Lost everything? [and found it again 🙂]

Hi,

I’ve made a big mistake.
I have forgotten the password and cannot find the seed of my wallet.
I still have the wallet.
Will printing a paper wallet save my ADAs?

Thanks.

I would expect it to require the spending password, if it’s enabled for the wallet.

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Also the paper wallet will have a different seed than the original wallet (different number of words).

Make sense.
So all is lost. :cold_sweat:

Unless there will be an option for choosing to enable a password for generating a paper wallet.
Something like 2-step verification.
I mean, first users will make a password, then the wallet will ask if they want to enable password also for making a paper wallet (Or after they try to make a paper wallet it will ask if they want to enable the password).

Do you have any idea what the password could be like? We had a case here recently where a dude forgot his exact password, but kinda remembered what it could be with some options. We checked if there’s a limit for the number of password inputs - and there isn’t any. So you can at least try to guess or remember the password, hopefully :man_shrugging:

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:disappointed: trying every time with no luck…

You should use some methods to save password: paper, https://keepass.info, …

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I think if you restore the wallet (with 12 seeds) you will be able to choose another spending password…

:disappointed:
Too late for my mistake.
My friend asked me, “Why it’s so hard to recover the password”.
Too bad I cannot undo my ADA transfer from the exchange to my wallet.

@mavada did you ever use the seed phrase to open your wallet before?

I would keep trying different passwords you would have used as there is no limit on attempts as @vantuz-subhuman suggested. This is your only solution. Once you have success - set up another wallet, write down seed, and send your ADA to that wallet.

Sadly, no.
I have opened a new wallet so I could transfer the ADA from that wallet to the new one.
A couple days ago I have tried to recover the wallet on a friends computer and saw that it’s not the wallet with the ADA.

Since there is no limit on number of attempts get some program to brute force break your password. I’m guessing you used 1 word rather than a high entropy pass word / phrase. It should not take long to break it. The reason " Why it’s so hard to recover the password " is so your wallet can’t get hacked.

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Plot twist, @mavada is trying to get into someone’s wallet. :smiley:

Don’t you have the 12 word recovery phrase written down in some form? If you do, then maybe the phrase is correct, but you entered them in the wrong order, or mistyped a word?

Since you’re in possession of the encrypted key, all is not necessarily lost. It could be feasible to crack the password eventually, especially with future hardware performance increases. Whatever you do, make sure you save the wallet private key file for later, as it might be a matter of hours to crack it with future tech (a few decades later).

It’d make it easier if you had any clue of the pattern of the password, e.g. knowing that it contains a certain word or English dictionary words in general, begins or ends with certain characters, approximate length, anything helps. Can you think of something to go on?

To clarify, is the below information correct?

  • You have a Daedalus wallet that you can view and has greater than 0 balance.
  • When you look up the addresses on the wallet’s Receive tab on https://cardanoexplorer.com/, the sum of balances add up to the amount reported by Daedalus.
  • The 12 word recovery phrase is lost completely, not even partial information is available.
  • A spending password has been set and lost completely.
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I’m not a Dev person but don’t I need something to connect the password program to my wallet to try all the options?

I worry that I made the password hard.
But I have some words that I can try with the password program, that I think I could have used.

Yes. The below information is correct.
I had one transfer from exchange to the wallet if it helps.

I hope it’s not that easy. Otherwise if someone steals your laptop, they can just brute-force the spending password and take your ADA.

Everything is hackable.
That’s why there’s a paper wallet.

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What do I need to backup from my wallet?
Secrets-1.0 and Wallet-1.0 folders?

It’s overkill, but I would compress the entire Deadalus application directory (which holds the two dirs you mentioned) into an archive, because I’m not entirely sure. Also save your Daedalus version number and the current state of code from GitHub:

A rudimentary cracking tool could be written to see how it all works and to be 100% sure which file is needed, but a decent and totally unknown password would be unbreakable with current technology. :slightly_frowning_face:

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