How To Open Encrypted JSON Key Files
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I see a ton of questions about how to open encrypted json keyfiles, so I thought I would just put this here. I am going to do this the "old school" way and show you how to open these files using tools built by Ethereum foundation themselves. This means you do not have to trust me or anyone in any way other than the people who actually built Ethereum. This is the safest way to open these files. Once you do this set of operations, you will get the private key itself that you can drop into whatever wallet you want. First, you need to have GoLang ( a programming language ) installed. In order to install GoLang go to this website: Follow the directions there and you will now have GoLang working on your machine. This is the programming language the Geth Ethereum node software is written in. Next you need to download the Geth github repo. This is the actual Go-Ethereum node software that lets you run an Ethereum node, but we are not going to run the node itself. Instead we are going to run a tool that is part of the git repo, so you need to download the whole repo. You can do this by going here: Once you go there click on the Green Button that says "Code", then click on "HTTPS" and then click download zip. Once you have downloaded the zip file, you can unzip it. Now open a terminal and navigate to the `/cmd` directory from the unzipped source code. The sub directories should look something like this: What we want it the `ethkey` sub directory. So navigate there in your terminal. Once there you can type the following to build the program and run it in the local directory: You should now see the help page for the utility and it should look something like this: Now copy your keyfile into the same directory as `/cmd/ethkey` and type in the following: `go run . inspect –private keyfile.json` Make sure you make the `keyfile.json` part of the command is the name of your keyfile. This will generate an output like this ( this is a burner account so don't bother trying to go dump it ): The line that says `Private key:` is your private key. You can copy and paste this into Metamask or whatever. Feel free to reach out if you have questions. submitted by /u/AugmentedTrashMonkey |
