Bitcoin wallet password
Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets are normally encrypted by you, the wallet owner. However, sometimes you forget or misplace your wallet password. This is a bad thing! Unless the password is recovered, you have no way to access any funds stored in that wallet. That money is lost forever. At today’s exchange rate, that might be a lot of money.
Hopefully we can help you.
We have created a service that can take your wallet information, your best guess at your remembered password/passphrase, and attempt a brute force decryption of your wallet.
Impossible?
If you have no idea at all of your password, and it was more than a handful of characters long, then it is unlikely that we can help you. No-one in the world, including the NSA, CIA, D-Wave or anyone else can crack the encryption used in the Bitcoin or Ethereum wallet if the password is more than 15 fairly random characters. The wallet encryption is strong by design. There are no known flaws in the implementations, and many people have tried to break them!
However… do not despair… maybe your password wasn’t as secure as you thought, or maybe it was completely different from what you remember?
Possible!
If, however, you have a vague idea of your password, but can’t quite remember it… Then we can help you.
For instance
- If you thought your password was probably TheIceMan123, but weren’t sure about what capitalization or suffix number you used, then we can help.
- If you were sure that you wrote down the password Hdd%&7d77ddH#3@4 when you chose it, but now it will not unlock the wallet when you type it in, then we can help.
- If you were pretty sure that your password contained words from a sentence from The Return of the King, but you’ve forgotten which page, then we can help.
- If you reckon that your password is some permutation (with some spaces or maybe capitals) of 6 of the words in the list "fred, hello, from, Butter, elephant if, unlikely, green, grep, gorilla, antelopes", then we can help.
Decryption Service
We have created a highly optimized multi-threaded C++ program to perform the brute-force decryption. This service is designed right from the start to be a scalable solution - it runs on a cluster of high performance Linux boxes, hosted on the Amazon EC2 cloud. This enables us to scale up to nearly any number of computing cores. We have tested this with up to 100 8-core computers, but more can be brought online if required.
Some of the wallet encryption formats are suitable for solving on GPU (video card) hardware. In these instances, we have hand-crafted highly optimized GPU software to provide huge speed advantages.
The algorithms used to generate the password permutations are proprietary, but are designed to be flexible in order to handle unusual requirements. The encryption used by the Bitcoin-core wallets is much harder to break than most encryption schemes. A technique known as ‘key hardening’ is utilized, so that it takes most home computers a full 0.1 seconds to check just one password for correctness. This is why an optimized, distributed, specialized program is required to attempt large numbers of brute force decryption attempts.
Wallets
We can decrypt both bitcoin and litecoin wallets, ethereum pre-sale and Mist/Geth/Eth wallets and most of the other altcoin wallets. (e.g. Dogecoin, Vertcoin, Peercoin, Mastercoin, Quark, Protoshares, Feathercoin, etc). We support brain wallets and BIP38 encoded wallets too. The full list is here.
Trust
Should you trust us with your wallet? Why won’t we just steal your money? Good questions. If you send us your wallet, and we decrypt the password, then it would be possible for us to steal the money that the wallet holds. (we won’t, but you can’t be sure of that).
Fortunately, the design of the bitcoin-core wallet is such that you can send us just part of the wallet information. The part you send us allows us to decrypt the wallet, without giving us any opportunity to steal your money. See various detailed explanations on the bitcoin wallet design (google them). Refer to the wallets page for more detailed information. (Note that this applies to bitcoin-qt/bitcoind/litecoin/dogecoin and most other alt-coin wallets, but does not apply to blockchain.info or multibit or armory or electrum or BIP38 encoded wallets, nor the Ethereum wallets)
Payment
We would like to decrypt your wallet to recover your lost Bitcoin funds. We want to do this because it is fun, it helps you, and we see the possibility of a monetary reward for us. You can pay in Bitcoins, Ether or other alt-coins (of course), typically from the funds in the recovered wallet. Just send us the wallet details, and we’ll try our best to decrypt it. Generally, we ask for a fee of 20% of the value of the wallet, but this is payable ONLY if we succeed in decrypting your wallet and returning your funds to you.
What Next?
If you have forgotten or misplaced your password, send us your wallet (or a subset of your wallet details for bitcoin-core wallets), and your best guess of the remembered wallet password or passphrase.
