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Need help recovering wallet from 2010

51.8k sats \ 53 comments \ @jennann 29 Aug 2023 bitcoin

I finally found the backup I wrote down after using Gavin Andresen's Bitcoin faucet. I don't remember if I was using only Bitcoin Core, Armory, or something like Multi-bit. Those sound familiar.

There are 5 bitcoins in the first address and I never moved or used them. The characters I found on my handwritten paper backup are 80 characters, between (0-9) and (A-F). I wrote these in blocks of four characters. Within these 80 characters, I have 14 question marks. So a total of 66 known characters. I'm not sure if I only need 64, 66, or 80 characters total.

I have Bitcoin Core and Electrs downloaded on my Umbrel to start trying the recovery process. I also have Electrum and Armory downloaded.

I'm not sure the best course to go from here to find out what the key may be and how long it should be. I'm not in a hurry and have time to try to figure this out, hopefully with your help.

Offering a full Bitcoin to the best helper.

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2569 sats \ 2 replies \ @Hypnagog 29 Aug 2023

Based on what you wrote , the private key is in hexadecimal format. The total characters should be 64 total. Looks like you added 2 there. Try removing two at the end

1 sat \ 1 reply \ @Hypnagog 30 Aug 2023

My guess here is you had a hexadecimal private key and added 16 "?"s to confuse anyone who got the paper. Irony is now you are the one who fell for the trick!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @jennann OP 30 Aug 2023

For sure!

1211 sats \ 7 replies \ @jimmysong 30 Aug 2023

It's almost certainly Bitcoin Core, though I don't know why it would give the hexadecimal of the private key. That's a fairly unusual format for a private key to be in. That said, it's easy enough to write a script to try some combination of your 66 hex characters and convert it to a 32-byte private key. The WIF format has 4 bytes extra (for a total of 36 bytes or 72 hex characters) that act as a checksum, though that's encoded in Base58, so it's unlikely to be that.

Honestly, you're best off hiring someone with the 1 BTC bounty as part of it. You'll be able to tell onchain if the person lied to you and just took the bitcoin.

1765 sats \ 6 replies \ @jennann OP 30 Aug 2023

Thanks Jimmy. Big fan of your writing. I think a script is a good idea.

Below is the exact format including the location of the question marks, but I did change each character to something random and different than the original. When I get off work later I will try adding the 0x in front of each side, but still unsure of significance of the question marks. At first I wasn't sure if I had two 40 character length keys, or one 66-80 character keys Not sure why question marks would only be in half the writing.

0486 | 4AE5F | 41BC A58F | 3FB3A | 1AD7

34F6 | 2AEB9 37A4 | 4AE5F

7?A4 | ?42? | 6F?? | ??D8 71?D | 6?A? | ?FCA | 86B?

32?F 7F?B

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @jimmysong 30 Aug 2023

The really odd thing here is the 5-letter hex found in the second column of the first 4 lines. Hex almost always come in pairs as each byte is 8 bits and each hex letter is 4 bits.

So doing some math 15 bytes in first chunk, 9 bytes, second chunk. 16 bytes third chunk, 4 bytes fourth chunk. 40 bytes is too much for a private key (they're 32 bytes) and 24 could be it, I guess. I can write you a script that you can run to check if the 24 bytes come out to the address you were looking at. I'm guessing it's uncompressed SEC since it's so early, and that's a detail you're going to need to know about for address generation. DM me on Twitter if you want to try it.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @jennann OP 30 Aug 2023

Sorry, that was an accident when writing the example. Every block is only four characters. How does that change things?

The only other thing I can think about if nothing else works, is I took the Bitcoin Core backup it gave me and converted it into to HEX, so if someone found it they wouldn't know what is was.

We hear all about these examples now, but I wasn't aware of those risks back then.

