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0 sats \ 5 replies \ @BitcoinHandsOn OP 26 Nov \ parent \ on: The "easy wallet" (repeated seed phrase and memorized 7-word bip39 passphrase) bitcoin
The whole point is that the seed phrase provides ZERO entropy. Those phrases (all the no entropy ones, like "action" repeated 12 times) are constantly scanned, and if anyone were to put bitcoin onto one of the addresses linked to the private key associated with that seed phrase, it would immediately be swept away.
You can actually restore that seed phrase into Sparrow, just for fun, and see all the transaction on it. I guess people accidentally (?) send sats to an address associated with that key. And...immediately it's swept away.
However, with the seed phrase AND the passphrase, you have a different private key. And that private key will have much better entropy. Not as good as 12 words, but good enough for a lot of purposes.
Be careful with your calculations. Each bip 39 word adds 11 bits of entropy so 7 words would add 77 bits.
If you were using the EFF long diceware wordlist... 7 words is ~90bits. And 8 words is over 100 iirc. Even a small increase in entropy is an exponential increase in security so more is better.
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Ah, thanks very much for that clarification. That definitely makes a difference.
I seem to remember some website where there was a table of how much security X bits of entropy gave you. Do you happen to know a good one?
For instance, a 6 word BIP 39 seed phrase gives you X bits of entropy and it would take a supercomputer X amount of time to crack. A 12 word BIP 39 seed phrase would give you Y bits of entropy, and would take X amount of time to crack.
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This is specifically using random picks from the BIP 39 word list. And there's a spanish version as well. If you're just picking random words from your head, it's likely very poor entropy.
But as anon posted above, I made a mistake in assuming that the BIP 39 seed phrase and the EFF long word list are the same. Actually the EFF long word list is about 3 times as long as the BIP 39 word list, and so the entropy is much higher with the EFF long word list.
I still think the BIP 39 word list is better because it's much more common and familiar. But, I'll definitely need to review the entropy numbers carefully before I include this as an exercise in my book MORE Bitcoin Hands-On.
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