Long story short: I created a Litecoin paper wallet in 2017 and accidently lost the last 3 characters of the private key. I have 55/58 characters starting with 6. Does anyone have any idea how I could try to brute force the last 3 characters and with a specific Litecoin wallet? How many possible combinations are there, like 200k? Any help or ideas would be greatly “appreciated”.
A Litecoin WIF private key uses the base58 character set, that means if you lost the last 3 characters, that would be 58x58x58=195,112 combinations.
For a computer this isn’t much. Could probably write a script to do this. Also the other thing is that the last characters are actually the checksum, so this would reduce the calculations significantly. But since number of combinations is so low, and complexity of writing a script for this would be higher, I’d rather write a script to brute force the missing characters.
The one thing that confuses me is that you say that you have like 55/58 characters, and normally a WIF key present on a paper wallet only has 51/52 characters.
According to ChatGPT this python script should be able to brute force valid values.
from base58 import b58decode, Alphabet
from bitcoinlib.keys import Key
prefix = “6xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx” # 55 chars
alphabet = Alphabet.BITCOIN # the Base58 character set
for a in alphabet:
for b in alphabet:
for c in alphabet:
cand = prefix + a + b + c
try:
raw = b58decode(cand, alphabet=alphabet, verify_checksum=True)
except ValueError:
continue # bad checksum, skip
if raw[0] != 0xB0: # not a Litecoin WIF, skip
continue
k = Key(import_key=cand) # derives pubkey & address
print(“FOUND:”, cand, “→”, k.address)
# Compare k.address with the address that held your LTC
# If it matches, sweep it in a trusted wallet offline
raise SystemExit
1 Like
Last Seen Jul 24 and has not reemerged.
He did it, he lost hope or he just forgot about it. What else could it be? @Woodchuck
I’d suggest double-checking old backups or devices just in case. Sometimes the easiest fix is finding where the full key might have been stored.