In March 2014. CoinDesk.com confirmed that the MultiBit Bitcoin Wallet had passed 1.5 million downloads, making it the most popular wallet at that time. Other estimates have put the total number of MultiBit wallet downloads at two million.
The MultiBit wallet became so successful that the hardware wallet firm KeepKey purchased it. However, this purchase would mark the beginning of the end of the wallet - and KeepKey shuttered the Multibit wallet in 2017.
If you're interested in this history of Multibit, we recommend that you read What Happened to the Multibit Cryptocurrency Wallet?
If you still have funds trapped in a Multibit wallet, this article will help you get your funds out.
And, if at any point you'd like professional help, please contact us.
If you have your Multibit wallet -- or the computer that Multibit ran on --but you've forgotten or lost your password, this section can help you recover the password.
First, here's the information that we're going to help you collect:
A wallet backup is essentially just an encrypted version of your private key.
The Multibit Classic wallet backup can live in a few different locations, depending on which operating system you have:
Within that folder, the file will have a ".key" extension, and will typically look like this:
multibit-YYYYMMDDhhmmss.key
YYYYMMDDhhmmss refers to the date and time when you created the wallet.
For example if you created your wallet on May 14, 2013, your wallet backup might be named: multibit-20130514122037.key
If you open the file, it will look something like this:
U2FsdGVkX1+iKR5t81BMuTvkJ8jlfey9foALs0V4ayBdxFjwQSnbck8U6L4vt4Hqu/Cq0OHOJnfhZ9Xdkz6h1AczVLN5HSnKTWtV/BVLIwByJovdJD3CzjpMxdlzCfWA
Once you have found your .key file, you're ready to move to the next step: collecting password guesses.
It doesn't look like there were any specific requirements when creating the password for your Multibit backup wallet. While this doesn't give you much to go on, it also means that the password could have been quite short.
We recommend that you collect your password guesses in a spreadsheet. Typically, you'll want to include:
It's good to keep in mind that you should include password guesses, even if you think they aren't the right password. That's because people often mis-remember their passwords. You might be surprised how often we recover passwords, and the owner of the wallet swears that there's no way they could have used that password.
If passwords were created randomly, there's no need to include them in this list. You only want to collect password guesses that could reasonably be related to your lost password.
You can read much more about this process here.
Once you've collected every password guess you can think of, enter them into your Multibit wallet, one at a time. If it decrypts your wallet, you've found it!
If not, it's time to get professional help.
If you reach a point where you’re running out of new ideas to test, or you have simply exhausted your patience, don’t despair. We can take your wallet backup and your password guesses and try anywhere from billions to trillions of password variations in an attempt to find the correct password.
This process of "brute-forcing" a password is our bread and butter. Contact us here.
