Yes, my memory failed me when writing that he charged 15%, it is indeed 20%.

Having said that, he cracked my wallet in about 2 hours. I've been using btcrecover on it for 2 years with no luck.
I received an encrypted email saying that he was successful, and had already taken his 20%. He gave me the correct passphrase and urged me to move the coins to a different wallet and never
use the passphrase again.

I would not hesitate to use him again and have passed his URL along to friends and family.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Thank you to all who have taken the time to offer their helpful thoughts.

I think I am going to give walletrecoveryservices.com a try (Dave Bitcoin).
He charges nothing if unsuccessful and 15% if sucessful.

I will know if he was successful because there is only one unspent UTXO in the wallet, and I can monitor it.

He comes with a personal-use recommendation from Stephanie Murphy of The Bitcoin Talk podcast,
and interestingly, out of all the similar services online he is the only one who provides a PGP pubkey on his site
and pushes people to use it. If he scams me, I will let Stephanie know, and let her broadcast it.

I will report back here later on this. I am aware of the risks, and willing to accept them.

Thanks again.

I have a (thankfully) small wallet that I've been trying unsuccessfully to restore for awhile, mainly using btcrecover.

I see a few online services with impressive websites that offer to recover wallets and only charge a % if successful.

I'm curious if there is much experience with any online wallet recovery services within this group, and am looking for "reviews" of any experience with any of these services.

Please don't message/offer to try to recover  my wallet yourself. Im just interested in bona-fide experiences with any online services.

Thanks.

Seems like a waste of time to use random BIP words, as the seed word generation process involves checks, and many randomly generated combinations will be invalid.

Plus, even with a list of valid word combinations, it's a fools game in terms of odds.

I can't imagine that he said 4 words are enough for a BTC mnemonic.
Using the 2048 word BIP 39 list, each word represents 11 bits of entropy
Thus, 4 words = 44 bits of entropy.

44 bits of entropy can be brute-forced in a matter of months, even at a reasonable 1 million guesses/second.


At a minimum, if you consider your adversary to have an NSA-level (according to Snowden) 1 trillion guesses/second capablilty
you would need at least 7 words (77 bits of entropy) to make brute-forcing your mnemonic unlikely for at least your lifetime.

Electrum does, at least the desktop version.

Agreed. Also, real time/resident AV programs require unparalleled access to the most sensitive & vulnerable areas of your OS. I'd rather police my own browsing/downloading behavior than
 let AV software into my "perimeter"

I'll guess that most people who own BTC don't care what the US Govt or its agencies think.
That's part of the point of owning BTC.

Running the code from the bitcoincheaters.com URL through VIrusTotal gives a "phishing" alert from Fortinet, one of
the evaluator sites.

In my experience, generally speaking, the simpler the system, the more robust it is. Beginning traders make the mistake of trying to develop a system that is rarely wrong. There is no Holy Grail of systems.
The Holy Grail of trading is inside of you, in terms of knowing yourself and your emotional weakness, and working to trade in a way to minimize harm from your weaknesses.

You can knock yourself out trying to create a system that is rarely wrong....you start with perhaps a pair of moving averages, then when it shows some promise but is wrong a few times in a row, you add some other indicator...then another and another. The result is, at best a system that has been "curve-fitted" to your test data and is not robust in real trading. The other effect is that your new super 5 layer indicator system
filters out too many trades.

Here's what I mean: Every trader using a mechanical system, which is what the "turtles" used, should know his/her system's "expectancy". If I have 100 trades, 60 of them profitable with an avg profit of
$20...and 40 losing trades with an average loss of $18, my expectancy is (.60 * 20) - (.40 * 18) = $4.80 / trade. The beginner mistake is to add layers of filters to the system to try to raise the expectancy
higher. In doing so, if they succeed it usually results in fewer trades, so even though each trade is more profitable than before the system was modified, they make less money because their new trade selection
parameters are stricter and gives fewer trades.

Example: I have system A detailed above: Expectancy of $4.80 / trade and with those selection parameters I get 100 trades/year....so I make $480

I then tweak system A and manage to raise its expectancy to $7.00 / trade. This new system (B) with stricter selection rules to filter out more losers only
generates 60 trades a year. Even though each trade makes more $, it only makes $420 in the same amount of time that system A made $480

Accept that losing is part of profitable trading. Casino's dont mind losing b/c they know that time is on their side. All they want is more chances to let their
statistical edge work for them and eventually/inevitably make them profitable.

