Welcome to mnemonic hell.

On December 19th 2020 Miguel Cuneta (@MiguelCuneta) / Twitter tweeted: Helping a friend recover his old blockchain wallet from 2013. Crossing my fingers for him because the $50 he won from our UFC betting is now $3000+

Miguel sent us 17 words, a wallet.aes.json and a bunch of hints, like his friends name, year and month he created the wallet and some variations of the password.

Immediately we started brute forcing the password using custom made algorithms and our custom built password cracking servers. …

A crypto currency Nightmare happened in the last few months of 2020. A hacker or a group of hackers managed to breach Ledgers customer database leaking personal information to almost 300.000 of their customers.

Ledger customers are receiving phishing mails, phone calls and threats. This is a ten step guide and best practices how to avoid loosing your funds. And this is not only from your Ledger hardware wallet, but also from any account that has been using with the very same mail or phone number with your Coinbase, Binance, blockchain.com or other exchange.

1. Check if your password has been leaked

Go to the site https://haveibeenpwned.com/ where…

A client from Norway, the country known to have been inhabited by Vikings, contacted us with a unique story.

He was holding Bitcoin in an open source bitcoin wallet from Schildbach that has been around since 2011. The story is fascinating but somehow sad, how the backward compatibility in crypto is broken.

We received the first email 3.39pm with the text

Hi. I bought XX bitcoin back in 2013 and used a wallet simply called “Bitcoin” that had a B-logo on a yellow background.The …

Blockchain.com (or blockchain.info as it was called previously) have over 50 million wallets created since its inception. Blockchain.com support will not help you if you lost your password, what other options do you have?

If you forget your password but know what email created your wallet, you are able to request an email. They will send you all wallets ever created with that mail. The link for that service is:

If you are not able to remember the password there are several other options to recover the encrypted wallet.

Its possible to use btc recover to download the encrypted backup.

…

A famous movie director once told me: “Shooting a movie is just 10% of the work, the other 90% is preparing”. That came into mind recently.

Wednesday 8.55 pm

Someone sends me a request to find the passphrase to his Bitcoin Core wallet password. I reply immediately I would be more than happy to help. There was no answer until the next day.

Thursday afternoon. 2.04 pm

I was at our summerhouse with my cat, making it back to the city after a short break when the reply dropped into my inbox. As always I replied with courtesy the needed…

Tokyo city.

I land at Narita Airport, my client said someone will meet me, but I don’t know where and how he looks like.

Exiting through the arrival terminal a gentleman in white gloves has a sign: KeychainX

I don’t ask questions, jump into the limo and off we go into Tokyo city… One hour into ride we arrive at the entrance to a super skyscraper close to Ikachimachi train station. I am left alone in the lobby and wait.

30 minutes later, three young Japanese men come and greet me with broken English.

Chainx?

Confused I ask if its…

An old client of ours got back recently asking if we could help him recover a lost password to Bitcoin core wallet file called wallet.dat.

He believed he had the password correctly written down and did not understand why the password did not work anymore.

We received a list of possible hints, the wallet file and agreed on a fixed fee if we managed to recover his coins. The fee is usually a cut of whatever is inside the wallet and we never charge anything upfront.

The first thing that struck us was that some of the password hints were…

• buy bitcoin
• encrypt your wallet
• forget the password
• call me in 5 years

This is exactly what happened to a gentleman I met last Saturday. He bought Bitcoin for a few thousand dollars when BTC hovered around 100 USD and in 2015 forgot the password after importing it to blockchain.info wallet. He encrypted it twice with a double password.

Blockchain.com (previously blockchain.info) is one of the longest running online wallet services, unfortunately many people forget or lose their login credentials rendering it impossible to access the funds.

To be able to access the backup, you need to know your wallet…