Bitcoin Forum

maybe with a super computer ?

That is not possible as of now so far your seed phrase or part of the words of your seed phrase is not known to an hacker. If you generate the seed phrase and no one knows about the backup and if you are not careless online with it, no one can brute force it.

It depends on the number of seeds you have and the number that are exposed. Say you have like a 12 word seed phrase and you are looking for just 4 with 8 known, then it wouldn’t take much of a time to get that through btcrecover tool but one of the addresses attached to that seed phrase must me known. But for 24 seed phrase which has a higher entropy it will take a million years to achieve that with the current computers available. So yes there is a possibility with a super computer in the future but we don’t have that now. And should we get there which is not something that will happen soon bitcoin addresses would have been moved to a more secure cryptography then

Yes but it is as likely as you walking to the correct beach and picking the exact grain of sand that is the one needed to open your wallet.

In my analogy you walking to the Beach and picking a grain of sand that works is as fast as a thousand super fast pc's trying to crack your seed.

yeah like not re-using the same bitcoin address. once the public key is revealed, that's how someone is going to try and attack that balance, not by just blindly generating 24 word seed phrases.

You can have a 24 word seed phrase, but a 12 word BIP39 seed phrase provides 128 bits of entropy and is secure enough. Even a private key gives you 128 bits of security and as I said that's enough.

Also note that you shouldn't choose a seed phrase. You should generate a random seed phrase and that's surely unique if it's generated in the correct way.

No need for a super computer. If someone is targeting your seed phrase, that means there is some portion of the leaked phrases that can be easily bruteforced using current device capabilities. Hackers also don't want to do things that seem like they'll end in vain.

Actually....... that's much more likely:
Let's visualize it:
7500000000000000000 grains of sand. And that's not only the beaches, that includes the much larger deserts too.

A 128 bit private key gives:
340282366920938463463374607431768211456 (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2%5E128) possibilities. That's 45370982256125128461 possibilities for each grain of sand on earth.

Super computers are no match for 128 bit encryption.

Like others said it's possible but if you are afraid that someone can brute-force or guess your seed phrase there are some ways to avoid those possibilities.
To avoid them you can generate a seed phrase with an additional extra word(as a passphrase) even if they found a few words or leaked your seed phrase they can't still access your wallet without the extra word(as a passphrase).
Or use Bitcoin core offline wallet which generates a wallet.dat this file can be backed up since it's offline you are far from any attacks online and it only requires an online device(extra device) to make unsign transactions. It is a bit technical but once you learn how to make a raw transaction and familiarize yourself with the process it will be easy next time.

for example i wont o open an trust wallet but they offer only 12 seed phrase  how to use 24 word ?

As already said, a 12 word seed phrase provides 128 bits of entropy and is secure enough.

If you really worry about your security, you shouldn't use trustwallet at all.
Trustwallet is close source and there is no way to know how the keys are generated and whether they have access to the keys or not.


There are many wallets that are better than trustwallet.

A good option is electrum. It's available on Linux, Windows, Android and MacOS.
The desktop version of electrum allow you to generate a 24 word seed phrase through command line in its console. Just note that electrum's seed phrase is not BIP39 and it can be imported only in itself and bluewallet.

If you are on dekstop, you can also use Sparrow. Sparrow allow you to generate a 24 word BIP39 seed phrase easily.

If you are on mobile, you can also use bluewallet and Samourai. Of course, none of these wallets generate 24 word seed phrase.

right but you left out that me walking to any grain of sand is a huge factor slower than having 1000 super fast pc's grinding out try after try after try.

can a fast pc try 1 million seeds in a minute? sure why not. so 1000 x 1 million is a billion try in a minute.  while a person can not try 1 grain a sand a minute .  Right now the nearest  sand to me is 3 miles away at Lowes. Once I get there  60 minutes later I did zero tries and the super computers did 60 billion seeds.. Yeah there are a lot of bags of sand at Lowes but I then need to walk to the next location .  I would end up needing to live a really long time to check all that sand due to travel time to reach it and tons of grains of sand. If you factor in the need to walk all over the earth to get to all the sand it is closer than you said. And if you look at my post I did factor in me walking to get to the sand ;D.  That has to slow me down a lot

Lol. I wrote a great analogy to visualizing this earlier and used the same piece of information:

OP, read it. You'll get your answer. The difference between "being impossible" and being "being improbable" approaches zero.

