Recovering password for Bitcoin core wallet.dat

Hey everyone. My brother and I used to hold some BTC in a Bitcoin Core wallet that was encrypted. Last year, our place caught fire and we lost the device with that wallet, plus all the notes with the password. But just last week, while I was going through my hard drive to save some wedding pics, I found a backup of the wallet.dat file. The only issue is we can't remember the password. Is there anyone here who can help me out with this? I’d really appreciate it. Thanks a bunch!

I'm not sure there's anything that can be done to help you here mate.. you need the password+ the wallet.dat file to access your funds since the wallet was encrypted. the password was lost in the fire, I don't think there's anyway you can recover your wallet.. did you buy any chance save your seed phrase somewhere else or on your hard drive?

it was saved on the device that was burned down, no idea how it could be I have the wallet.dat only the password is missing. Hope good things come

Since it's allegedly your backup, you should at least know a couple of possible passwords or parts of it for bruteforce method to be viable, yes? If so, try BTCRecover and construct a "token file" based from the possible password parts that you can remember. If you need assistance on it, you must describe it in detail without being specific on the password itself, like for example: 8 to 10 characters, first 7 letters could be word1, word2 or word3, followed by numbers then a symbol. Since it's a backup, if you've changed the password after that backup is created, you should refer to your old password. If you prefer DYOR, here's its documentation: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Otherwise, there's no way to retrieve your bitcoins since your private keys aren't saved anywhere but your wallet.dat file and its backup.

You must have some idea of what your password looked like for the bruteforcing to be successful. Otherwise, it's never going to work unless your password is something incredibly simple, which I don't think it is. Losing everything in a fire seems horrible, but you can always learn something even from negative experiences. In this case, the lesson is not to keep your passwords, seeds, keys, etc. saved digitally. Instead, use laminated paper or metal backups. Also, make multiple backups in different geographical locations. If an accident happens in location#1, you can still recover your coins from location#2, #3, etc.

This sounds like your wallet encryption password was stored in a file on the storage device for your Bitcoin Core wallet. If you made backups of the wallet file, then why didn't you make backups of the password file? This seems not very logical to me. Who created the wallet encryption password? Was it human generated or some random password? Humans tend to have certain recipes how they "invent" their passwords or they re-use common passwords they had and make only little adjustments. Knowing the details about possible password usage may help a lot to crack such an unkown password, but you need to have at least some ideas about what could've been part of your to be cracked password.

Both of you must do the best to remember pattern, length or other characteristic of the password. Have you checked these options? 1. Possibility that one or both of you also made backup of the password or note of the password. 2. Possibility of re-using password or password characteristic that being used elsewhere. 3. Whether you use password generation software. 4. Whether your hard drive contain the password or note of the password. Bitcoin Core use strong encryption, which makes it's impossible to perform naive brute-force your wallet.dat file unless you used weak or short password.

You can also make use of hashcat, the more gpus you have access to the better.

I'll quote your link for documentation purposes only and if a proof is needed that quoted user promotes malware or other nefarious activities. For others: it's not worth watching! Do NOT download any "cracked" Bitcoin Core executable, you will regret it!! I'm not promoting the bullshit that is shown in the video. The video creators will try to sell their so-called "cracked Bitcoin-Qt" version. You very likely pay them for some malware or ransomware. What you're promoting here is likely complete bullshit because even for such an ancient version of Bitcoin Core 0.18.1 (why the heck would such an old version be needed?) the encryption and decryption of private keys in a wallet.dat doesn't work like the way the video guys explain in their video description. It's not that you can bypass the entry of the wallet encryption password because this is needed to derive a key to decrypt the secret random encryption key which encrypts all sensitive data in a wallet.dat file like the private keys. Without the wallet encryption password that the user defined at some point of time, you simply can't decrypt the AES encrypted secret random encryption key (this key is not revealed to a user, it's an internal random secret) and this secret internal encryption key encrypts the private keys of the wallet. (This two-step method allows to change the wallet's encryption password without the need to decrypt and re-encrypt all the private keys in the wallet, it's only needed to re-encrypt this secret internal encryption key.) See here, how Bitcoin Core encrypts private keys in a wallet.dat file: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet_encryption P.S. edit: made link in quotation un-clickable.

Do not trust what @Jordan19ward write. Title of that youtube video is "How to Open wallet.dat files without Passphrase or Password│Getting Private key of Encrypted wallet". In addition, the video provide download link for Bitcoin Core which leads to their own website.