Passwords · Pillar article
I forgot my wallet password: what decides whether it can be recovered
A wallet password is not decrypted: it is guessed by trying. That sounds bad, but it is the key to understanding your case, because it explains why two people with the same problem get opposite verdicts. It all comes down to three things, and one of them depends only on you.
First: what you remember
This is the factor that decides eighty per cent of cases. You don’t need to remember the password: you need to remember how you built it. Look at the difference:
- «It was my dog’s name and a year, first letter capitalised» → a few hundred possibilities. Solvable.
- «It was something with numbers at the end, maybe eight or ten characters» → hundreds of thousands. Workable.
- «I used to use variations of three passwords of mine from that period» → an excellent starting point.
- «I have no idea, nothing rings a bell» → almost never works out.
- «A manager generated it, it was random» → it won’t work, and it is honest to say so up front.
That is why my first question is never «what was your password?» but «what were your passwords like back then?». The second question almost always has an answer, and it is the one that opens wallets.
Second: how slow testing is
Wallets are deliberately designed so that each attempt is slow. That is not a flaw: it is the defence. And the slowness is not the same everywhere: a 2013 wallet can allow tens of thousands of attempts per second, and a modern one a few hundred. The gap between those extremes is a hundred to one or more.
This can be known before starting, because it is written inside your own file. It is the first thing I look at, and I explain it in the parameters of your file that decide viability.
Third: whether you still have the file
Without the file there is nothing to test against. This point seems obvious and it is where most cases are lost, because people uninstall the app, reformat the computer or let a cleanup tool wipe their browser data while looking for help. Before doing anything at all, make copies: see back up before touching anything.
The table that sums up your case
| What you remember | Old wallet | Modern wallet |
|---|---|---|
| Concrete candidates | Yes | Yes |
| The pattern you used | Yes | Likely |
| Length and little else | Likely | Hard |
| Nothing | Hard | No |
| It was random | No | No |
What you can do today, for free
- Make copies of the wallet file or folder, in two separate places.
- Sit down for half an hour and write everything you remember without filtering: words, numbers, ways you wrote things, passwords you used elsewhere back then.
- Look for old passwords of yours in browsers, managers and notebooks: they work as templates even if they aren’t this one.
- Check on an explorer that the wallet holds a balance, so you know whether it is worth continuing.
That second point is the most valuable work there is in a password case, and only you can do it. How to do it well is in how to build a candidate password list.