10 sats \ 3 replies \ @jimmysong 30 Aug 2023

12 bytes/8 bytes/16 bytes/4 bytes

There's no obvious way to get 32 bytes, which is the typical length of a private key. I guess it could be that the last 4 bytes are not anything and the first 3 chunks are 32 bytes + 4 byte checksum. If it were and you had those question marks in those places, that's 10 question marks or 40 bits that you have to roll through or 2^40 of attempts. That's about a trillion different possibilities, which is doable, especially with some GPUs. I did 2^44 in about 2 days a while back and that cost about $800 to rent the requisite GPUs if I remember correctly. So, 2^40 should be 1/16th of that, or 3 hours and $50? But there's some custom code that needs to be written to calculate the address and there's no guarantee that that's what these letters mean.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @jennann OP 28 Aug

Hi Jimmy, how can I contact you. I can’t send DMs on X

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @jennann OP 30 Aug 2023

Thanks, I'll reach out by DM on Twitter.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @monaco 30 Aug 2023

deleted by author

155 sats \ 0 replies \ @fiatbad 29 Aug 2023

5 Bitcoin? Do you know how many decades of my life it takes to stack 5 Bitcoin?! And you're just gonna "recover" it like some kind of video game?!

I'm a little jealous, not gonna lie.

84 sats \ 0 replies \ @Hypnagog 29 Aug 2023

If you're in no rush, then buy this book and read it thoroughly . it will be the best thing you can do in this instance to learn how keys should be structured and how they interact with the network.

https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Bitcoin-Unlocking-Digital-Cryptocurrencies/dp/1449374042

82 sats \ 3 replies \ @sahil 30 Aug 2023

It looks like you have a partial private key.

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/102307/found-old-key-to-bitcoin-wallet-but-dont-know-which-wallet

If it's 80 characters, the private key is in Wallet Import Format (WIF).

You can use FinderOuter to find missing keys: https://github.com/Coding-Enthusiast/FinderOuter (Free and opensource runs locally, no need to trust anyone)

https://imgprxy.stacker.news/RpnmxDCHbBfrTPa8NbboW9KOktzxkHythOix_8neWCE/rs:fit:600:500:0/g:no/aHR0cHM6Ly9yYXcuZ2l0aHVidXNlcmNvbnRlbnQuY29tL0NvZGluZy1FbnRodXNpYXN0L0ZpbmRlck91dGVyL21hc3Rlci9Eb2MvSW1hZ2VzL01haW5QcmV2aWV3LmpwZw

If my maths is right there should be 64^14 possible values to be brute force. You can also make use of GPUs to brute force those values faster!

7 sats \ 2 replies \ @Hypnagog 30 Aug 2023

I didn't think it was wif format because he mentioned A-F Letters only and isn't wallet import format base58?

If its hexadecimal then standard would be 64 characters

6 sats \ 0 replies \ @monaco 30 Aug 2023

Right, but good tips

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @0260378aef 30 Aug 2023

Not exactly 64, no.

The key itself is 64 but there is a prepended version byte and 4 extra bytes of checksum at the end. This adds 5 x 2 = 10 hex chars. I'm not sure how you get to 80 but I'm trying to figure it out :)

127 sats \ 2 replies \ @Storyteller 30 Aug 2023

I think those 14 question marks are the name of someone special to you.

I think you made a riddle that says: I’m gonna take away these letters and these letters only I know what they mean.

So who is the person you love that was important to you back then?

Who has a 14 letter name? What is the meaning of 14.

That is how I would think.

What I would do is trying to picture yourself back then. There is this faucet and you are sitting behind your computer.

How old were you? What was your job. Who were your loved ones?

Simulate going back and having a piece of paper. You go to the faucet. You write this down. You know this is a secret key and then you put 14 question marks. Why? Who did you think about that has 14 question marks in their name?

You mother Your father Your daughter Your wife ?

Who?

Go back

If you have plenty of time. Picture yourself 13 years ago. Like in a dream.

Like a movie. Picture yourself in that situation. Job, loved ones. House. In front of a computer. A piece of paper and a pen. How does the story go? 14 letter. Maybe 7 and 7?

Play the scene.

Do it over and over again.

Good luck

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @davidw 31 Aug 2023

This is great. You should be a storyteller

90 sats \ 0 replies \ @jennann OP 30 Aug 2023

Thank you, I will.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @AR0w 29 Aug 2023

Wow thos are bitcoin from the year of pizza day , really wish you good luck recovering your bitcoins

Make sure to do everything patiently and ask the users here, they have much experience

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @drdoom 29 Aug 2023

Why did you put question marks on your paper backup?

Were you originally intending to just remember those or are you saying those characters are unreadable due to age/messy writing?

