Bitcoin Core Password Issues

What’s up with my Bitcoin Core password? I’ve tried a bunch of versions down to 0.6.2 on a Windows 7 VM and just keep getting error -14. I swear the password is right, but I noticed some ckeys and a 32-byte vMasterKey. Is this some kind of IV DecryptSecret() issue due to updates? I found people online who fixed it by downgrading Bitcoin Core, but I couldn’t get it to work. Anyone else had this issue? What’s the fix?

Check your wallet folder, dude. You might have multiple wallet files hanging around. If you find more than one, try to import them manually. Just go to File > Open Wallet, and pick the other wallet file to see if that works. Also, did you upgrade to version 30.0 or 30.1 recently? There were some bugs reported with those versions affecting wallet files.

Thanks for the reply! But I don’t think this is about importing an old wallet from 2012. I feel like Bitcoin Core just can’t decrypt all the ckeys due to some cryptography glitch. It’s only decrypting half of them. The error message is just ‘password is wrong’ when I haven’t changed anything. I hoped someone else has faced this and found a solution.

If you mean the IV for each encrypted prvKey, those should come from the hash of their associated pubKeys stored in your wallet. Since half of your private keys are working, it seems the AES Key is decrypted fine from the Master Key and your passphrase. The wallet.dat file can’t save two sets of keys separately, so your decryption process should be okay. Maybe it’s a corruption issue instead.

You’re onto something with that corruption idea. My old Toshiba Qosmio was acting up back in 2012 and it might’ve messed with the wallet during a save. I’ve tried the initial IV from the hash bytes, but now I’m stuck on parsing issues. I found the wallet among others on my Qosmio’s HDD. One was fine, I moved 0.08 BTC a while back because that one had no password, but this one’s been a nightmare.

Good point about narrowing it down, but it’s not something you can easily replicate. Plus, memory can be sketchy, so we’re just guessing here. The program you used for the half-decrypted keys isn’t mentioned. You could try the ‘salvage’ command on a copy of your wallet.dat file, just don’t do it without a backup. If it’s a parsing issue from wallet database corruption, those failed ckeys might still be intact.