Part of the CustodyStress archive of observed Bitcoin custody incidents
Passphrase unavailable
Cases in this category involve wallets protected by a passphrase that could not be recovered. Even where the seed phrase was available, passphrase unavailability blocked access.
Passphrase unavailability differs from seed unavailability in that it often arises years after setup, when memory of an infrequently used passphrase has faded. Cases in this category frequently involve users who understood the concept of a passphrase but underestimated the precision required to reproduce it exactly. Even small variations in capitalization, spacing, or punctuation produce a different wallet.
217 observed cases
Blocked
152 (70%)
Constrained
2 (1%)
Survives
51 (24%)
Indeterminate
12 (6%)
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet 2017
Mobile or software wallet
A Bitcoin investor who had generated a high-entropy passphrase using a dice-rolling method in 2013 could not locate their character conversion table in August 2
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet (2017)
Mobile or software wallet
A September 2017 forum case describes a retired teacher who had set a wallet passphrase in 2014 and recorded it in code in the margin of a book. When they retri
PayPal's forced password reset cycle had since caused them to change the PayPal
Mobile or software wallet
A user documented in October 2017 that they had used their old PayPal password as their Bitcoin Core wallet passphrase in 2012. PayPal's forced password reset c
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet (2017)
Mobile or software wallet
An October 2017 forum case describes a user who had encoded their passphrase in a personal shorthand cipher. By 2017 they had forgotten the cipher key. The nota
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet 2017
Mobile or software wallet
A user found in November 2017 that they had misremembered a critical character in their wallet passphrase. After exhausting all memorable variants, they engaged
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet 2017
Mobile or software wallet
A Bitcoin holder who had generated a passphrase using an online entropy tool in 2013 found in November 2017 that the tool had changed its output format in a sub
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet 2017
Mobile or software wallet
A user in December 2017 discovered their wallet passphrase hint—stored on a sticky note—had faded completely over four years of sunlight exposure. The hint had
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet 2017
Mobile or software wallet
A user found in December 2017 that they had stored only the first three characters of their passphrase as a 'hint' in a notes file. They remembered the passphra
Passphrase unavailable — exchange custody (2017)
Exchange custody
An exchange account holder who had not logged in since 2014 found in September 2017 that the exchange had migrated to a new authentication system. Their old pas
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet 2016
Mobile or software wallet
A user who had set their Bitcoin Core wallet passphrase in 2013 using a phrase from a personal journal found in January 2016 that the journal had been discarded
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet 2016
Mobile or software wallet
A user who had set their wallet passphrase based on a childhood address found in January 2016 that the street had been renamed as part of urban redevelopment. T
When they attempted recovery in February 2016 they found the mapping table they had
Mobile or software wallet
A user who had generated their wallet passphrase using a dice-based method in 2013 had documented only the die-roll sequence, not the final passphrase output. W
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet 2016
Mobile or software wallet
A developer who had generated a 'brain wallet' by hashing a personal motto found in March 2016 that the motto they remembered produced the wrong address. They b
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet 2016
Mobile or software wallet
A Bitcoin holder who had emigrated from their country of birth used their original national ID number as part of their wallet passphrase. When their home countr
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet 2016
Mobile or software wallet
A user who had used their email address as part of a wallet passphrase found in March 2016 that the email address domain had been decommissioned. They could no
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet 2016
Mobile or software wallet
A user who protected their wallet with a passphrase stored only in their password manager found in April 2016 that the password manager's company had shut down
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet 2016
Mobile or software wallet
A user discovered in May 2016 that the passphrase they had set for their Bitcoin wallet contained a special character that behaved differently across keyboard l
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet 2016
Mobile or software wallet
A user who had used a password manager to generate and store their wallet passphrase lost access to the password manager after the company shut down and deleted
They had changed their Wi-Fi SSID following a router upgrade in 2015 and could not
Mobile or software wallet
A forum post from June 2016 describes a user who had set a wallet passphrase as their Wi-Fi network's SSID combined with a number. They had changed their Wi-Fi
A flood damaged their home and the sheet music was destroyed.
Mobile or software wallet
A Bitcoin user stored their wallet passphrase by encoding it as musical notes in a piece of sheet music. In June 2016 a flood damaged their home and the sheet m
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet 2016
Mobile or software wallet
A forum user reported in July 2016 that they had set their Electrum passphrase to the serial number from a physical product they had since discarded. The produc
They could not recall whether the phone number used the old area code (before
Mobile or software wallet
A user set their Armory wallet passphrase to a combination of a former phone number and a now-forgotten PIN. In July 2016 they could not recall whether the phon
They did not realise TOTP codes rotate every 30 seconds and cannot be reproduced
Mobile or software wallet
A forum case from August 2016 describes a user who set their passphrase to the output of a time-based one-time password (TOTP) code, believing it would be uniqu
Passphrase unavailable — software wallet 2016
Mobile or software wallet
A Bitcoin holder who encrypted their wallet with a passphrase that used a foreign language word they had learned during a holiday found they could no longer rec
They knew the dates but had used multiple possible formatting conventions and could not
Mobile or software wallet
A user documented in October 2016 that they had set their wallet passphrase to a combination of their children's birthdates in a format they could no longer rec
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