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Crypto investors have shown a growing interest in decentralized wallets following the crash of FTX. However, a new issue has emerged: investors are starting to lose their 12-word recovery phrases. Some have written them on paper, stored them in different places, or even tried to memorize them. So, is there a way to recover if you forget these words?
I Forgot My Crypto Wallet Recovery Phrases
Firstly, if you have completely forgotten your recovery words and lost access, there isn’t much you can do. To avoid such risk, you need to back up these words in several places. However, there’s a way to recover your wallet if you’ve forgotten a few words.
Axel Bitblaze has prepared an excellent guide on this issue, which I have compiled for you, hoping that you won’t need it one day. The BIP 39 list contains 2048 words, which means all seed phrases are formed using combinations of these words. Since the range is fixed, your chances of success with brute force are high.
Brute force is actually an attack method. If the Wi-Fi password in your coverage area consists only of numbers, you can crack this password with brute force tools in a short time. You can do the same for your recovery words.
How to Recover a Crypto Wallet?
Depending on the number of forgotten words, there is a chance of success by testing combinations. Depending on the number of forgotten words, your success time varies between 6 seconds and 10 years. If you’ve forgotten four or more words, your lifespan may not be long enough to succeed with this method.
Here is the estimated success time of brute force by the number of missing words on a regular computer:
- 1 word: 2048 possibilities (2048^1), estimated 6 seconds
- 2 words: 4,194,304 possibilities (2048^2), estimated 90 seconds
- 3 words: 8,589,934,592 possibilities (2048^3), estimated 2 days
- 4 words: 17,592,186,044,416 possibilities (2048^4), estimated 10 years
Will you manually try these attempts? Of course not, there are a few popular apps.
Using Seed Saviour
Seed Saviour is a browser-based seed recovery tool that can help you recover your seed sentence if a word is missing. To use it:
- Go to the project’s GitHub page.
- Paste your partial seed phrase.
- Indicate the missing word with “?” and ensure its position is correct.
- The code will then do the necessary work for you. This only works if you have forgotten one word.
Using BTCRecover
BTCRecover is a script that you can download from GitHub and open. To use it:
- Install Python3
- Open cmd and write: pip install -r requirements.txt
- Open cmd and go to the directory
- Write the following to run: python seedrecover.py
- An interactive drop-down window will appear asking for the type of wallet you are trying to recover.
- After selecting the wallet type, it will ask for a shared key, which you can enter or skip.
- Then, it will ask you to paste your lost wallet’s wallet address. Enter it if you remember.
- Finally, it will ask you to enter your broken seed phrase.
- Just put your broken seed sentence and it will start bruteforcing the remaining missing words and try to match it with the wallet address you provided in the previous prompt.
Can Seed Words Be Guessed?
Can a hacker guess my seed words? No, they can’t. As previously mentioned about the possible combinations, guessing is nearly impossible. In a scenario where all 12 words are missing, there are 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 possibilities. This actually suggests that if they try forever, they might succeed at some point, of course, if they could live forever.
