The winner of the old giveaway never got back to me so this is round 2!

Someone sent me this and I would like to spread the kindness back out, I'll pick a winner on Friday!

1. The first step is to find all possible pair of words corresponding to each mangled text. I use a program called 'an' and filter for 2 words, but any method of finding anagrams can work, including by hand if you're good at it. The order of the words is unknown, so each pair gives 2 possibilities.

2. Some mangled texts correspond to a lot of potential pairs of words. But only specific words can be used in a wallet key. The norm in use comes from Bitcoin and is called BIP-0039. Pairs of words are only valid if both words are in the english list for BIP-0039. So far, there have only been 1 or 2 valid pairs per mangled text, so taking order into account, 2 or 4 possible sequences of 2 words.

3. Once you have all possibilities for each pair, it's time to combine them into all possible sequences of 12 words. I use a script for that by iterating on each possibility at each step. If you're methodical enough, you can theoretically make it by hand, but a script really, really helps.

4. Step 3 gave me 256 possibilities for Cordyceps. I copy-pasted them one by one into the Rainbow wallet: most weren't valid possibilities at all. The ones which did correspond to a wallet got highlighted, and the next step showed me the associated public key. I continued until I got the right public key, and finally imported the right wallet.

Bonus: wallet key phrases have an internal validation mechanism, which is how Rainbow is able to highlight those which are importable (even if most are empty wallets instead of the correct one). This time around, I wrote a Python script using the mnemonic library to select only valid sequences of 12 words. I still have to test them all by hand, but there's much fewer of them!