As for what time frames to trade....day trade, swing trade, trend trade...that's where knowing yourself and your risk tolerance and ability to sit tight on a trade is critical. If you find a system that works on a daily chart using a 20 day indicator...but you know you are more risk averse and want a shorter horizon, test the system using the same number of chart bars(20 for the daily example that
I just mentioned) using 20 bars of an hourly/30 min/15 min/5 minute chart as a starting point for your testing.

I have many years of experience in trading both in the CBOT bond pit and by computer, as well as designing profitable systems and backtesting. There is nothing magic about Dennis' system or Donchian Channels.
They did what anyone willing to work can do: Find a repeatable method that has a positive expectancy, apply aggressive money management rules to it, and trade it faithfully and consistently.

They picked people that they thought had personalities that would allow them to stick to the rules, which is critical for any "system".

Where things break down, and the problem with trading an otherwise profitable system that you havent developed yourself (with incorporated knowledge of yourself and your risk tolerance)
is that your brain won't let you follow ALL the rules, ALL the time.

For the vast majority of people, trading a system that someone else has developed is usually a fools game. It might be profitable on paper, and for the person that developed it, but if its
style and rules aren't compatible with your particular brand of "fear and greed" (which we all have), you're very likely to lose money.

Well said! Nice to see someone see through Mayer's disingenuous blather.

Can you open a terminal/CMD window and try to launch Electrum from there using the -verbose flag, in order to
see what goes on, including error messages while it tries to connect?

Not even sure if that would work using windows, but worth a try.

If it does work and you get info from the attempt, post it here and maybe someone will
see the problem. If not, try the electrum IRC channel on freenode. The people there
are very friendly and helpful
https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=electrum


As an afterthought, do you have all of the required python/dependencies installed on your W10 instance?

AFAIK, the easiest way would be to go to the site:
https://iancoleman.io/bip39/

Save the site to your HD or USB and run it from an offline computer.

Enter your 12 word seed and then, lower on the page, select the address format that you need to match the recv address

(BIP32/44/49/84)

and it should give you your xpub, xprv, all recv addresses and related private keys

For me, what works better is an air-gapped/never touched the internet VM in virtualbox , in which I've installed a downloaded and signature-verified copy of electrum as my cold wallet.

I put the related XPUB in my regular-use/online computer as a watching-only Electrum wallet.

A transaction is pretty easy....create the unsigned tx, put it on a trusted USB and insert to the cold VM...sign it, return it to the watching wallet, and broadcast.

I'm as paranoid as about anyone, so my Electrum wallet connects to my own Electrum Personal Server installed on my own full bitcoind node.

Easy, and secure.


I

Government:   Give me $1000 in gold and I'll give you a piece of paper to represent it.

100 years later, that piece of paper buys 1/100th of what it originally did.


1's and 0's also provide immensely better security and portability than paper.

Hence, bitcoin.


Why is the price down?

Because it got too high for the current level of adoption and understanding.
That doesnt mean it has no value or will never go up again.

Here's the basics. Using the 2048 word BIP39 list, each word represents 11 bits of entropy (2**11 = 2048). So a 12 word phrase has 132 bits of entropy, and therefore a 24 word phrase has 264 bits of entropy.

Looking at a 12 word phrase, that means there are 2**132 possible combinations = 5.444 x 10**39 possibilities.
A 24 word phrase has 2**256 possibililties, or 1.158 x 10**77

If you want to go the distance on this analysis, you can do the math as to how long either would take, assuming some # of guesses/second.

Either should give you comfort.

If you want to consider phrases other than 12 or 24 words, as long as you're using the BIP39 list just remember: #bits of entropy = #words * 11
and number of possible phrases = 2**(#bits of entropy)

If you or your friend is poking around a "found" usb with btc data...on a computer that you use regularly and/or with your personal wallet on it,  there's a really good chance that you'll soon be back here posting about how your wallet was hacked.
If I was you and had a wallet on a computer that you plugged that usb into, I'd move the funds to a different wallet on a different computer of phone, STAT.

You dont mention it, so I assume you didnt do this: anytime you find a USB and want to see whats on it, you should use a "live CD" boot on your computer.