Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Claim the coins challenge - The typo scenario
by
joan
on 30/06/2011, 14:39:22 UTC
This challenge is related to import/export of private keys and wallet and creating "off the radar" addresses.
I don't know if it can be done. (I still have the correct private key of course)

Scenario:
- I used a tool or the client to generate a completely off the radar address.
- I wrote the private key on a piece of paper and stored it in a safe.
- I secured some of my savings to the corresponding address.
- We are now some years later and I want to import it back and spend my savings.

Unfortunately, it looks like I made a typo while writing down the private key ! This is all the information that I have left :

privkey: 5JjNVWPaRTPg1i4etqfPHFnsDZ1Js5qBYXFH9G4jC2Drb6kERsm
addr: 18j6vJ39JFtHtgwNninSk4L61VzRhXBmoc (bbe)
balance: 0.10 BTC

hints:
- The address is valid, the privkey has a typo, the typo is not in the checksum bytes.

I don't know if this can be done due to the double SHA256 used for integrity check. Maybe we should have correcting codes instead (A non working destination address due to a typo is not very critical, but a non working privkey is).

Idea:
Maybe we could have a validateprivkey rpc call like there is a validateaddress. This way I might have checked earlier and realized the backup wasn't valid.

Reference threads
- Private key and wallet export/import
- Bitcoin Off The Grid (shell script to generate privkeys)