so I've had number of people ask me you
know can I recover my seed phrase if
I've lost one or two or three or four or
even six of the words sometimes even 12
so this video is going to look at how to
use BTC recover to recover your seed
phrase if you know that you have a
couple of words missing from your seed
phrase and especially if you know which
words those are and as always if you
haven't really done so hit subscribe and
that way you can stay in the loop about
future content I make to help you to
find your way in the crazy and often
hostile environment that is
cryptocurrency so if you find yourself
in a situation where you're missing some
words and don't know what to do this guide's
is going to look at that though there
are some important notes to start and
that's firstly don't ignore the security
of your recovery environment I cover
this in the previous videos on using BTC
recover
you will need part of your 24 word
seed even if it has errors for the
purposes of this video I think we should
say the realistic limit is really
recovering three missing words
any little more than that and you're
talking a recovery that's going to take
months and years to do I will do a
future video looking at the realistic
limits of using BTC recover but if you
have say less than 6 words missing or
even if you do have 6 words missing it's
the kind of thing that isn't realistic
today but could very well become
realistic in the next decade or two so
if you've lost like five or six of your
words you know don't throw the seed
phrase away but also understand that
this might be something that will be
more doable in the future even if it's
not doable today and if you're someone
who split your 20 forward seed in half
and has lost 12 of those words I'm sorry
there is simply no practical recovery
option available to you at all and I
find it hard to conceive of a situation
where it would even be recoverable at
any point in the next century it simply
gets far too complex far too quickly
like always for this you'll need to know
at least one address that you had used
with this wallet the setup is the same
for all of these videos that I do you
need to set up your environment you to
download BTC recover if you are trying
to use it with litecoin addresses you'll
need to use my more recent Fork of BTC
recover and we'll look at the command
line options to run BTC recover so don't
just double click on it because it
probably won't do what you want
so the first
sample we have is one where you are
trying to use BTC recover and you've
lost the last two words for whatever
reason okay so for this first example
were just going to use this command here
which is basically the same as what I'd
used in a previous video looking at
using this with Litecoin but the key
thing here is we need to tell it that
there are two typos and we also need to
tell that those two typos we want our
big typos so that means like completely
different words not just looking for one
character that's wrong or something like
that
so we'll just say we want that to run we
don't have a wallet file we're just
using a standard BIP39 thing we don't
have an xpub key we're gonna use this
litecoin address and we are going to use
this best guess of the mnemonic so we've
replaced the last two words which were
just completely unknown with a number
and that's just going to tell BTC
recover immediately that that is an
invalid word that is an invalid word so
it's going to target the errors there
there we go found result 30 seconds so
it's correctly identified the last two
words the other example that I'll look
at is something which I've had one or
two people ask about and that's
essentially where someone is trying to
recover a missing word but they don't
know which words so maybe their word
list only has 23 words written on it
because you know might sound odd but
some people will use this as a security
mechanism so you know deliberately leave
words out of their seed phrase as sort
of like a DIY security kind of thing but
had subsequently lost or forgotten the
word that was missing so the approach
here when there's one word that is
missing
so essentially methodically try and work
out where the gap would have been so
I've just got the first two steps that
you might do for that and we'll run
through it here so again the same
command we're using before except this
time we had 23 words so we're only going
to worry about one typo and one big typo
so it was popped up there and what we're
gonna say is we don't have any of these
things we're looking for this litecoin
address and our first guess is going to
be that they had 23 words and that maybe
they just left the first one off so
we'll just put that in position 1 and
put the number 1 there simply so you
keep track of it yourself when you're
doing this it'll run through there it'll
exhaust it a couple of seconds and say
not see not found bummer so not to be
deterred we run the command again this
time we said well maybe the word that
was missing is in between element and
sniff so we put the number two in there
so we don't have that we don't next pub
key the address we want is this one and
the best guess mnemonic is this so we'll
let that run and bingo found it so again
this seems like an odd example but this
is just for those folks who have created
this situation for themselves and are
wondering how to get out of it and as we
can see here even just removing you know
two or three words from your passphrase
is something that can be recovered from
even if it is going to take a bit of
manual work for this kind of
situation here thanks for watching I
hope that was helpful
hit like if you think that other people
would find this video useful and hit
subscribe if you'd like to be kept in
the loop about future content I make
that helps people stay safe in the
crypto space and to recover if they get
into trouble if you have any questions
about this video or a topic that you'd
like me to cover just leave a reply
