Cryptocurrencies’ decentralized nature makes lost wallet passwords a pain for the unlucky folks. Previous reports detail that around 20 percent of all Bitcoin in existence is lost in stranded wallets.
As this issue came to the limelight, companies such as BTCRecover stepped up to assist crypto owners locked out of their wallets. Among the methods used is the seed recovery phrase.
Restoring a Wallet With Seed
A seed phrase is a list that contains all the information needed to restore bitcoins into the chain. The wallet software generates the seed phrase and instructs the user to write it down on paper. This list is usually words from a dictionary, which are all numbered. To determine the key pairs used in the wallet, the seed phrase automatically gets converted to a number that is used as an integer of the seed value.
Try different assumptions based on the initial values you entered when trying to restore BIP39 / 44, recent forms of passphrase standardization. During this process, btcrecover.py is deployed. and starts determining which initial seed value combinations could be correct. Usually, each initial assumption is used to generate multiple public key (mpk) then compared to the mpk you enter, or generate a Bitcoin address then compare it to its address.
The recovery process takes longer when downloading the blockchain and generating AddressDB, a database containing all addresses worldwide. The actual verification of that part of the process is done at roughly the same speed whether it is tested against an addressDB or 600,000 addresses on it. Even if you’re not sure which address your wallet uses, AddressDB is very useful.
The AddressDB generates addresses and then searches the entire blockchain for each generated address. To do this, you must first create a blockchain-based address database. There are two ways to create an AddressDB, either by analyzing the raw blockchain data directly or processing a file with a list of addresses.
Note: By default, Seedrecover.py will get results for the majority of simple invalid mnemonic or invalid seed type errors.
Storing Seed Phrases for the Long Term
In the past, many people accidentally lost bitcoins due to failed archives, misspelled letters, forgotten hard drives, or damaged SSDs. Thanks to bitter experience, it turns out that pencil and paper are one of the most practical storage media. Bitcoin wallet private keys are encoded into random words from a writable dictionary. If your hard drive crashes, you can find boot material and recover your entire wallet.
You can also engrave the seed phrase on metal, which is more durable than paper and protects against extreme conditions. In case all these seem like a Gordian knot to you, please get in touch with BTCRecover and the team will walk you through all the necessary steps to take.