It's been a while since I've been a part of the bitcoin project. Got extremely bitter after Gox collapsed since I had 90% of my holdings on there. After a recent attic cleaning, I found my old drive, which is supposed to have the other 10% (I believe it was in the thousands of bitcoins, definitely more than one thousand, not exactly sure). I tried every possible password combination I could remember, but it didn't work. The only thing I know for sure is that the password is 10 characters long.
This isn't feasible for me to bruteforce on my home computer, so I was wondering if anybody has experience with smarter algorithms that would be able to decode my wallet passphrase in a shorter amount of time (I'm hoping within a week or so). I've been in a financial crunch recently, and to be honest, had mostly forgotten about cryptocurrencies, so finding my old drive was a very welcome surprise. Feels good to be back in the game. Also, if anyone has contacts with some good wallet recoverers, please let me know, and I will do my best to arrange for an in-person meeting.
Since you seem a bit unaware of the size of your holdings you should first parse the wallet file to see if there is any bitcoin at all.
There are several tools on github, easiest to use is pywallet, you can get it
https://github.com/jackjack-jj/pywalletIf you decide to crack it yourself try btcrecover (also on github) or if you have access to gpus get hashcat , you can read more about hashcat at hashcat.net
If you want to know more I will be doing a keynote regarding wallet recovery at malta blockchain summit in a few months (as I did in May with Ledger CEO)
ps. even with a decent rig a 10 character password will take a while, so your best bet is using a dictionary attack with some basic rules, or seup btcrecover to do variations of the passwords you believe you used.
/KX