I have a question. Recently there was a flood and a notebook containing a offline wallet was damage and it destroyed part of a WIF private key, so now I basically have:
Kw**********(I have the next 40 characters, just not posting for obvious reasons), so I am missing 10 characters in all.
I also have the public key. Is it possible to use this software to start a search at Kw... and iterate over the missing 10 characters with the known 40 characters also in the key.
For example : 1GuqEWwH5iRZ89oo5xw26FqmyZFMWZrtPi - is the public address
and for the WIF private key I'd have Kw**********JzXaqU2rcFSoaLaehAQHqoQX1cWCo92tAA3ihLJ7
Any advice is appreciated and examples are even more appreciated
Thank you,
S.
It's a good thing that you have end of WIF format data where the checksum is. You have to first Base58 decode the string (with corrupted part, or you can replace the corrupted part with zeros). Since you are doing it only once you can use this online tool:
https://www.browserling.com/tools/base58-decodeOnce you have decoded number you can use the checksum to quickly check the possible missing values, if the checksum does not match you do not need the other calculations to get public key and check against it.
This is enormous speed-up, this is doable even on CPU, no need for GPU.
I doubt that you have some ready made tool for this second step, have to do some work yourself to code checking the missing values against the checksum. Good luck!
Edit:
Just tried it with some test values, you have to do Base58 Decode for all possible versions of missing values, not only once, string before corrupted characters stays the same but Base58 Encode changes all values after the corrupted place.
However, this is still much, much faster then generating Public key, doable on CPU for sure.
I believe I tried this with CPU and it was going to take a crazy amount of years to go through all combos. So perhaps I am doing something wrong. I am willing to pay a bounty for any help and code examples provided.
S.