Mnemonic Not Working - Recovering Lost Cryptocurrencies
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A few people have asked for help recovering their passphrases after finding this article. I am happy to help but wanted to list a few resources I found that could be useful:.
A wallet password and recovery tool: A python seed recover script from the above toolset that looks like it specifically addresses the issue of this article.
This post is long and covers my entire process, and I learned a lot of things on the way that are worth mentioning if you are interested in some technical crypto knowledge. Keep in mind there was definitely some trial and error and more direct processes possible easy to see in hindsight. Technically, coins are never really stored because they only exist on blockchains, but the passwords to access them are bitcoin address technical details slabs people secure away.
All the coins appeared lost after hours of effort. My first thought was to leave the device completely alone, akin to not making any changes to your computer files if you accidentally deleted stuff you want to recover. Probably not analogous but a safe move until Ledger support could be reached. After a little more conversation, I learned that he had written down the word mnemonic passphrase for his wallet. These are bitcoin address technical details slabs generated by the device for you.
The 24 word passphrases are not the actual password themselves, but they can be converted into the actual passwords following a standard specification called BIP Two compounding issues though:. But he had bitcoin address technical details slabs word list, so even with something written down wrong, it made me optimistic recovery was a possibility.
I remembered reading a similar story somewhere, probably on Reddit, where someone had written down one of their 24 words incorrectly, and a friendly interneter wrote a script to find out which word was a mistake and solved it! In any case, I bitcoin address technical details slabs about restoring wallets from Ledger and passed on their support page link and a website that makes it easier to check if your 24 words are valid.
At this point, I think they accepted the loss but had some hope. FYI, everywhere I read strongly recommended you do not generate your own passphrase, and let it be generated for you. Essentially, one that you try to create will never be as entropic, or random, as one algorithmically generated for you. Anywayyyy, I first asked them if they had any ideas of words that could be wrong, like copied over incorrectly, hard to read, or written down by row instead of by column.
But better than going off of nothing at all I guess. Well, easy enough to write a script to produce the passphrases. And only the first step. As we learned earlier, the last word in these test passphrases acts a checksum, and hopefully the majority of the 49, are not valid mnemonics at all. How do we test that automatedly? Ahhhh, only valid combinations! Say we did have the correct passphrase.
Then we should be able to generate the private key and access to the wallet. Is there an app software wallet that I can easily throw these test phrases in? My understanding was that a wallet is really just a corresponding public and private key and a blockchain address. No matter — if we can generate addresses at least, bitcoin address technical details slabs can check for transactions on the blockchain. If we found a transaction, that means the mnemonic passphrase it came from would be the right one.
Transactions are all completely public, and various websites make it easy to check, e. Luckily I also found a Reddit post where someone posted their broken mnemonic for a bitcoin wallet, and another redditor figured out the issue and posted some info not the same story I referred to at the beginning of this post. Using the Mnemonic Code Converter for the Reddit post passphrase honey relief scale kite dose lyrics they middle globe exhaust smooth galaxy horror ensure grape way gift embody spring cupboard horror hurt image swiftwe bitcoin address technical details slabs all sorts of data: Why are there so many addresses?
Here are some screenshots. Well, if we check the Account Extended Public Key on blockchain. Note that some of those addresses on the left match the derived addresses above. Cool, so if we can generate whatever these accounted extended public keys are for our passphrases, we can check those online.
Maybe there is bitcoin address technical details slabs way to check in bulk. Could also be a fun exercise to download the entire Bitcoin blockchain and figure out how to read it myself…another time perhaps.
Lots of bitcoin address technical details slabs around functions and some unfamiliar javascript stuff. Pleeassseeee let there be a Ruby gem I can use. Wooo, looks like this MoneyTree gem might work. Not sure what all this stuff means. Now there is a method available on the master node object we can try: Ok, we can do the same thing to find the public key, but if you try searching the result on blockchain, nada. We gotta figure out this derivation path stuff to get that account extended public key.
How do we get account extended public key …? Looking back at those screenshots, we see the derived addresses. For each address, we see a path on the left. Learn more about them here.
And a wallet address is definitely easy bitcoin address technical details slabs check. I asked about what coins were on the wallet, and he actually did have some bitcoin as well as Stratis, Dash, and Litecoin. Hmmm, if we can check these in bulk, and we see any transactions, then we have a hit! Butttt…there are tons of possible derived addresses for each passphrase. Update the script to generate all bitcoin address technical details slabs this. At some point I figured out the account extended public key was one parent up in the derivation path.
I lost a lot of hope at this point. I got really excited at this point and figured this meant one of the test passphrases was correct.
Not the most efficient, but I just did a manual binary search checking the addresses betweenthenetc. The 4th transaction, the one on top, was the coins getting moved to a new wallet after this recovery.
That was bitcoin address technical details slabs really fun problem to try to solve and how awesome is it that it worked out?? Still, got to learn about how all this works and how HD Wallets have this tree structure that allows for basically many wallets all stored in one master wallet.
Learn more about HD Wallets here and here too. All in all, this took about hours. And for further reading, a much cooler — and more techincal! Toggle navigation Damien's blog. Home About Bitcoin address technical details slabs Projects Work. Update A bitcoin address technical details slabs people have asked for help recovering their passphrases after finding this article.
I am happy to help but wanted to list a few resources I found that could be useful: This guy grnqrtr has a service for this and many references. Two compounding issues though: What if the written down word list was wrong?
