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First aid · Preparation
Before asking for help: the information you should gather
Half an hour gathering this saves you weeks of back and forth, and it protects you too: when you know exactly what information is needed, you instantly spot anyone asking for something else.
What is needed
- What type of wallet it was and which app created it. If you don’t remember, your app store history or old emails usually say.
- Roughly what year. The era changes the outlook a great deal.
- What exactly you lost: the password, the phrase, part of the phrase, the PIN, the device.
- What you still have: the file, the app installed, the device, an incomplete sheet, an old copy.
- What you remember, unfiltered: approximate password length, whether it had numbers, which words you used back then, which position the missing word was in.
- One of your addresses or something that lets ownership be verified.
- Roughly how much there is, to know whether the work is worth it.
Point five decides your case, and it is the only one only you can do. Sit down for half an hour with a piece of paper and write everything that comes to mind, including what feels unreliable. A doubtful memory is tested and discarded in a second; an unmentioned one is never tested at all.
What is never needed
Your complete phrase, any of its words, your password, your private keys and the wallet file. None of that is needed to tell you whether your case has a way out. If someone asks for it in a first contact, the conversation ends there. The full table is in what data is safe to share.
An order that works
- First make copies of everything you have.
- Then check on an explorer that there is something to recover.
- Then gather the list above, calmly.
- And only then write to someone, through the official channel on their site, initiating the contact yourself.
That order matters: steps one and two are free, you do them yourself, and they solve or rule out many cases before anyone needs to be involved.