Noob questions about Electrum

[NoobElectrum]

Hello all.
Please answer some questions about the Electrum
Look, here the program, when creating a new wallet, gave me 12 unique words.
In the future, if I enter 11 words, and I sort through 12 words manually, will I be able to get to another wallet?
Or will some kind of protection work and I can't just go further?

Thanks.

[Charles-Tim]

Do not spam this forum with translation, you posted this on the Russian local board not quite long and converted it to English and you post it here which should be considered as spam.

Backup your 12 words seed phrase properly and never lose it, that is why more than one backup in different locations is important, any word missing can give you more chances of not being able to recover back your coins. Although, only one word missing can easily be brute forced.

[goldkingcoiner]

Hello all.
Please answer some questions about the Electrum
Look, here the program, when creating a new wallet, gave me 12 unique words.
In the future, if I enter 11 words, and I sort through 12 words manually, will I be able to get to another wallet?
Or will some kind of protection work and I can't just go further?

Thanks.

Those "12 words" that you have are for accessing your wallet, in case you cannot access it normally by your regular way. DO NOT show anyone these 12 words... If you do, you then that person will be able to steal your bitcoin.

As the previous poster mentioned, a single word can easily be found out by a hacking method called "brute force". Thats when a computer program randomly tries different words (all the words of a dictionary) until they find the right word and can access the wallet.

Also do not store those words on a device that has internet access.

The best thing you could do is memorise the words and never tell anyone.

[bitmover]

In the future, if I enter 11 words, and I sort through 12 words manually, will I be able to get to another wallet?

There are 2048 words.

Not all combinations of word will generate a new wallet, as there is  checksum. You can play with it here:
https://iancoleman.io/bip39/

If you play around with 12 random words there you will see that not word combinations will generate a valid wallet.

Also, remember that the words are not unique. You can have a wallet with 12 equal words that will pass the chekcsum and generate a valid wallet. For example, lets try this:

Code:

word word word word word word word word word word word word

This is a valid combination of 12 words. It generates a new bitcoin wallet.

But the combination of "small" 12x will generate an invalid mnemonic:

Code:

small small small small small small small small small small small small 

So are you feeling lucky and want to try to find some coins? Just go to https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ and click GENERATE button to generate new valid mnemonic combination, ie, new wallets. You will see that you will never find anything...

[o_e_l_e_o]

-snip-

This is not correct when considering Electrum seed phrases, which are different from BIP39 seed phrases.

Electrum seed phrases do not contain a checksum, but do have a version number encoded in to them. The version number is the first (usually) 3 nibbles (12 bits) of the SHA512 hash of the seed phrase. For the sake of non-2FA segwit wallets (which is the default wallet which Electrum will produce), these first 12 bits must be 0x100.

Given that these are 12 bits, then there are 2¹² = 4096 possibilities for these 12 bits. So by brute forcing one word to one of 2048 possibilities, there is only a 50% chance on average of finding a word which satisfies these conditions in the entire search space.

[hosseinimr93]

If you enter the 12th word randomly, it's very very unlikely that the seed phrase is valid. As stated by bitmover above, even if the seed phrase is BIP39, it must pass the checksum. But you can still generate a wallet even with a non-standard seed phrase.

If you want to force electrum to generate a wallet with any words, click "options" and check "BIP39 seed".

If the seed phrase passes the checksum, electrum displays a message saying the checksum is OK.
If the seed phrase doesn't pass the checksum, but all the words are included in the BIP39 wordlist, electrum displays a message saying the checksum is failed.
If the seed phrase includes words that don't belong to BIP39 wordlist, electrum displays a message saying "Unknown wordlist".

In all three cases, you can generate a wallet.

Note that it's not recommended to generate a wallet using a non-standard seed. You should either use a seed generated by electrum or a standard BIP39 seed (a BIP39 seed that passes the checksum).

[_BlackStar]

Don't waste your time just to break gold mountain in the depth of the ocean without oxygen. If you are tinkering to test the security of an electrum wallet then you will need to invest your time and life years from now just on pointless work. You're unlikely to be lucky, but most of the wallet you make from random words are empty wallet ^{[new wallet].}

Very few people can beat a wallet security system, but almost all their efforts will end up in vain. So go for it if that is your goal. The average hacker is much easier to hack user data than it is to hack software like wallet, so do you still want to peek at electrum security through the eye of a pin?

[Clairvoyance]

In the future, if I enter 11 words, and I sort through 12 words manually, will I be able to get to another wallet?

You can access it by brute forcing. The general rule of thumb is to keep 12 words safely. Offline, notebook, paper, or any backup that can easily be stored and kept.

Or will some kind of protection work and I can't just go further?

You can't access the wallet if you don't have the 12 seed phrase. Incomplete seed phrase = inaccessible wallet. If you are planning to randomly get some lucky wallet I'm afraid your chances are slim to none.

[o_e_l_e_o]

If you enter the 12th word randomly, it's very very unlikely that the seed phrase is valid. As stated by bitmover above, even if the seed phrase is BIP39, it must pass the checksum.

For a 12 word BIP39 seed phrase, it's actually not that unlikely. Given that for a 12 word phrase the checksum is 4 bits long, then you have a 1 in 2⁴ chance, which is 1 in 16. With 2048 words in the BIP39 wordlist, that means that 128 of them (on average) will produce a valid seed phrase.

For a 24 word BIP39 seed phrase the checksum is 8 bits, so the chance becomes 1 in 2⁸, which is 1 in 256. For an Electrum seed, the chance of finding the right version is 1 in 2¹², or 1 in 4096, as I've explained above.

If you want to force electrum to generate a wallet with any words, click "options" and check "BIP39 seed".

If you don't want to use the BIP39 wordlist, then a better option is to import your own wordlist in to Electrum (replace the file english.txt at electrum/electrum/wordlist with your own wordlist), and then load Electrum normally and have it generate a new seed phrase. Your new custom seed phrase will be importable in to any Electrum client, even if they do not know the wordlist you used.