I'm not sure if I understand you correctly, but nope, OP said that it's all words from mnemonic wordlist. He basically failed to document his own obfuscation or correct pattern how to find his mnemonic wallet recovery words in his grid of words.

Maybe his recovery words are at prime number positions in his extended list of words or something similar, like jumping like a chess bishop on a grid of words. Possibilities are vast and I always wonder why people invent something but fail to document it. Because one thing is for sure: you will forget whatever you invented when you don't use or repeat it regularly.


Not much to add to this. Add complexity and/or obscurity and fail to document it for you or your heirs and you have a recipe for desaster and loss.

Whatever you do, you should verify if you can successfully recover your wallet(s). If you have your non-standard procedure(s) only in your head, it's almost guaranteed you will forget something and shoot yourself in your foot. Don't do this, apply KISS principles!


Indeed, I would think it should be possible to count the words and tell the exact number. Not that it would make much of a difference. Without any clues, you can't really brute-force this. You don't have the time and/or the energy to exhaust the search space.

I have a few questions.

• How many words do you have written on the paper. Please count them. Is it 30? Is it 50? Is it some other number?
• Is there any pattern to how they are written? Alphabetical? Length (number of letters)? Vertical list? Horizontal, comma separated? Around the circumfrence of a circle? Something else?
• How many bitcoins will you gain access to once you solve this puzzle?
• Do you have/know any of the Bitcoin addresses associated with the puzzle?
• How much did you pay to purchase this puzzle? Where did you buy it? How did the seller contact you

Recovery through brute force is only possible if the search space is small enough that can be checked within reasonable time.

So the first step is to shrink that search space as much as possible. So for example you have to first figure out how many words you actually have. Why is it a big range (30 to 50) instead of a fixed value?! Just count them already...

Then start checking them against a word list trying to eliminate invalid ones to reduce that search space.
But to do that, you first need to figure out how you created the mnemonic in first place. Although there is a popular and most used word-list standardized by BIP-39[1] but other wallets like Electrum, blockchain.info, etc. have used different word lists and algorithms in the past.

Knowing the wallet/tool used is also necessary to know the mnemonic algorithm when recovering your keys. After all you have to derive the child key to check if it is valid.
It would also help if you knew the version of that wallet/tool that you used. For example Electrum has changed its algorithm 2 times if I'm not mistaken. Knowing the year or version of it would help narrow down the algorithm.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/bip-0039-wordlists.md

P.S. of course if you have "bought" this from some random user on the internet telling you it holds a treasure, you most probably threw your money away and are also wasting other people's time who would try to help you.