Can't decrypt bitcoin core wallet, did I made a backup at the wrong time? I am confused on why my bitcoin core wallet password would not work. I am 90% sure I tried the right password(s).


wallet has many receiving addresses (10 000), I generated them with Linux from command line in 2017
I encrypted the wallet (probably after generating the addresses).
started receiving payments, made copies of wallet.dat after some of them, I see the different wallet.dat backups have same size (probably normal).
now in 2019 I downloaded Bitcoin Core 0.18.0 on Windows 10
put my wallet.dat in the bitcoin data folder
I can see the received coins
wallet shows as encrypted in the lower right corner
if I try to send and enter password, it says it is the wrong one


1) Can this be because my wallet.dat is since before I encrypted it ? If so, it would not show as encrypted when I start the program, right ?

2) Can errors like this happen because wallet is too large (10 000 addresses, 5.7 MB) and maybe it got corrupted while generating that many addresses ?

3) Any known issues of incompatibility between wallets created on linux ubuntu vs windows, that can cause such problems ?

4) Can password stop working because the Bitcoin Core version changed ? I can see the wallet was first created in Oct 2017 so I used whatever Bitcoin Core version it was then.

// It is kind of hard to make experiments with different wallet configs because of the large address list, it takes forever to load the program/blockchain.
Bitcoin Core 0.18.0 is compatible with any wallet version from 2017, if you want to check you can download any Bitcoin Core release. Bust most probably you are misspelling your password.

You could try also from the console. Use this command to decrypt it for 60 seconds:
In Bitcoin-Qt click Window -> Console.
walletpassphrase your-wallet-passphrase 60