I must have written my 24 seed words incorrectly, options?

Question

I have 24 seed words for a wallet (greenaddress), and also had access to that wallet with a simple passphrase on my machine. I wrote down two backups of the seed words which are identical, yet I must have made a mistake as it isn't working to restore the wallet. This is after my passphrase failed 3 times and was reset which was odd.

Anyway entering it into greenadress tells me nothing except "log in failed". So I downloaded electrum to try and restore there. Entering the words into their text box doesn't allow me to click on "next" with no error warning. There are in fact 24 words so I'm assuming I misspelled one or put one out of order.

What are my options here for most efficiently finding out which it is and regaining access to my funds?

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 14 '18 at 21:13

2

If your old wallet supports the default BIP-0039, you could look up all the words and check them here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/english.txt

Maybe you wrote "odd" instead of "add" or smth. like this down.

answered Jan 14 '18 at 21:13

hardfork

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Is there some code that can do this for you more effectively? I also have one of the associated addresses if that helps. – Ariel Deschapell Jan 15 '18 at 03:19
@ArielDeschapell I am pretty sure that all valid seed word combinations result in a wallet. I also understand that it is possible to have the same seed words with a different checksum word and get a different wallet so, they must be entered accurately. You can try this answer for an explanation of brute forcing probability. – Willtech Mar 18 '18 at 02:39

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 28 '20 at 06:09

First off, you should check that each of the words you wrote down is in fact a valid word as mentioned by ndsvw.

We can automate this with a bit of python and this library.

from btctools.HD import WORDS


known_words = [
    'glory'
    'habit',
    'limit',
    'slow',
    'yard',
    'clog',
    'cylinder',
    'axis',
    'enough',
    'only',
    'magic',
    'hair'
]

total_phrases = []
for word in known_words:
    if word not in WORDS:
        print(f'Found INVALID word in list: {word}')

In this case we see the following output:

Found INVALID word in list: cylinder

This should send you down the right path. If you find a word that isn't valid and can't find a similar valid one that makes sense then I suggest checking out some related posts where people are missing one word from their mnemonic phrase:

I must have written my 24 seed words incorrectly, options?

2 Answers2