keysafe is open source

built a small thing today because the complaint kept repeating.

someone bought bitcoin years ago. maybe on an old laptop. maybe inside an old phone backup. maybe in an encrypted wallet file they forgot existed. maybe in a folder named backup final final. maybe in a text file they should not have created but did because they were human.

then the price moved.

and suddenly that old file was not an old file anymore.

it was a question.

is there bitcoin in here?

can i recover it?

what is safe to open?

what should never touch the internet?

that is the space i wanted to explore with KeySafe.

KeySafe is an offline Bitcoin wallet recovery scanner. not a password cracker. not a cloud ai recovery service. not a magic box that promises to find coins where none exist.

the first version is much simpler and much safer.

you select a folder or files on your own machine. KeySafe looks for wallet artifacts and recovery clues. bitcoin core wallet.dat files. electrum wallets. multibit files. hardware wallet exports. backup archives. browser wallet databases. seed phrase notes. password hint files. exchange and tax records that might help reconstruct the story.

then it scores the findings, explains the risk, and tells you the next safe step.

the principle is simple.

before anyone tries to recover a wallet, they need a map.

most recovery mistakes happen because people skip the map. they open original files directly. they paste secrets into websites. they send screenshots to strangers. they overwrite old wallet files with new installs. they confuse addresses with private keys. they assume a seed phrase is safe because it is just twelve words on a screen.

bitcoin custody punishes that kind of confusion.

so KeySafe starts before the dangerous part.

it inventories. it classifies. it redacts. it exports a safe report. it tells the user what not to do.

that last part matters more than the clever part.

the product is not trying to be the ai that takes control of your machine and rummages through your life. that might make a great viral story. it also violates the trust boundary that should exist around private keys.

KeySafe is local first by default.

wallet files stay on your machine. seeds stay out of the cloud. private keys are not displayed. password cracking is out of scope. transaction signing is out of scope. the app only scans what the user explicitly chooses.

this is the kind of bitcoin tool i want more of.

boring in the right places.

paranoid in the right places.

useful before it is powerful.

and open source from day one.

the repo is here: github.com/blink987654/keysafe.

right now it is a browser based local prototype. dependency free. you can run it locally, load the demo scan, or point it at a folder you control. the next step is turning it into a proper desktop app with a native filesystem layer and better recovery playbooks.

but the thesis is already clear.

there are billions of dollars of bitcoin lost, half lost, misremembered, poorly documented, or sitting behind anxiety. and the answer is not to teach everyone to become a forensic engineer.

the answer is to build tools that make the safe path obvious.

KeySafe is a small start.

if you care about bitcoin self custody, recovery, old wallet formats, local first software, or just making dangerous things less confusing, i would love your eyes on it.

fork it. break it. improve it. add wallet detection rules. add better safety language. add tests with synthetic files. help make the map better.

because one day someone is going to find an old drive in a drawer and ask the question.

is there bitcoin in here?

i want the first answer to be safe.