Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: btc privatekey with lost the last 6 characters
by
o_e_l_e_o
on 05/02/2023, 13:57:11 UTC
i have 1 btc privatekey with lost the last 6  characters...i know that there are 2 btc but i can't remember address...is there 1 solution?  thanks
This should be very easy to brute force, even without knowing the address. I would also use btcrecover as ETF has suggested above.

What format is your private key in? Is it hexadecimal (only containing the characters 0-9 and A-F), or is it in WIF (containing a mix of numbers and letters, and starting with "5", "K", or "L")?

If it is hexademical, then 6 missing characters is only 16^6 = 16.8 million possibilities. Even an average home computer could exhaust this search space in a matter of minutes. If it is WIF, then the last 5 or 6 characters are checksum, so the number of actual possibilities will be <100 and completely trivial to brute force.

Do you know if the address begins with "1","3", or "bc1"? It will be quicker to not have to derive and look up all three address types, but still easy enough to check all three if you don't know.