Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: Missing 10 Characters in WIF Private Key - Can I recover them?
by
NotATether
on 30/12/2021, 09:31:08 UTC
Keep in mind that this method is significantly slower than to simply test each character permutation.
You see each character at the start of the string (from left) converts to a much bigger integer than any character from the end of the string. So even the difference between 1 char missing becomes huge.
Take the following example:
Ky**DfuvLpt8eSb8EQzhZwDCQeCaycKeAoxJMY8pfPZXmn3uB38R
Even though only 2 characters are missing the difference between Ky11Df... and KyzzDf... as integer is
Code:
13491826005831086771641399365157222283117801812915393869332949675679483454208
While the permutations are only 3364.

The program I'm using is able to skip-count so I think that can mitigate the speed penalty. So I can jump through each next value, adding the huge difference to the previous each time to get the next.