Forgotten wallet.dat Password: 13.8 BTC Locked Since 2013
IndeterminateWallet passphrase was unavailable — whether access was ultimately recovered is not known.
On 2 March 2018, a Bitcoin holder identified as fabriciofenenga posted to the Bitcoin Technical Support forum seeking password recovery assistance for a wallet.dat file created in 2013. The wallet contained 13.81155374 BTC, valued between $110,000–$220,000 USD at March 2018 prices. The owner had completely forgotten the access password but retained one critical detail: the password was exactly 6 characters long, consistent with their password practices at the time. The wallet address 1ADAf5nyrPwfe7chRhch5W7z6EAL27qZ6b was publicly disclosed alongside the owner's email address.
Community response was swift and knowledgeable. Experienced forum members including HCP, Welsh, and BenOnceAgain recommended the open-source tool btcrecover, which specializes in brute-force and token-based password attacks against Bitcoin wallets. HCP noted that a 6-character password should be cracked in 'hours if not minutes' on average consumer hardware, provided standard ASCII character sets were used. The consensus strongly favored self-service recovery using btcrecover rather than outsourcing to specialist services.
Alternative recovery paths were also discussed. Chironexxx and boy130 referenced walletrecoveryservices.com as a third-party option, but user Sellingaccs criticized their 20% recovery fee—approximately $40,000 USD at the time—as 'utterly ridiculous.' Welsh and other responders warned explicitly against sharing the wallet.dat file with any third party, recommending instead extraction of only the master key if external assistance became necessary.
The thread contains no follow-up posts indicating whether the password was successfully recovered, partially recovered, or the bitcoins remain inaccessible. The case represents a theoretically tractable custody failure—short password length and available recovery tools—but outcome status remains entirely undocumented.
| Stress condition | Passphrase unavailable |
| Custody system | Software wallet |
| Outcome | Indeterminate |
| Documentation | Partial |
| Year observed | 2018 |
| Country | unknown |
Why passphrases fail years after they are set
The failure mode documented consistently across observed cases is temporal: the passphrase is set with confidence, not used for an extended period, and then cannot be reproduced exactly when needed. A single character difference — different capitalization, an added space, a slightly different special character — produces a different wallet with a zero balance. The holder may be certain they remember the passphrase while being unable to produce the exact string that was originally set.
What makes this particularly difficult is that there is no signal at the moment of failure. A wrong passphrase does not produce an error message. It opens an empty wallet. The holder sees a zero balance and typically concludes the passphrase was wrong — but without knowing which part was wrong, or by how much.
Professional passphrase recovery services can attempt permutations when the holder has partial information: they remember the general structure, typical patterns they use for passwords, the approximate length, or that it included a specific word. Recovery from total non-recollection is not feasible.
The preventive action is to store a passphrase record — not with the seed phrase, which would defeat its security purpose, but in a separate secure location accessible to the holder and potentially a designated recovery person. A passphrase that exists only in memory has a time horizon: it will eventually be forgotten, and the timing is unpredictable.
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