Ravencoin — Recovering from 12 Word Seed (a guide)

I’m pretty easy going, but my blood boils when I hear someone say that writing down 12-words is just too hard. WHAT?!?! You want to be your own bank, control your own funds, take your destiny into your own hands, free the world from the rent-seeking behavior of parasite banks, but you can’t write down 12 words and store them safely? I weep for humanity.

Let’s say something’s gone horribly wrong, and your precious iPhone fell out of the fishing boat and is now resting at the bottom of a muddy lake. You remember that you’ve stored your 12 words between the pages of your Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedias where Raven would be in the alphabet. You now have your 12 words in your fish gut covered hands. Now what?

This guide will help you recover funds from just the 12 words.

Step-by-Step

1. Wash your hands and get a new phone.
2. Go to https://ravencoin.org/bip44/
3. Type your 12 words into the field that says BIP32 Mnemonic. As soon as you finish typing all 12-words, the addresses for BIP44 Derived Addresses will appear at the bottom of the page.
4. Check for funds by taking the first address and looking up funds in any RVN Explorer. The address will start with an ‘R’. Paste it into the search field at https://ravencoin.network and you should see that some RVN are there or were in there. If the Final Balance is 0, don’t panic, it probably means the funds were spent and moved to a new address.
5. For addresses that do have a final balance, you can either sweep the funds with the iOS wallet by going to Settings->”Redeem Wallet/ Private Key”, then hit [Scan Private Key]. Next to the address on the web page, hover over the corresponding Private Key. This will bring up a QR code that you scan with your iOS wallet. This sweeps the funds, meaning that it uses the private key to create a transaction to move funds to a different address on your iOS wallet.
6. Repeat the previous two steps for each address. As long as there were ever funds in the address, keep going. If you find a few sequential addresses that never had funds, meaning the Total Received is 0, then you can stop. That’ll get you all the main addresses, next you’ll get the change addresses.
7. To check the change addresses, modify the “Internal/External” address from a 0, to a 1. This will show the change addresses. Sweep each of these that has funds.

BIP32 (Old Android and Old iOS Wallet)

For those that are recovering funds from the older Android Wallet (Classic), or from the original Alpha/Beta of the iOS wallet.

The steps are exactly the same as above, except you’ll change the derivation path to the old style BIP32 path. So you’ll hit the [BIP32] tab when on the https://ravencoin.org/bip44/ page, and you’ll enter m/0'/0 for the BIP32 Derivation Path, and then when you do the change addresses, enter m/0'/1 for the BIP32 Derivation Path.

Importing vs. Sweep

Another option you can use instead of Sweep, which is only available on iOS RVN only right now, is to import the private key.

Find the funds using the same steps you used above, but once you’ve located some funds, you can import them into your core wallet.

Steps:

1. In QT, chose Help->’Debug Window’
2. Then choose the [Console] tab.
3. If your wallet is password protected, then type

walletpassphrase <your passphrase> 240

That will give your 4 minutes (240 seconds) to import keys.

4. Then type:

importprivkey <private key from bip44 page that you want to import>

5. Repeat step for each private key you want to import into QT. It may take some time to import each key because the QT wallet must scan through the chain to find any funds for that key. Be aware that importing just brings in the private key so anyone who has the private key can steal the funds. When doing a sweep, that isn’t the case because the funds get moved to a new address.