Bitcoin Forum

 what is the chance of getting a random  valid BIP39 with bitcoin balance ?

Most of the addresses generated with BIP39 has 12 seed words. The English word list has 2048 words. Hence, for each of the 12 words, each of them will have 2048 possible combinations. Thus, the total number of possible keys is 2048^12. Might not look like much but it is a lot more than the number of grains of sand on earth.

Even if you factor in birthday attack, you would still have better luck trying to find a specific grain of sand on earth.

zero!

it's the same argument as chances of creating the same private key since any BIP39 seed has at least the same security level as a private key. don't think about BIP39 mnemonic as words, there is an entropy behind those words which is ensuring the security, the words are just human readable form of it to make things easier for users.

From what I know you have about the same chance to win the lottery 5 times in a row.

To calculate the chance you have to do:


So, your chance is 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000018%, you are playing a losing game my friend.

There's more chance for all the air molecules of your room to get condensed at a corner, suffocating you to death.

What follows is pedantic, I know, but for the sake of accuracy this isn't quite correct.

First of all, a 12 word seed phrase converts in to 132 bits of data. Indeed, 2048¹² (which I assume is the calculation you did) equals exactly 2¹³². However, the last 4 bits of this number are not random - they are a checksum. This means that only 1/16th of all 12 word seed phrases are actually valid, and a wallet will never generate an invalid seed. So the denominator for your fraction is "only" 1¹²⁸, rather than 1¹³². Furthermore, we can't calculate the numerator for that fraction. If you were looking to have a match with another specific wallet, then yes, the numerator would be 1. But if we are looking for a match with any wallet with coins in it, then we would need to know exactly how many different wallets there are holding coins, which of course, nobody can know.

As I say, this is all pedantic, because the bottom line is still the same - it is impossible.

Now, to be even more pedantic, there is theoretically no limit to the number of addresses that can be derived from any single BIP39 seed phrase. If you were to take any seed phrase and derive enough addresses by adding an arbitrary number of branches to your derivation path, you would almost certainly end up with a collision at some point. Practically though, we would reach the heat death of the universe before you even came close.

there is a nodejs package called bip39 it can generate a random valid mnemonic i know it takes too long to get one with balance but is it possible ?

Yes. Its definitely possible that you'll obtain a BIP39 that has some Bitcoins one day. But, obviously no one has been doing it because it's so damn impractical. I'm pretty sure the chances of you striking lotteries till you become a multi-millionaire is much more likely.

But sure, if you want to try... You'll need to parse the entire blockchain using your local copy of the blockchain. For every seed that is generated, your computer needs to cycle through the addresses to check for used addresses. The process is so inefficient that I doubt you could find it before the universe cease to exist.

i found that there is more ether addresses with balances than those of bitcoin so i made a nodejs tool that generates random BIP39 and check it's ether balance. 20K/min , should i share it ?

so basically you want to look for a needle in the haystack using a bulldozer :D
yeah sure share it. github is already filled with this type of pointless waste-of-time projects that exist for a short time before they are abandoned, what's one more.