Unable to access seed with large balance. Please help, preferably IOTA team?

[rain]

Hey, unfortunately I made a stupid mistake two weeks ago. My friend and I were not aware how the seeds work, and I though that the wallet will only login with a generated seed. I was not aware that a seed can basically be any combination (of 81 characters)...

There is a small chance that I manually typed it in which case there may be typos in the seed I sent the funds to, but I am really afraid I may have accidentally had something else in my clipboard, and since I am using PC and it was 2 weeks ago, I have no idea what that could have been.

I have already confirmed that the seed I have is not the seed with the balance. When my friend sent it, I saw the funds and someone checked the address he sent to and the funds are confirmed still there. I thought I had tested the seed after I had written it down, since the written down version is all I have, but looks like that may not be the case. I may have tested it before I received funds, thinking that the fact that I logged in = the seed is correct (since as above, I wasn't aware that virtually any combination works).

I do not blame at all IOTA or the team for my mistake, although I have to say it is a bit unfortunate that the system doesn't have some sort of double confirmation to be more "idiot-proof"; I can't imagine that I am the only one who has had a similar problem. I feel awful about what happened obviously.

I would really, really appreciate if someone from the IOTA team could get in touch with me, or if someone can put me in touch to discuss more details. I don't feel it's particularly relevant to write the exact amount here but it is very significant. I am more than happy to offer an appropriate reward/bounty. I'm not really sure where else to try, I contacted IOTA support but whilst they were helpful, they couldn't really do much and informed me they are a community run site.

[phx]

Hey D. I am so sorry to hear that your introduction to IOTA was tainted by this misfortune! I hope that you are able to recover your IOTAs, and that you are still excited to participate in the future of the Internet of Things!

Real quick, I want to confirm something: Did your friend send the IOTAs to your seed, or did they send IOTAs to an address that you generated after logging into the wallet using your seed?

If they sent IOTAs to your seed:

This is unfortunately not a recoverable situation, because what your friend actually did was send IOTAs to an address that has the same value as your seed.

The only way to recover the funds would be to find the seed that can generate that address, which is virtually impossible (this is by design; otherwise, anyone could steal IOTAs by guessing other people's seeds!).

If they sent IOTAs to an address generated using your seed:

Depending on the version of the IOTA wallet that you are running, there is potentially some good news here.

Since (I think) version 1.0.3, the wallet will not let you enter seeds with invalid characters (see here for more info), and it will warn you if your seed is not exactly 81 characters (hopefully, if this warning did appear, you took note and double-checked that you entered the seed correctly!).

So, depending on what you had in your clipboard at the time, it's probable that your seed is not completely random (e.g., if you had a URL or some text with punctuation in it, the wallet wouldn't have let you use that as a seed).

The first thing I would do is look at the seed you wrote down and note any characters that might be ambiguous. E.g., if the letter is smudged, or maybe you misread an "I" as an "L", etc. Try some different variations, and see if you can find the seed that you typed in.

There's also a possibility that you just mistyped one or more characters. This will be a lot harder to recover from because it's impossible to know which characters are correct and which are incorrect.

This is where you might need to turn to a "seed recovery" service (somebody who's written a program that can guess different combinations of typos based on a known seed). I don't think any exist at the moment, but your IOTAs aren't going anywhere, so hang onto your seed — at some point there should be somebody who can help!

[rain]

Thank you very much for your detailed response.
This has obviously been a nightmare and whilst I accept responsibility I do wish future versions will be more newbie/noob friendly.
Fortunately, he sent for sure to an address generated by the seed, and I specifically actually saw the balance in its entirety before I closed the wallet. I am trying to figure out what possibly could have been on the clipboard at the time.

Right before logging in "successfully" I copy and pasted a file name and not the seed as intended, and noticed the "warning" that it had invalid characters minutes before logging into the seed with my funds so I'd like to think I would have noticed if a similar warning came up but I can't be sure. I used 1.3.0.
Right before I upgraded I generated the seed on 1.2.5.

I'm really not sure if I wrote it manually or copy and pasted when I logged into the seed with all my funds although I'm leaning towards copy and pasted (which should mean it's less likely a "typo"/variant of my seed with a couple differences. But there really aren't many possibilities of what would have been on my clipboard in between the addresses of the two seeds and the seed itself.. I even checked my browsing history which shows I didn't open pages during this time.

I tried a few variations of what my seed "could" be based on unclear writing etc but I think there's a reasonably high chance I copy and pasted something. Tough to figure out what that is though, two weeks later! I do think it's very possible I can get this sorted but it seems like it could be very difficult.

[frha]

and it will warn you if your seed is not exactly 81 characters

Not exactly true. The 2.3.0-wallet does not complain if the seed is between 60 and 81 characters. Therefore it's just as easy to accidently hit backspace and delete last char at the same time as you press enter, and thus 'change' the last char to a 9.
So when you manually type the seed, you can actually skip quite a few letters without the wallet complaining.

I have done som programming on this, but it takes quite some time to run through even with only testing for two dropped characters...
I Have tried to help three others with this program, but still not found the correct seed. So when you combine the possibility to have skipped letters and wrote some wrong (O and Q can easliy be swapped) the possible combinations starts to grow very fast. And since it's not sure wether older wallets may have generated addresses at sec-level 1 or 3, it will take time to process these seed-recovery-tools...

[frha]

I'm leaning towards copy and pasted

If you didn't copy the whole seed, you could do some small tests where you drop the last caharcter, last two and so on a few times, and possibly do the same with the first ones. current wallet is OK with the seed beeing 60 chars long.

[phx]

Not exactly true. The 2.3.0-wallet does not complain if the seed is between 60 and 81 characters. Therefore it's just as easy to accidently hit backspace and delete last char at the same time as you press enter, and thus 'change' the last char to a 9.
So when you manually type the seed, you can actually skip quite a few letters without the wallet complaining.

Really? Wow! That sounds like a significant bug in the wallet! Did someone log that on the Wallet bug tracker?

[frha]

Don't think it's a bug, its a documented feature. At least I read somewhere about that 60 chars was considered 'secure enough'... and then the wallet pads with 9's to nake use of the internally hardcoded length of 243 (81*3) integers in the key.

Point is - this wallet is alpha-version - at the best (at least in the UX-world). It should not be a problem using the same method as in the android-wallet (an any altcoin-wallet) - store the seed in an encrypted file, and protect it with a password..

[vondes]

How we can use It with mrecorder.com on Android, and can teach how to improve skill in this application?