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helium / miner

Miner for the helium blockchain
Apache License 2.0
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wallet.key restoration #1734

Open alanbumble opened 2 years ago

alanbumble commented 2 years ago

this might not be the right place to ask this but I just wanted to give it a try...

I created a crypto wallet and with a lot of my investments and staked them as validators. As a backup plan, I then put wallet.key file which contains the private key from my Macbook to a USB flash drive.

As you would have guessed, my Macbook was lost and I can no longer access the key file on it. I tried to recover my key on the USB flash drive by plugging it on other computers (both Windows and Mac) but I only found 186B of random characters. (I was able to read the key file from the flash drive when I created it... cat wallet.key, vim wallet.key)

I guess it would have to do with a) some encoding I was missing when trying to read it. b) some I/O encoding diff with Mac&Windows. or c) the key file on the flash drive is somehow changed when a Windows machine tried to open it....

In any case, I hope c) is not possible and what I wrote to the flash drive persists as 01s so I can still find a correct way to restore it with correct encoding algorithms.

Any suggestions or even pointing out things that will not work are much appreciated!

arduino43 commented 2 years ago

Have you tried using helium-wallet-rs? "186B of random characters" - this is expected; I don't know how you were reading the plain text key.