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Can someone please explain?
454 sats \ 1 comment \ @rafaelasprilla334 2 Dec 2023 bitcoin
Long story short there was a guy on Twitter who ran a challenge and posted his seed phrase in chunks of 4 words. On the 2nd last day 20 out of 24 words were known.
If 20 out of 24 seed words are known, 4 would have needed to be brute forced. But considering seed words are generated using Bip-39. (Wallet was electrum). That would mean the last 4 words have 20484 possible combinations. If I did the math right that would be almost 17.6 trillion combinations. How did someone manage to brute force that in like 12 hours? Wouldn't you need to create all those wallets too? is there some crazy software out there that can do all that?
Here's the tweet if you want to look into it:
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @antic 2 Dec 2023 freebie
I am currently generating over 1T keys/day on one machine (in a low effort search for Satoshi’s keys). It’s totally doable if you have a full node and some code and can scale up a few AWS EC2 instances.
For brute forcing seeds, it’s a few more steps and it’s possible that they hid the coin in a deeper generated key—but he published the segwit address so it’s easy to just see if that shows up in the generated output. It’s also worth noting that the last word in a bip39 is a checksum so it has a reduced possible set of the full key words so really it’s not as hard as brute forcing a set of 4 words.
Actually in this instance, you don’t even need a full node. This can be done with just an offline machine looking for the hash address target.