Is there a best practice to extract bitcoin wallet hashes that works both with old an
#1
Hi everyone,

I have an old Bitcoin wallet created with the original windows client back in 2011. And of course I forgot the non-trivial password.

I would like to try to crack the wallets password. But before investing significant funds in the appropriate hardware I would like to make sure that I properly understand hashcat. Therefore I created a new, empty wallet using Bitcoin Core v26 with a simple password ("t3est") that I could even decrypt on my Ryzen's integrated GPU. But trying to get the hash from this worthless wallet using bitcoin2john fails:

Code:
PS C:\Python27> .\python.exe .\bitcoin2john.py .\t3st.dat
ERROR:root:(22, 'Invalid argument -- .\\test1234.dat: unexpected file type or format')
ERROR:root:Couldn't open wallet.dat/main. Try quitting Bitcoin and running this again.
ERROR:root:See our doc/README.bitcoin for how to setup and use this script correctly.

Using bitcoin2john on the actual (2011) wallet with bitcoins works. Some search on the net turned up information on bitcoin2john not being actively developed any further in a direction to solve that issue. Instead, btcrecovers extract scripts are recommended as a solution, but they return the hash in a different format from the one hashcat expects.

Of course I could try and find an older version of Bitcoin (Core) to create a test wallet that still works with bitcoin2john, but I hope there is a better way.

Can somebody recommend a way to extract hashcat compatible wallet hashes that works on old and new wallets?
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