Passwords · What can and can’t be done
Why some wallet passwords are unrecoverable
A wallet password is not «decrypted»: it is guessed by trying. Whether it can be done depends on two things, and neither is having a huge computer: how much you remember of it, and how slow each try is. Here it is, without the jargon.
A password is not «cracked»: it is guessed
There is no magic that reverses the encryption. Your wallet file holds your key inside a box locked with your password. The only known way to open it is to try passwords, one by one, until one fits. No shortcut, no «special program», nothing that skips that work.
Here is an important difference from a website. A website locks you out after a few wrong tries. A wallet file does not: there is no server to stop you, so a computer can try as many as it likes. That sounds good for you, but the catch is what comes next.
Each attempt is made slow on purpose
Wallets are designed so that checking a password is slow, precisely so a thief cannot try millions per second. Depending on the wallet and how it is set up, a normal computer may try only a few thousand per second… or, on old or «weak» wallets, up to a million per second. That number changes everything, and it is the first thing I read from your file.
| Type of wallet | Tries per second, roughly |
|---|---|
| Ethereum keystore · Bitcoin Core | very few (on the order of a few per second) |
| Recent MetaMask (2023 onwards) | few |
| Old MetaMask (before 2023) | many more (up to hundreds of thousands) |
These are ballpark figures on a home computer; the exact ones are in your file and are the first thing I look at. Between an old wallet with «light» settings and a modern one with strong settings there can be a thousandfold difference. That is why the same case can be a matter of hours or of years depending on what it was made with.
The other factor: how many passwords there are to try
This is where everything is decided, because this number does not grow little by little: it explodes. Every extra character, and every «I’m not sure if it was upper or lower case», multiplies the possibilities. And this is where your memory is worth more than any computer.
| What you remember | Roughly how long it takes |
|---|---|
| Almost all of it, with small doubts | minutes to hours |
| The structure and a couple of pieces | days |
| Only «something with my name and some numbers» | weeks or months, and with luck |
| Nothing, it was random from a manager | impossible |
Eight random characters, with no clue, is a bet no one wins. What decides the case is not how «strong» the password was on paper, but how much of it survives in your head.
That is why the first question is what you remember
The line between possible and impossible is not set by your password: it is set by your memory. And the memory that helps is the specific kind. It helps to know that you used to start with a capital, that the symbol was a «!» or a «-», that it ended in a year, that it was one of the three you used back then.
With that information a made-to-measure searcher is built — your rules, not just any dictionary — and the number of possibilities goes from astronomical to small. That is the whole secret, and it is why «I remember nothing» and «I remember it was my dog’s name and a number» are night and day.
What really helps
- Fragments, variants and rules you provide. Even twenty loose candidates — all twenty get tried.
- Knowing the length, or at least a minimum and a maximum.
- Your other passwords from the same period: not to reuse them, but to see your pattern.
- Which app you created the wallet with, and roughly when.
How this turns into an honest answer
Reading your file tells me what each attempt costs. Listening to you tells me how many attempts there are. Multiply and you get hours of computing — and from that, one of three answers: feasible, doubtful or impossible. If it is impossible, I tell you in the first reply, free, and that is the most common outcome.