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37 Dash in my wallet and my BIP38 passphrase is not working :(

Kim Koldtoft

New member
Note: I have cross-posted this on Reddit.com

I have a cold wallet with 37 Dash in it, which is about 8.000 USD$ at the current exchange rate. Today I wanted to withdraw some of them to pay for some renovations, but to my surprise, when I tried to decrypt the BIP38 encrypted private key, I get the message "Incorrect passphrase for this private key".

I have created the keys in the Tor browser on an offline Tails system, using the dash paper-wallet generator, downloaded from https://paper.dash.org and that is also where I am trying to decrypt the keys now.

My passphrase is 29 chars, consisting of numbers, and letters and capital letters and I use the same passphrase for my bitcoin BIP38 encrypted cold wallets, where it's working fine. I also use it to unlock my encrypted persistent volume in Tails, which I would have also done, JUST before creating these wallets.

Important facts:
I am sure it is a BIP38 encrypted key, as it starts with 6Pf. I can see the wallet balance using the public key (See: https://goo.gl/S9wMzK - or XqC8zEviF2Pgw1hWqmDGg38SKWWPadCkwm). I am sure I used https://paper.dash.org as the PDF wallets I saved, shows that. (I also have the keys in a text file) I have 5 other cold dash wallets (which are empty) that I made for later use, and I made them 1 by 1. I have the same problem with all of those, making it highly likely that I simply had a brain fart at the time of creating them and used some different variations of my crypto password to create all of them.

So what do I do?
I think the best option is to try do two things. Keep trying different variations of my password till I succeed or give up and try to brute force it, using some tool where you can enter some words, numbers and phrases, and then the password brute force generator take those words and numbers and letters and phrases in to account.

I would very much appreciate if anyone has any other suggestions as to what I can do, and also if anyone know of a good password brute force tool that I can use for this?
 
Thanks for the help guys. I manged to figure it out with manual attempts. The answer was a space in front of the passphrase. So dumb.
Congratulations on the recovery!

Yep, this kind of thing happens when you copy passphrase from text file. In old days I believe there were some similar issues when some text editors added "new line" ("\n") special character into copied string, so when user pasted passphrase this character was counted too and passphrase check was failing.

And btw, thanks for reporting back! Glad to see that it's not a bug and there is nothing to fix :)
 
As long as you leave something as collateral and cover the cracking costs, I can have a go at it. Let me know if you still need this done!
 
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