36 sats \ 0 replies \ @jennann OP 29 Aug 2023

That is the part I can't remember what my intentions were. Those 5 Bitcoins were only worth 20 cents then, and I naively thought they would always be worth about that much.

60 sats \ 0 replies \ @aoeu 29 Aug 2023

Just noticed that this was back when fees were 0 sats. So cool!

72 sats \ 4 replies \ @DarthCoin 29 Aug 2023

The wallets created pre-mnemonic times (BIP39) have to be saved with private keys directly. So I suppose that what you have as backup is your private key, not a seed.

So open Electrum and just paste/type the whole private key you have. If is not completed, then you can say goodbye to those BTC. You will need maybe hundreds of years to guess the missing characters.

Your umbrel is useless to recover this old wallet / private key. Umbrel is a LND aezeed wallet and will not recover that old privkey.

12 sats \ 3 replies \ @jennann OP 29 Aug 2023

Thanks, I thought it could help speed up the process if the number were slightly wrong.

This is the address: 1DYFqhdKDkHYytVn66QWKGY4PUebNYH9j9

24 sats \ 2 replies \ @aoeu 29 Aug 2023

Good luck recovering it! I wish I would have participated in that bitcoin faucet. If you can't recover it, thank you for your donation towards reducing known supply of bitcoin.

87 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 29 Aug 2023

https://imgprxy.stacker.news/sj_5ZaFFLF5_sgml_MnCiENbQfgDBhp5RMd73IgxUCQ/rs:fit:600:500:0/g:no/aHR0cHM6Ly9pLnBvc3RpbWcuY2MvVDNWQjJmNTQvZmlyc3RfZmF1Y2V0LnBuZw

I was there too. I still have the BTC from that faucet (but moved to a segwit/taproot new address after the BCH fork). But I never lost any control of any wallet, ever.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @jennann OP 29 Aug 2023

Those were the days. I like reading about Bitcoin history.

58 sats \ 0 replies \ @AyCaramba 30 Aug 2023

If you have your private key in the format you say, in order to import your key into bitcoin core, you need to convert your key into "WIF" format first.

I guess if you exclude the question marks, you should have 66 characters. However a private key has 64 characters.

One question: What are the first 2 digits of your key? (Do not tell me of course) If the first 2 digits are "80" (eighty) there might be a chance your key is a private key that you prepended 2 digits (80) to it.

For the process of converting to WIF, the first step is adding that number at the beggining.

These are the links I found:

Convert private key to WIF: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet_import_format

Encoding to base58: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Base58Check_encoding

Finally, importing WIF to bitcoin core: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Help:How_to_import_private_keys_in_Bitcoin_Core_0.7%2B#Run_Import_Command_in_Debug_Window

61 sats \ 5 replies \ @TwoLargePizzas 30 Aug 2023

A quick computer science lesson...

In computers, large numbers are often represented in hexadecimal format. Hexadecimal uses the characters (0-9) and (A-F) which are equivalent to 0 through 15 in decimal.

If you're counting in decimal numbers you would say 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18. If you're counting in hexadecimal numbers you would say 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F, 10, 11, 12.

It's important to notice that 10 in hex is not the same as 10 in decimal. This can be pretty confusing to wrap your head around but you get the idea. So, for example the hexadecimal number A455 is actually to 69,420.

When dealing with really large hex numbers it's common practice to group them into blocks of 4 characters for readability. But this grouping has no impact on the final number. Additionally, hex numbers are often prefixed with 0x just as a reminder that its hex and not decimal.

Here's an example of a Bitcoin private key format represented in hex.

0xFFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFE BAAE DCE6 AF48 A03B BFD2 5E8C D036 4140

A Bitcoin private key is just a really, really large number (sometimes known as a 256-bit number). But assuming you have all 64 of the hexadecimal digits you should be able to recover it I believe.

3487 sats \ 3 replies \ @jennann OP 30 Aug 2023

I did write the code in a way I split up each group of four characters. I have 20 blocks with 4 characters in each block. the first or last 10 blocks of 4 characters don't have any question marks, but the questions marks are all in the first or second half of the characters, depending on the way to read from top to bottom or bottom to top.

0486 | 4AE5F | 41BC A58F | 3FB3A | 1AD7

34F6 | 2AEB9 37A4 | 4AE5F

7?A4 | ?42? | 6F?? | ??D8 71?D | 6?A? | ?FCA | 86B?

