1 BTC bounty

So, I've got this wallet.dat file and I’ve heard from a bunch of folks that cracking it should be simple enough. But here’s the thing… I’m not downloading any of your tools, not following any so-called "easy tutorials" online, and definitely not sending you anything. If by chance I manage to access the full balance, I’ll gladly pay 1 BTC, no issue.

I do not really understood what you posted but I guess you want someone to help your brute force the wallet.dat password so that you can have access to the wallet and have access to the bitcoin on it. Definitely you bought the wallet and which means you have been scammed.

It seems that someone send you wallet.dat file and then the person who sent it to you is asking for a payment, I guess? Take note there's no easy way to crack a wallet.dat file if the wallet is fake or even it's authentic if it's secured with a long passphrase. You can't bruteforce it in one day, a week, or months it would take decades, and the sad thing is, it might not even have stored BTC on the wallet.

Going to be hard to crack if you are not willing to download pywallet and hashcat.

Why didn't you continue in your last topic? Then just start typing those easy passwords. Good luck!

FYI, those are under the premise that the actual password is simply "the date". Not easy if it's just a clue left by your father. For example: my easily-accessible written account list doesn't have the actual password but a clue for me to remember which of my common passwords to use. But at least if you try to bruteforce, you can deduce that the password is not simply a date if it exhausted the search. That's not doable by hand though since you'll be typing each of the possible millions of combinations manually so you'll need the "stuff" to do that. At least use the suggested "open-source" tool BTCRecover which you can audit the source code.

If you got that wallet.dat from stranger or random website on internet, it's likely you got fake wallet.dat. Read this explanation, It's good you took some precaution. But if really you think it's not fake wallet.dat, your only option is brute-force using software such as BTCRecover or Hashcat.

Maybe because he couldn't find it - it's always easier to open a new topic and start the whole story from the beginning. However, with such an attitude, it is certainly not realistic to expect success - but perhaps it is not something that should be considered a tragedy. Assuming that the story is true, the person who set up the protection had two possible goals - the first is that no one can gain access to those coins, and the second is that only those who will be intelligent enough to understand how to unlock them can get them.

What? A user has his own post history right from his own profile, there's a link to a user's own post history. Well, if that's already too complicated for some newbies, how do they even survive? Asking for a friend... jokes aside. I glimpsed over your first topic from 2023. Were the details you posted from some notes from your father? Have you tried some rather obvious choices for "THE DATE" like date of Bitcoin Whitepaper, date of Bitcoin Genesis block, date of your father's registration on bitcointalk, his birthdate, his wedding date, your birthdate? You may need to try various typing styles or what's just common for your father. Have you tried THE DATE literally, as written here in italics?   To systematically check every possible way and not missing something AND if you're that paranoid to avoid using tools for this, you need to be very good at not making errors and document every trial carefully. Reliable and reputable tools exist and are better for this, but you need to learn to use them properly when you want to refuse "easy guides". Many guides by good and reputable members are already in this forum. I see no problem with using well reputed tools. You can do your stuff on an offline computer and completely wipe it afterwards, if you don't trust the tools. Just don't let it go online after you've exposed your wallet.dat on it. Well, then do your own research. Your wallet.dat file won't reveal its password by itself. Whatever guide you find, you can ask here if you don't understand some steps. You may get answers here, too. Of course, you shouldn't send your wallet.dat file, that's a given. You shouldn't even keep this wallet.dat file on an online computer which security status you can't assess! Store it in multiple copies only on offline devices and/or storage media. Judging by the balance of the one address you revealed, I recommend multiple redundant copies, two distinct places to avoid a single point/place of failure. Sensitive data like private keys in a Bitcoin Core wallet.dat file are encrypted with a random encryption key. This encryption key then is AES encrypted with the wallet.dat's encryption password/passphrase, IIRC. To access and use private keys of your wallet, you need the wallet's encryption password/passphrase. The AES encrypted random encryption key by itself doesn't reveal anything about your wallet's private keys. So it's safe to share this AES encrypted chunk as long as you keep your wallet.dat safe and secure and only in your possession. In your other thread you refused to get help by a good member of this forum who is unfortunately not anymore amoung us. When you say, tools like btcrecover and its setup to tackle your problem is above your head and you don't want external help from forum members, then you probably only have below professional option left. If you want professional help, I can recommend to contact Dave (you will need to read past first posts full of skepticism by natural crypto space reflexes). Dave will not ask for your wallet.dat file, he only needs that AES encrypted chunk of bytes. There are tools to extract those specific bytes from your wallet.dat. Dave will guide you accordingly in private communication. You only pay Dave if he accepts your challenge and when he succeeded to find the password of your wallet. Promisses, promisses, ... Good luck and progress with your wallet.dat.

