Password recovery for electrum wallet
#1
Hi there! I always meet the same problem again and again after recieving coins. Electrum wallet ( https://electrum.org/ ) just stops to recognize my password and I have to make the new one. But the problem is that once I was not so attentive and just made a new one thinking that I will just recover the previous one. So I forget to save my seed and only what I have is the password that have to be right, but wallet says no. I don't know does it plays any role in that, but wallet stops recognize password right after recieving money from https://tumbler.io/. I tried it three times and result the same. Wallet stop to recognise the password. I tried with other mixers and exchangers, but that kind of result only after recieving btc from tumbler. I restore those wallets from seed, send money forward and they are continue to work as before, even with that mixer. I know that whole situation sounds very strange but I have no idea what it could be. So is there any ideas how to recover this wallet? Thanks in advance guys
Reply
#2
(12-12-2023, 12:54 PM)Jhonathan2Poul Wrote: Hi there! I always meet the same problem again and again after recieving coins. Electrum wallet ( https://electrum.org/ ) just stops to recognize my password and I have to make the new one. But the problem is that once I was not so attentive and just made a new one thinking that I will just recover the previous one. So I forget to save my seed and only what I have is the password that have to be right, but wallet says no. I don't know does it plays any role in that, but wallet stops recognize password right after receiving money from https://tumbler.io/. I tried it three times and result the same. Wallet stop to recognize the password. I tried with other mixers and exchangers, but that kind of result only after receiving btc from tumbler. I restore those wallets from seed, send money forward and they are continue to work as before, even with that mixer. I know that whole situation sounds very strange but I have no idea what it could be. So is there any ideas how to recover this wallet? Thanks in advance guys

Just taking a guess here, but Electrum is a light wallet that gets your wallet history from looking through the history of all UTXO's received by your wallet and then pruning it to the minimal data you need. The problem here when using a mixer is that it might very well have to retrieve the full history of all those UTXO's that are being mixed, basically removing many of the advantages of being a light-node since it involves a lot of data, especially when using mixing reoccurring a lot of UTXO's end up being in the history of your transactions. Probably since it is not an initial sync, this causes problems.
I would advice to first a) make you have a backup of the right wallet file, b) make sure you updated to the latest version c)!, then go to the console tab in Electrum and run:
wallet.clear_history()

See if that works.
Take it as a lesson that it is best not to use a light-node in combination with a mixer/tumbler.
Electrum has no lock in, however it is slightly different from most nodes in deriving its keys (the step from mnemonic to seed_bytes is slightly different). You can import your coins in another wallet, but it requires you to manually export and import each key, which is frankly very user unfriendly. The good news is that Electrum does use proper standards such as BIP44 for deriving its keys but as long as you cannot decrypt the wallet, that will not be of help.

If clearing the history did not work, Electrum wallets can be easily hacked using Hashcat, so at least you can verify if the password you think to be correct is indeed the correct password. See this thread here
https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-11589.h...t=electrum
You can download the electrum2jonh.py script to extract a hash from your wallet here:
https://github.com/egidijus/JohnTheRippe...um2john.py

Good luck, let us know if it worked out. In worse case scenario I could recover you keys for your for a modest fee, but first try all the above and keep your coins to yourself.
Reply
#3
(12-15-2023, 11:02 AM)monyanus Wrote:
(12-12-2023, 12:54 PM)Jhonathan2Poul Wrote: Hi there! I always meet the same problem again and again after recieving coins. Electrum wallet ( https://electrum.org/ ) just stops to recognize my password and I have to make the new one. But the problem is that once I was not so attentive and just made a new one thinking that I will just recover the previous one. So I forget to save my seed and only what I have is the password that have to be right, but wallet says no. I don't know does it plays any role in that, but wallet stops recognize password right after receiving money from https://tumbler.io/. I tried it three times and result the same. Wallet stop to recognize the password. I tried with other mixers and exchangers, but that kind of result only after receiving btc from tumbler. I restore those wallets from seed, send money forward and they are continue to work as before, even with that mixer. I know that whole situation sounds very strange but I have no idea what it could be. So is there any ideas how to recover this wallet? Thanks in advance guys

Just taking a guess here, but Electrum is a light wallet that gets your wallet history from looking through the history of all UTXO's received by your wallet and then pruning it to the minimal data you need. The problem here when using a mixer is that it might very well have to retrieve the full history of all those UTXO's that are being mixed, basically removing many of the advantages of being a light-node since it involves a lot of data, especially when using mixing reoccurring a lot of UTXO's end up being in the history of your transactions. Probably since it is not an initial sync, this causes problems.
I would advice to first a) make you have a backup of the right wallet file, b) make sure you updated to the latest version c)!, then go to the console tab in Electrum and run:
wallet.clear_history()

See if that works.
Take it as a lesson that it is best not to use a light-node in combination with a mixer/tumbler.
Electrum has no lock in, however it is slightly different from most nodes in deriving its keys (the step from mnemonic to seed_bytes is slightly different). You can import your coins in another wallet, but it requires you to manually export and import each key, which is frankly very user unfriendly. The good news is that Electrum does use proper standards such as BIP44 for deriving its keys but as long as you cannot decrypt the wallet, that will not be of help.

If clearing the history did not work, Electrum wallets can be easily hacked using Hashcat, so at least you can verify if the password you think to be correct is indeed the correct password. See this thread here
https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-11589.h...t=electrum
You can download the electrum2jonh.py script to extract a hash from your wallet here:
https://github.com/egidijus/JohnTheRippe...um2john.py

Good luck, let us know if it worked out. In worse case scenario I could recover you keys for your for a modest fee, but first try all the above and keep your coins to yourself.

First of all, thank you very much for such a detailed answer. I no longer hoped that anyone would respond to my request. Secondly, thanks for the excellent advice, I did what you advised, and I was able to restore access to my coins!
Reply