Ethereum Presale what was it?

Ethereum Presale was conducted in the summer of 2014 Ethereum Foundation. You could send Bitcoin and receive Ethereum encrypted in a json file. The initial price for each ETH was 31cents and payment was done using Bitcoin (BTC). During the presale each bitcoin could buy 4000 ETH, but the price increased as the presale ran for almost two months.

Approximately 9000 fortunate investors saw a significant increase in the price since the ICO’s inception, resulting in a profit of 100 times or even 1000 times for those who delayed accessing their accounts due to forgotten passwords. By the conclusion of the 42-day sale, the Ethereum Foundation successfully raised an impressive $18 million through almost 6700 transactions, selling a total of 51 million ETH.
If you would like to see what addresses were active in the presale, check this link
ETHEREUM BLOCK 0

Ethereum Presale

Ethereum Presale ICO page

Is it possible to crack an Ethereum Presale wallet if password is forgotten?

Yes, if you have the email with the backup json file and some ideas of the password, it is possible to decrypt the wallet.
Unfortunately there are still roughly 500 “locked” or “lost” presale wallets. KeychainX has successfully helped several individuals open their Ethereum presale wallets using custom decrypting tools and algorithms. You can read about one Twitter user here

How long does it take to find the password and unlock the wallet?

The longest password so far that we unlocked was 99 characters long and had “scrambled” characters. The password was not possible to replicate on a normal English keyboard. More about this story here. The longest wallet took us over 4 years. On general basis we open wallets between 1 day to 1 week. Longer or complex password can take very long time and are due to complexity of the password.

What is needed to open the wallet and export the private key?

To open the wallet you need have the original Ethereum presale json file that was mailed to you. In rare instances, the .json file was not generated correctly and did not contain any funds. The file contains your encrypted private key, which can be imported to wallets like Metamask. Metamask can be found HERE

How can I try to find the password myself?

There are various tools that can help you doing this. One of the is Hashcat that is open source and widely used in the hacker community. It uses the hashmode 16300 and can be downloaded here: Download Hashcat page You can read various tutorials on how to use it on their webpage. Before you can run hashcat with your wallet json file, you will need to convert it to a hash. The easiest tool to do that is John the Ripper repo that is hosted on Github. It can be downloaded here: JTR Github. The tool that you need to run is ethereum2john.py and to execute the command you will need python installed. The command create the has is:
python ethereum2john.py ethereumwalletbackup.json > ethereumwallethash.txt

How did the Ethereum ICO webpage look like?

You can view the original Ethereum Presale ICO page here from waybackmachine
https://web.archive.org/web/20140804235628/https://www.ethereum.org/

What was the password requirement for the Ethereum Presale

The password minimum requirement was 10 characters of which there needed to be at least of of;
Small cap letter. Big cap letter. Number. Special character. An example password that would be accepted: P@ssword123!
This example would not be accepted: p@ssword1 or this would also be rejected P@ass1

Why does my password not work to open the Ethereum Presale wallet?

The usual error that was (except of completely forgetting the password) either using a foreign keyboard which generated a “scrambled” password. Another reason could be using special characters that behaves differently depending on your browser, keyboard setup or language setup. Another known problem are keyboard on MacBook Pros that were having sticky buttons error. Those generated keys or flipped keys, depending on how fast you wrote.

I never received a JSON file!

Some people claim they did not receive the JSON file that was supposed to be mailed. Most of those cases entered the wrong e-mail. That means your wallet was never mail to your correct inbox. Another known issue is if you were buying in two trenches, the mailed wallet file used the same name and could in rare cases be overwritten when saved to the same folder.

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