Not even the total computational power provided for the security of the Bitcoin network can break anything beyond 90 bits.

It's highly unlikely that anyone could crack your Bitcoin wallet's seed phrase, even if they had access to a supercomputer. Your seed phrase is like a super-secret password, but it's incredibly long and random. Think of it this way: a typical seed phrase contains 12 or 24 words chosen from a list of over 2000 words, this means there are 2048^12 or 2048^24 possible combinations. That's a mindboggling number of possible combinations, even the most powerful supercomputers would take an absurdly long time to try every combination. However, never share your phrase with anyone, once they have it, no need for any bruteforce attempt.

Unless you open your wallet in another person device and click remember me in the device and you logout from the device and unknown to you the person clicked remember password and the person login after you have logout. And go to the setting and see the seed phrase and copied it and transfer it to somewhere and later use it to hacked the wallet from another device if not nobody can Brute-force  wallet and see your seed phrase. Seed phrase is not a password that hackers can use trial and error method to get it. It is a combination of 12 words so it is impossible for them to do that.

Hackers use Brute-force on straight forward password and not even complicated ones.

as you said it is impossible.. Even if it were possible, Bitcoin would have been damaged and abandoned a long time ago because of this. The only way someone can open a wallet is by having or knowing the wallet's seed phrase or private key. Even to crack one phrase or private key by a supercomputer it may take several years or even not at all, and this is not worth the time spent.

If you practice proper cold storage techniques then you are safe from super computers. The issue arrives when you are using Windows and are opening lots of sketchy links and downloading sketchy files. Then there is a huge chance your crypto can be stolen. But it wouldn’t get stolen due to poor entropy it would be stolen due to poor security on the end user.

So if you are new just use a hardware wallet or just leave it on the exchange. Just use 2fa which isn’t sms, use unique email and password and should be fine for most people.

Unless you live on bedrock, there's sand right under you. If you only count the beaches, there will be much less than 7500000000000000000 grains of sand, making it even more (lol) likely to get the exact same grain of sand.

Yeah, but what's 45370982256125128461 divided by 60 billion? That's still 756183037 times less likely to find the same seed than it is to find the same grain of sand.

Instead of grains of sand, how's this?

There's no such remember me when you import your 12 or 24 words seed phrase, a Bitcoin wallet can be accessed by multiple devices, it's not an account where only one user access it, the other device will simply logout.

Not entirely correct because you need to consider the checksum. (https://getcoinplate.com/blog/seed-phrase-last-word-checksum/)

For 12 words there are 2^128 possible combinations and for 24 words there are 2^256 possible combinations.

Picture my analogy for a moment. Even if you had 1000 super-duper fast PC, trying 1 quadrillion private keys per second, you would only manage to find 0.013% of the grains of sand per second, for one planet Earth. It'd take you 7501 seconds, or about an hour and a quarter to find all grains of sand in one planet Earth, and you'd still have 999,999,999,999 planets left; it'd take more than 43 trillion days to cover just half of the total grains.

And after 86 trillion days, in glory and triumph, you'd have successfully searched 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003% of the total private keys.

I don't think hackers can get seeds from your wallet. except that happens when you accidentally download and install an application from an unknown party and you permit it to access your device.
I don't know how people might store their seeds. some just write the manual on paper and keep it in a locker. but I'm sure some save it offline or online on their devices.
when hackers don't get access to your seed, they won't be able to access your wallet.

With a few breadcrumbs or portions of the seed phrase it's very much possible if the right pool of words is used...but the chances of success are very slim especially that process takes up a lot of time to crack this 2²⁵⁶.

Otherwise the chances of success is if a hacker uses Keyloggers to get our seedphrase unlike brute force.

An optimist would say you don't need to find all private keys, since many of them will lead to the same address.

I like to say: guess my phone number, give me a call, and tell me my creditcard number. That's still much more likely than guessing someone's private key.

No, but I want to demonstrate how many private keys there are.

The odds of finding a private key that corresponds to the same address, is about 1 in the 2^256 / 2^96 = 2^160. Even if you used 1000 super fast computers that make a total of 1 quadrillion searches per second, you'd still need more than 8 nonillion (10^30) days to cover half. If the age of the universe is 13.8 billion, then that'd be about 612,881,456,878,565,703 times the age of the universe.

So, yeah. We're pretty safe with that hypothesis.