Bitcoin Core

How to recover your Bitcoin Core

Bitcoin Core, formerly known as Bitcoin QT is the original and "official" software client. It was first released by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 and is still widely used among miners and users. As the blockchain size increased throughout the years, many users chose other 'lite' clients that do not require to download a copy of the entire blockchain in order to operate the wallet and nowadays there are more popular Bitcoin wallets.

Need help recovering your password?

We at Brute Brothers have special software and hardware to help you recover your locked Bitcoin Core wallet. We've helped many people recover their lost wallet.dat passwords and restore corrupted wallet.dat files.

Bitcoin Core's security model

Bitcoin Core allows its users to encrypt their wallet.dat file which contains all sensitive information regarding your wallet, namely your private keys that are required to be able to spend coins from any associated addresses. The chosen password is first converted to a Key/IV pair, with a dynamic number of rounds. The Key/IV pair is then used to encrypted a randomly generated master key using AES-256-CBC encryption. Finally, the wallet private keys are encrypted using that master key, also with AES-256-CBC.

Recovering your Bitcoin Core password

If you've forgotten your wallet password, you can try and recover it. Bitcoin Core is a self-custody wallet, therefore there is no company or entity that holds your password for you and can help you 'reset' your password. You will either have to remember your password or recover it using specialized tools that can help you brute force your password.

Manual recovery

The basic approach to recovering your password is to create an Excel sheet with all relevant and optional passwords that you might have used, then, expanding each option to multiple other options. For example, if you usually use the password Password123 then you may want to include Password1234 and Password111
After listing all options, you can open your Bitcoin Core wallet, switch to the Debug Console tab and paste each password in the following format:

walletpassphrase <password> 1

if you see an error message, that means that the password is incorrect.

Recovering with BTCRecover

A more advanced approach is to use Brute Force or Dictionary attacks on your wallet. This will allow you automate a part of the process in case you could not find the correct password manually. BTCRecover is an open source software developed by gurnec (and currently maintained by 3rditeration) and can help you scale your cracking attempts.

Using BTCRecover requires some technical knowledge and has basically two ways to recover your password:

1. Using a dictionary attack - Requires you to create a long list of possible passwords in a text file and feed it to BTCRecover
2. Using a token file - Allows you to create structures of passwords that you might have used and attempt any password that matches the pattern you provided.

To install BTCRecover, follow the instructions listed in the instructions page

Using a dictionary attack

First, create a text file containing all possible passwords that you may have used for this wallet, place each password in a new line. Then, run the following command in your terminal:

python3 btcrecover.py --wallet wallet.aes.json --passwordlist my-passwords.txt

Using a token list attack

Token lists can be really simple or really complex, depends on how you want to use them. To fully understand how token lists work, you can read this instruction page. To get back to our Password123 example, let's say we're not sure if we've capitalized the P or if we used 123/1234/111/123456 or any other combination of numbers. A good token to represent all of the possible options is the following

%[Pp]assword%1,6d

The above will generate passwords with an upper case and lower case P and will append any digits in the length of 1 to 6. Relevant candidates for the above token are:

Password123
Password111
password91874
password000000

To run your token list attack, simply use the following command after creating a file with all relevant tokens

python3 btcrecover.py --wallet wallet.aes.json --tokenlist my-tokens.txt