32?F 7F?B

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @jennann OP 30 Aug 2023

Sorry, every block of characters is four, not five. That was an error in the example.

12 sats \ 1 reply \ @TwoLargePizzas 3 Sep 2023

Is it possible the question marks are words? Maybe taking a look at common word people make with hex will jog your memory. https://stjerneskinn.com/hexadecimal-words.htm

8 sats \ 0 replies \ @TwoLargePizzas 3 Sep 2023

Also, maybe you laid it out this way for a reason. The first word might be 7 letters?

DEFACED FACED

19 sats \ 0 replies \ @Storyteller 30 Aug 2023

I’m reading the book Grokking Bitcoin and there they explain all these hex codes. Way above my payroll! I have to read these chapters over and over again to understand it.

30 sats \ 0 replies \ @0260378aef 30 Aug 2023

A lot of people are (rightly!) confused about 80 characters.

I can only get there by stretching what's likely a little bit:

Original private key: 32 bytes = 64 chars hex. Version byte prefix: 1 bytes, 2 chars. Checksum (truncated sha256): 4 bytes, 8 chars.

Now we're at 74 chars.

Extra single byte 01 at the end of the raw private key to indicate that it should be used with a compressed public key when generating the address (I have seen this logic in old wallets.. somewhere .. don't forget that back in the day, uncompressed public keys were quite common) - that could add 2 more, for 76.

4 still missing - this is a stretch but, did sometimes people prepend the string with "wif:..." ? That would be exactly 4 more.

3 sats \ 2 replies \ @Longtermwizard 31 Jan

Hey, how is that going? Any new?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @jennann OP 29 Aug

Not yet!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Longtermwizard 3 Oct

keep going, i stay tuned

101 sats \ 0 replies \ @02b7622c79 29 Aug 2023

Is the question mark are on random places in this 80 character string ? If yes why you wrote them ? Or you mean characters that are not visible or damaged ? Need some explanation to help you

11 sats \ 0 replies \ @wikparclones 30 Aug 2023

Interesting...

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @Ox 30 Aug 2023

Lucky guy! Hope you recover them!

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @ryu 30 Aug 2023

🫡

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @locomancell 30 Aug 2023

I don't have an answer for you, but I do hope you get to recover all your BTC. Best of luck, and I guess things happen for a reason, the right time will come my fren

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @edulopesf 29 Aug 2023

Good luck

1 sat \ 2 replies \ @82e78180a1 29 Aug 2023

A bitcoin private key is 256 bits long, that's 32 bytes, which when represented in hexadecimal would yield 64 characters.

However I'm puzzled by the extra 2 or even the other question marks. Are they spread all over the sequence of characters? or are they kept at one side?

Oh and both Armory and Multibit were started in 2011, so this is almost certainly from bitcoin core.

2412 sats \ 1 reply \ @jennann OP 29 Aug 2023

Ok thanks, I wasn't sure when those were created. It definitely remember the user interface when I look at images Bitcoin Core from then.

It definitely has all the characteristics of hexadecimal. They question marks are sort of spread around the first half of the characters and aren't in the beginning or end. I'm sure I could read everything clearly when I wrote it down so I put the question marks there intentionally. All characters used in hexadecimal are located in the string of characters, so I didn't intentionally leave a specific character or two out and just add those in place of the question marks. I stacked they string of characters in a way I couldn't tell if it was two 40 character keys or an 80 character key. If I only use the top line I have a 40 character string with no question marks, but that is an odd length.

I read this in Armory's FAQ, and opposes some other things I've seen.

"Each bitcoin (or fragment of) belongs to a cryptographic private key, which is an 80-digit number that is essentially impossible to guess. Bitcoins cannot be transferred unless the holder of the private key uses it to create a digital signature authorizing the transaction. A Bitcoin address is a string of letters that let other users know what your digital signature looks like without revealing the private key (it is related to the “public key”)." https://www.bitcoinarmory.com/faq/

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @82e78180a1 29 Aug 2023

It probably means 80 decimal digits. But even then it's a bit off. As a 256 bits number would require at most 78 decimal digits.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @LowK3y19 25 Sep

Dude hope u get in and get a shitload of bitcoin recovered so u can be stanky rich