Can anyone discover my bitcoin seed?

What is a seed? Can anyone guess it? What are the chances of this happening?

seed

When you make the excellent choice to leave the exchanges, you will first need to download a wallet (Wasabi, Electrum, Samourai, etc.).

In essence, these wallets will generate a “seed”. That is to say 12 words (or 24 words depending on the wallets) chosen from a list of 2048 English words.

As long as you don’t lose this seed, you can always regain access to your bitcoins. You have to write it on metal (there are plenty of solutions like cryptosteel) and bury it in your garden.

Example seed:

Fluid ancient satoshi rare zoo song object mother kick green human kitchen

In order for someone to take control of your bitcoins, they will have to discover these 12 words in the correct order. Is this possible? Yes. Is this likely? No.

Twelve words each chosen from the same list of 2048 words means that there are 204812 possible combinations.

That is 5,444,517,870,735,015,415,413,993,718,908,291,383,296 combinations. In other words, 5444 billion billion billion billion combinations.

It’s actually a little less since the twelfth word of a seed is calculated from the previous eleven words. So the true number is 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 combinations.

If you could make 1000 billion guesses per second, with a billion different computers, it would take over 10 billion years to figure out that many. Almost the age of the universe.

To give you an idea, the probability of tossing a hundred heads or tails in a row is one in 1,267,650,600,228,230,000,000,000,000,000.

It is therefore 268 million times more difficult for an attacker to find your seed than to hit a hundred stacks in a row.

Yes, but there is more than one seed…

Absolutely. So the probability of finding any seed is actually higher than what we have just calculated.

Let’s imagine that each human has a wallet. That makes us eight billion seeds. We must therefore divide the 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 possible combinations by eight billion.

The probability of finding a seed is then one in 42,535,295,865,117,307,932,921,825,928.

A billion computers capable of testing 1000 billion combinations per second would have to run for 1.3 years. This is less than the age of the universe, but the probability remains zero.

Today, with a billion bitcoin addresses, we can assume that there are maybe something like 50 million seeds.

[En effet, toutes les adresses générées par un wallet dérivent de clés privées dérivant elles-mêmes de la seed unique du wallet. Nous y reviendrons.]

Thus, we must divide the 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 possible combinations by 50 million.

The probability of finding a seed today is one in 6,805,647,338,418,769,269,267,492,148,635. That is 215 years if we take our example of computers.

We could also say that the probability of spawning a seed that already exists is one in 6,805,647,338,418,769,269,267,492,148,635.

The lucky one would then end up with someone else’s BTC…

What is the seed used for?

The seed is the kernel from which a wallet creates private keys. And it is from these private keys that the public keys are then generated from which the famous bitcoin “addresses” are derived.

You have to understand that there are no bitcoins in a wallet. The latter only contains private keys to move the bitcoins associated with them.

Bitcoins are strictly speaking UTXOs. There is currently around a list of 80 million UTXOs kept by each node in the Bitcoin network. UTXOs are fractions of bitcoin linked to a public key, itself linked to a private key.

Each transaction (sending UTXOs) requires a valid private key (or several if the transaction contains several UTXOs). The public key is comparable to a bank account number and the private key to the PIN code of his bank card.

In a bitcoin transaction, the recipient’s public key is represented by a bitcoin “address”. This address derives directly from the public key. Once the transaction is made, only the person with the private key corresponding to the address in question will have control of the bitcoins.

Public key cryptography

There are two main families of cryptographic algorithms:

-Symmetric algorithms, also called secret key (one key)
-Asymmetric algorithms, also called public key (a private key and a public key)

Asymmetric cryptography is at the heart of how bitcoin transactions work. This is where to dig if you want to better understand the concepts of private keys / public key etc.

The first public key cryptography system was the RSA system, named after the initials of its inventors Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman. It was presented for the first time in 1977 in the mathematical chronicle of the journal Scientific American.

At its heart is the difficulty of factoring large primes multiplied together. Here is a beautiful article if you are interested.

Bitcoin’s private and public key system uses asymmetric cryptography based on elliptic curves. Did you like this article? You will probably like this one on bitcoin mining.

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