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12 words is absolutely enough but there are some instances where 24 is more difficult to brute force.
If somebody randomly comes across 12 scrambled seed words, it’s relatively trivial to guess every possible permutation with even normal computer hardware.
If somebody comes across 24 scrambled words, it’s next to impossible to try every possible permutation with any hardware.
I don't scramble my words tbh. Just add a long enough BIP39 passphrase on top.
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Neither do I but I have met some people who think they are hot shit because they scramble their 12 words to protect themselves from an attacker.
This would obviously work for a very low level attacker, but anybody with the desire to do some Google searching and has access to even mediocre computer power could crack 12 scrambled words
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Exactly.
So, how hard is it to find the right order of 12 words? There are ~480 million permutations of those 12 words. Luckily, because of the BIP39 standard we have some advantage, the 12th word is a checksum. So only 1 in 12 of those permutations constitutes a valid mnemonic. We are down to 14 paragraphs with ~50 million valid mnemonics from each.
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