- a lot of nonsense that can be resolved through simply reading posts on this forum -
2048 words in the word list.
12 words in the seed phrase
2048
12 = 5,444,517,870,735,015,415,413,993,718,908,291,383,296 possible combinations
If you try to "brute force" 1 million combinations of 12 words every second, it will take you:
5,444,517,870,735,015,415,413,993,718,908,291 seconds = 172,526,360,392,901,089,291,137,276 years
to try all the possibilities.
The universe has only existed less than 14,000,000,000 years.
That means if you started searching through 1 million addresses every second at the moment of the Big Bang, and continued until today you would have searched through less than 0.00000000000001% of the possible addresses.
At that rate (1 million per second) you'd have to start all over again with additional Big Bangs and search for more than 12,323,311,456,635,791 entire universes worth of time to get through all the possibilities.
If you have the first 11 words in order, and you know which position the 12th word belongs in, then you'll find it in less than 2048 tries (since there are only 2048 words to choose from).
If you have the first 11 words in order, but you don't know where the 12th word belongs in the list, then the number of possibilities is 2048 X 12 = 24,576 possibilities since each of the 2048 words could be in any 1 of 12 possible positions.
There are quantities that are easy to say are "secure" such as 2048
12. There are also quantities that are easy to say are "insecure" such as 2048
1. Trying to find an exact line between the two where you can say that +1 = secure and -1 = insecure is impossible. Instead, choose a number that is obviously secure, and then
keep your entire seed a secret! That way you won't have to guess if the seed is "secure enough".