Bitcoin Lost: The Heroic and Maddening World of Crypto Wallet Recovery

David Veksler of Walletrecovery.info has seen it all. News.Bitcoin.com caught up with the man many in the ecosystem call upon when the ‘you-know-what’ hits the fan. Lost seeds. Fires. Seemingly unrecoverable hard drives. Mr. Veksler views the impossible as an interesting problem, a puzzle to crack. As more folks onboard into cryptocurrency, and as prices inch up, there is a lot at stake when things go wrong with a wallet holding precious digital coins.

Crypto Wallet Recovery Comes in Many Forms
News.bitcoin.com (BC): Let’s jump right into it. What are some instances where cryptocurrency recovery seemed doomed?

David Veksler (DV): The family of an early Bitcoin enthusiast who died in a farm accident asked me to recover his Bitcoin fortune. I had to [search] through the entirety of his digital life to find his Bitcoin wallet backup. Several of his laptops had been burned in a fire and the data on the drives had to be extracted from the burned out shells.

[In another instance a] customer forgot the password to his Doge wallet. All he remembered was that the password was a Doge meme. I wrote a Doge meme generator which created a database of every possible Doge meme (over 8 million). This wasn’t especially hard, just a fun project.

Most cryptocurrencies based on Bitcoin Core use a BerkeleyDB database to store the wallet data. Many of my cases involve recovering private keys from a corrupt database. Sometimes my existing tools can directly export the keys from the database file. My most difficult recovery involved an especially corrupt Litecoin database. I had to compile a custom build of the BerkeleyDB tools to reconstruct the wallet enough for it to be salvaged.