Passphrase unavailable — Bitcoin Core (2024)

A 2024 recovery case involved a Bitcoin Core wallet.dat file that had been encrypted in 2017 with a password the holder could no longer remember precisely. The wallet had been backed up to multiple external drives, all of which survived. The holder retained a partial memory of the password—they remembered it was a combination of a pet's name, a year, and a special character but could not recall the order or case. Wallet Recovery Services ran a targeted attack testing combinations of the remembered elements and recovered access after approximately three days of GPU computation. The recovery was one of the more straightforward cases given the partial password memory.