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.
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Crypto Wallet Recovery is very useful, I thought its impossible
good job