2 reactions
$100 in ETH if you guess the order of my seed phrase
Last week a poster wrote in asking how safe it would be if someone knew their 24 seed phrase words but didn't know the order. The comments in response were basically split between "It would be trivial to brute force it and compromise the wallet" and "It would take much longer than a human lifetime." I'm in that latter category. If we assume you know/figure out which one is the final checksum seed word, you would have 23!=2.6e22 possible combinations. I have no idea how many permutations a good script could reasonably test, but as a conservative check if you could test 10 billion per second it would still take 82 thousand years to try all the permutations (so we might expect you to get it in roughly half that time, 41 thousand years).
But maybe I'm way underestimating how fast scripts could check the seed phrases, or maybe I'm overlooking some feature of BIP39 that actually reduces the valid permutations. Regardless, many people are just not convinced by numbers on a page. Therefore, I'm putting my (little) money where my mouth is.
I've got a fresh 24-word wallet set up with 0.062 ETH (equivalent to $100 as of writing). The public address is 0xb6f420204511C7fE9Dd3DE14266a260e8f11aC37. It's yours for the taking if you can access it. The words in my seed phrase have been randomized in order and printed below. I'll plan to leave this wallet untouched until someone compromises it, or a year has passed and no one is interested. I should also mention that this wouldn't apply to a 12 word seed phrase. With the same estimation (11! permutations, 10 billion attempts per second,) that would only require 4 milliseconds to try every permutation for the 12 seed word phrase!
My 24 seed words in randomized order:
camera rhythm feature layer coconut ready need final north can early story stable report group depend employ problem monitor interest logic sausage toilet pencil
Happy de-crypting!
Last week a poster wrote in asking how safe it would be if someone knew their 24 seed phrase words but didn't know the order. The comments in response were basically split between "It would be trivial to brute force it and compromise the wallet" and "It would take much longer than a human lifetime." I'm in that latter category. If we assume you know/figure out which one is the final checksum seed word, you would have 23!=2.6e22 possible combinations. I have no idea how many permutations a good script could reasonably test, but as a conservative check if you could test 10 billion per second it would still take 82 thousand years to try all the permutations (so we might expect you to get it in roughly half that time, 41 thousand years).
But maybe I'm way underestimating how fast scripts could check the seed phrases, or maybe I'm overlooking some feature of BIP39 that actually reduces the valid permutations. Regardless, many people are just not convinced by numbers on a page. Therefore, I'm putting my (little) money where my mouth is.
I've got a fresh 24-word wallet set up with 0.062 ETH (equivalent to $100 as of writing). The public address is 0xb6f420204511C7fE9Dd3DE14266a260e8f11aC37. It's yours for the taking if you can access it. The words in my seed phrase have been randomized in order and printed below. I'll plan to leave this wallet untouched until someone compromises it, or a year has passed and no one is interested. I should also mention that this wouldn't apply to a 12 word seed phrase. With the same estimation (11! permutations, 10 billion attempts per second,) that would only require 4 milliseconds to try every permutation for the 12 seed word phrase!
My 24 seed words in randomized order:
camera rhythm feature layer coconut ready need final north can early story stable report group depend employ problem monitor interest logic sausage toilet pencil
Happy de-crypting!
| 4,000 mlx | |
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