Have you tried:  "August 23, 2015, 10:45:31 AM"

If the date really is the password to the wallet.dat then you just need Hashcat. Maybe you don't even need hashcat because the amount of valid combinations for the date are extremely small compared to say searching all 16-character passwords. Just get a GPU farm, make a script that will write all the dates between say 2010 and 2018 or something, varying by the second, and let it run for a few hours.

Maybe it's a wedding date or any other special date, so 2010 may not be enough. But the date format may be a problem, I can think of many different ways to write "October 3th, 2024".

The format won't be a problem if OP still remembers it. But still, it should not be so big. There are only 1.7 billion or so values between the 1970 epoch and right now. *Then again, I know how easy it is to forget things that I haven't written down, so I won't discount the fact that OP by now has probably forgotten everything about the password if he hasn't written it down.

The only problem here is to understand which date format was used. Perhaps your location will help here, since in the USA the MM/DD/YYYY format is more often used and in the European part DD/MM/YYYY I think that if you have any records of your father or messages, correspondence where he used some date assignments or something related to it, then you can at least understand what format he has and then parse all possible dates starting from 1970, as indicated by @NotATether, I think it will make your search much easier.

It is not complicated only for beginners, because many times we could see that even some older members ask about things that they should know, considering that they have been on the forum for years. Let's take the example of @jerry0, who obviously doesn't know how to check his post history - because if he knew, he wouldn't be asking the same questions for years Maybe the letters in THE DATE offer some solution - because each letter represents a number on old keyboards that contained numbers below the letters. Those who used mobile phones 20+ years ago wrote text messages in a completely different way than today. 84 33 28 3 - year 1984, March 28

Maybe he can try the lowercase 'the date', although there are more variations, without space, capital 'The date' or some similar combination.  Finding their own post history on the forum is too complicated for someone who believes cracking a wallet file is easy.

Maybe it would be "easy" if he listened to the advice he received when he first started a discussion on this topic. If you have the attitude "I don't want this, I won't try this" how will you solve the problem that brings you the 10 BTC reward? If I were in his place, I would try every advice and try all the possible dates that came to my mind - because if the password is really a date set by his father, then he didn't make up some nonsense date, but it is something that was very important to him.

Counting from year 0...2025 with 366 days per year, I'm to lazy to properly account leap years, it's 741,150 possible dates (including incorrect February 29th in non-leap years) in one particular style of formatting THE DATE. With the right tools it's a piece of cake for those who know how to do it, to try every possible date with some common formatting. Who cares if you need a few hours for one style of formatting to exhaust every possible date? OP could try them all, if he wanted. He could even first cut corners and try first only every possible date in the intervall 1900...2025 for all date formatting styles he can come up with. That's just 45,750 dates per style. That's what I would do first. I'm sure some knowledgable members here would and could give OP enough advise how to automate an exhaustive search. I'm pretty confident I could do it. Might need me some read-up as it's a long time ago I last did a wallet cracking recovery (someone in another forum forgot his spending PIN for the Schildbach Bitcoin wallet for Android, didn't even remember the length of the PIN correctly, so I worked my way up from 4-digit and higher; it took me some days to finally find the correct PIN as I didn't want to use heavy energy-demanding gear for the task. I wasn't too sure if the crack attempt would finally yield a positive hit. It felt good when it did.).

Yep. But OP doesn't want to download anything. And since I don't expect him to write his own software, he'll just keep opening a new topic every year. @OP: get an offline computer if you're afraid of malware stealing your Bitcoin.

No, I'm going to auction it off If you get the file and the money starts moving, I expect 9 BTC If they never move, I keep the bid