this is a story of how Sammy triumphed thru stupidity and lack of knowledge and recovered his sats!

2 years ago i was trying out a neutrino node running on an old laptop, after hearing that one does not need to download the entire blockchain to run an LN node. i downloaded the wallet, wrote down the seed and the password (no passphrase), the software synced to mainchain, i deposited some sats, and... it wud not open a channel. sending the sats out also did not work. i cud still open the user interface with the password.

at first, i tried following Darthcoin's SHTF guide. this method involves Cryptography Toolkit.

that did not work, as the aezeed seed was incorrect and all methods kept giving me an "incorrect checksum" error. i tried taking the wallet.db file and putting it into different wallets, which also did not work. so i put this problem on a backburner.

1 year ago i was running a lightning node on Voltage. it was about $10/month and i got very little use out of it, so after a few months i closed the channels. for whatever reason, i force-closed the channels instead of a cooperative close with a peer i know away-from-keyboard, so i learned how force-closures proceed. the Voltage support was not pleased, and even raised an issue on GitHub in order to create a warning for noobs like me. my peer was also not happy.

that day when funds were returned on-chain must have been a particularly good day - i was taking some gummies and maybe drinking beer also. i was using the boltz.exchange which at the time used P2WPKH-P2SH Segwit deposit address (starting with a "3"). now, to estimate the on-chain fees, i was using the Segwit address from that unsupported neutrino wallet, which i was pasting into the send-to-address field, then replacing it with an actual address before sending the sats.

well... that day i forgot to paste in the actual address i control and clicked "Broadcast." the sats were sent to the neutrino wallet address. after realizing what happened, i tried to RBF (or CPFP, cannot remember), but since i was already buzzed and high, i only expedited the transaction into the same address. now there were even more sats stuck in that Segwit address!

the sum was slowly becoming significant, while i kept reading, learning, using various lightning wallets, tho not yet running a dedicated Lightning Node myself. at some point @DarthCoin told me:

that's when i decided that i will not give up until i claim those funds, that i will train hard, and train my heirs to bitcoin, and maybe one day they will recover the funds... and more importantly i wanted to prove Darth wrong, lol.

together with this tip on GitHub and the chantools kit i started tinkering.

finally, this week, i made one more attempt:

by now i had a LinuxOS computer. i downloaded a fresh copy of Lightning Labs neutrino wallet, replaced the entire "mainnet" folder with the one from my original "stuck" wallet. i also put the chantools file into the same mainnet folder. i followed the instructions in this post.

i typed the command which gave me the BIP 32 HD root key (xprv):

chantools walletinfo --withrootkey \
	--walletdb ~/.lnd/data/chain/bitcoin/mainnet/wallet.db

after tinkering some more with the Cryptography Toolkit, Electrum, and Sparrow, i was able to recover the funds, which shall now be shoved into another lightning wallet.

now i can honestly say that i have never lost sats!