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Comment by lossolo | Hacker News Reader

I can recommend Hashcat, used it myself for cracking bitcoin wallet using multiple GPUs. Great tool if you forget your password and it works with so many applications/file formats.

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I thought cracking a bitcoin wallet was technically beyond the limitations of today's computing power??

If you have enough of the bitcoin wallet, cracking the rest is possible with todays resources.

If he was able to crack any random bitcoin wallet, I don't think he'd be sharing it on this website.

Ahhh ok! haha yeah I was going to say :)

You need the entire encrypted wallet so you can extract the password hash from it even then you need to know your password to the point of only 3-4 variable chars to be able to effectively crack it or use a pretty simple password that is either moderately short Witt a small key space or is in a dictionary.

Cracking the private key of a bitcoin address is beyond todays computing power.

I think the scenario here is that he had an encrypted wallet file that he didn't have the password for. In that case, cracking it is only as hard as the password (in other words, relatively easy if he remembers the enough about his password).

I had encrypted wallet.dat file.

And I imagine if he mined bitcoin that he had enough GPU power to speed up hashcat cracking process :)

its likely his own wallet and he had a good idea of what the password was likely to be, rather than just brute forcing a random unknown wallet.

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