute-forcing, and may seek a "reputable" source of assistance.
I am tech-savvy enough to have ran hashcat and everything else in attempts to unlock my Ethereum pre-sale wallet yet I still contacted someone with decent recovery rate to try it, too in the end (they also failed) under similar conditions. It's not that rare but my impression is that there's only occasional work.
That’s fair. I’m wondering if the team you contacted had the same approach, i.e. required you to provide your other passwords and reasoning behind them.
I know I’d still be reluctant to give those kinds of details, but that makes sense. Hope you end up recovering your coins… or at least getting over it.
I wouldn't mind making another $50k every 5 months. Assuming this wasn't their only success that sounds more profitable than a regular job in New Hampshire.
Right but micro companies make up to $1mm a year and they’re nowhere close to $1mm. It’s like a micro micro business. 1 employee kinda thing. I would’ve expected a bigger company given how much money is lost in btc
Is it bad-faith to suggest this was just an advertising piece? I don’t want to be that person, but there seemed to be absolutely nothing interesting or innovative in the technique this father-son team use, and the whole article (and now it’s on the front page of HN) seems like just a vehicle to spread the word about their service?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 50.3 ms ] threadAs I understand it, humans are not chosing passwords in this process.
When we can help?
..
You wrote down a list of words, and the passphrase is some combination of those words
You thought you knew your password, but perhaps it involves different numbers or different capitalization than you remember
Also worth noting that the sequence of random words is a pattern that has only been standardised over the last few years. There are plenty of random zip-encoded (etc) files around from before this.
Before BIP39, people would generate private keys by hashing passwords. Which is probably what this article is referring to.
See the "Brain Wallet" tab on bitaddress.org to see how a password-based secret key can work (please don't actually use this).
https://www.bitaddress.org/
I own a very old wallet.dat[1]. It is from a time when you had to compile some C files to a command line tool which downloaded the whole blockchain [2] to your computer locally.
I'm pretty sure I have never had to specify a password (or 12 random words). I remember this because it seemed odd to me back then.
What is the easiest way to check if this wallet.dat is intact and what is in there? [3]
I'd prefer if it would be possible to check without transferring it to a service (like Coinbase, or similar), but I'm open to that, if it is safe.
[1] Actually I have two different versions of it with slightly different sizes and couldn't figure out which is the most recent.
[2] I think it must be in my backups as well, but it is probably not of much use.
[3] I have a pretty good idea what should be in there and even know the Bitcoin address used. Still I would like to verify independently if my memory serves me right and if I could transfer the Bitcoins if I wanted to.
Then you can load one of them into bitcoin-core wallet and you are done.
That file should be all you need, it is unencrypted and contains your bitcorns.
This is exactly what I've done with it so far, haha.
> Then you can load one of them into bitcoin-core wallet and you are done.
Sorry, I'm completely out of touch with Bitcoin by now. In the beginning there was not much info and everything was low risk anyways. Nowadays there is so much noise and I'm never sure what to trust.
When you say bitcoin-core, you mean the client I can get from https://bitcoincore.org?
If I understand the instructions correctly I should enable pruning and need to download and store about 6 GiB, but that's it.
> That file should be all you need, it is unencrypted and contains your bitcorns.
Sounds good...
Also don't forget you will have coins on all the forks, get those as well.
I personally would only import that wallet.dat on a fully offline/airgapped computer (which you've synched to the BTC blockchain first), prepare the transaction to move those coins to a safe address (like an hardware wallet), put that transaction on a USB stick, put that stick in an online computer and broadcast the transaction.
But first and foremost: buy a hardware wallet, learn how it works, make sure to have copies of the seed (24 words probably), "warm" you address by having a friend send you 0.01 BTC on it or something, move these coins to another address (you really want to be sure this address works and everything is smooth). This costs some money (a hardware wallet + the fees to "warm up" the addresses / test how it all works) but if you have an old wallet.dat with some or a lot of BTCs, it's worth it.
And also: move the most valuable coins first. So BTC first, then BCH, then BSV. I'm not kidding with this. So many scams with the forks / executables to synch the forks etc. Don't even think about moving the BCH/BSV etc. before having moved all the BTCs.
Re- forks: depends on what you mean by "winning". BTC "won" over BCH if you take the market price (45 K vs 500 USD) but BCH lives on. So if your wallet.dat predates that fork, you'll have both. Once again: do not ever try to move the BCH before moving the BTC... For you want to minimize the places where you import that wallet.dat for the most important coin.
Now if by "winning" you mean: one chain wins and the fork dies a sad death, the point is moot as there's no other fork/chain and hence coins there are worth 0.
If you have an old wallet.dat, you'll have coins on the BTC chain, the BCH chain, the BSV chain, the BTG Gold chain, etc.
There have been scams where people sell hardware wallets with seeds that the scammers provided, and once the victim uses the hardware wallet with the scammer-provided seed, the scammer steals the victim's coins.
The master seed and the wallet password?
How is the wallet password created?
The wallet password depends on the wallet of course. I guess you often create it yourself or it may even be optional.
I wouldn't recommend that approach for storing large amounts.
There's currently a vote (https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1435320592350187523) but is it required for us to actually participate in the vote?
Beyond this second hand info I couldn't help you. As I suggested to another commenter, check out r/mtgoxinsolvency on reddit.
Regarding the vote, the answer is yes - but you cannot vote without having an approved rehabilitation claim, which confers a claim balance that weights the impact of your vote.
They claim they’re making decent profits and have a 27% success rate. Good for them and their clients if true, but a lot of the early adopters who would require their services would presumably be tech-savvy enough to have tried some of their techniques themselves and be skeptical when expected to have “100% trust in the process”.
So I doubt we’re getting a thriving cryptocurrency recovery cottage industry any time soon.
In these contexts, there may be no tech savviness..
They also know best how the original owner thought.
A lot of people have passed on, leaving crypto behind! A non-tech savvy sort, often has zero clue about brute-forcing, and may seek a "reputable" source of assistance.
Unless the 1% is the embedded affiliate links?