Need advice from Bitcoin community about a 2012 wallet recovery.
My client has a Bitcoin address from July 2012. We have a 12 word seed and the password, but nothing works. All 12 words exist in both the Blockchainwalletv3 list and the BIP39 list, and no word is missing.
But when we try to recover it on the Blockchain.info recovery page or other tools, it always says invalid seed phrase.
We also tried several recovery tools from GitHub including btcrecover:
https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover
https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover
But still no success.
The confusing part is that some sources say 12 word seed was very rare in 2012, and some say it did not exist at that time and only wallet identifier, password and wallet json were used.
Because of this we are thinking maybe my client misunderstood something about the seed, but the 12 words look valid and match the word lists.
Right now we are only trying seed shuffle and some brute force tests, but honestly we almost lost hope.
If anyone from the community has any idea, suggestion, or experience with old 2012 Blockchain wallets, please share. Maybe there is something we are missing.
Thank you.
Trying to recover a July 2012 Bitcoin wallet need advice
byu/Comfortable-Ant-3250 inBitcoin
Posted by Comfortable-Ant-3250
4 Comments
It happened to me, likely the seed is not an actual bip39 implementation, it often happened to earlier wallet apps as Electrum, try to get the same wallet app from an archive at the time your seed was generated.
Tell me if you success.
Mnemonic wasn’t an option until 2013. If you have “identifier” that’s likely blockchain.info old school setup.
Do not enter things randomly into websites or apps outside a secure environment. The words are probably unrelated to the identifier and json blockchain.info stuff. That wallet has not be recommended for a decade+. Whatever option they offer to recover their identifier based old wallets is your best bet from the info provided.
12-word seeds weren’t common in 2012. Thereis a good chance the seed might be something else like a backup phrase or recovery hint
Can’t help you with this but please, as a professional, do NOT input your customer’s seed (or any others for the matter) on an internet website.