Lost Password Recovery Strategy?

Years back, I kinda messed up my Bitcoin situation. Searched everywhere, and I found a couple of files. They're split into two parts, each 20 characters. It's machine-generated, just numbers and uppercase letters. But I've only got the first half.

Honestly, brute forcing this is gonna be impossible. Even with 20 known characters, the entropy is too high. Just think: 36 options for each unknown character after the first half. The calculations are wild.

You got a point with the math, but there’s a mistake there. Private keys are case sensitive. That changes the total number of combinations. So considering upper and lower case letters plus numbers? The permutations go way up.

@FindingNemo, OP didn’t mention if it includes lowercase. If it’s strictly uppercase and numbers, then yeah, those calculations are on point. Still, brute forcing? Not happening. Zero chance in any reasonable timeframe.

I don’t know, man. I’m iffy about all uppercase private keys. Can you explain why this scenario is actually possible? It seems kinda like a rare case to me.

We can make our private keys manually in different ways. Rolling dice, converting that to binary, then generating the address. But regarding OP's case, even if we ignore case sensitivity, breaking this is just impossible.

Got it. Now I see how certain key generation methods are safer. But since his method has lower entropy, it's still a bad situation. Both can’t be brute-forced anyway.

1. Seems like you made a brainwallet with a 40-character string. 2. You split it into two files for safekeeping, I guess? Try recovering that missing file. If you found one, keep looking. Brute force just isn't an option.

Just to clear things, I’m not after private keys but the password to my Electrum wallet. I split the password into two parts, forgot about it, and now only have the first half.

Ah, I see. You've got an Electrum wallet encrypted with a passphrase using AES. But brute forcing it? Not likely, complexity is through the roof.

So you’re saying you forgot your Electrum backup passphrase and split it up? Like having "Mypass" in one file and "Phrase" in another? That sounds messy. Can’t brute force zip files easily, though.

This seems like a follow-up to your last issue, yeah? But you're talking about missing passwords here. Just to clarify, do you still have your private keys? If you’ve got the keys, importing them should be easy, regardless of the zip issue.