© Reuters. This Viral Bitcoin Post on Reddit Could Cause Serious Delusion
U.Today – A Reddit subreddit user claimed to have performed a near-miraculous trick: guessing two Bitcoin seed phrases in less than five minutes and accessing the corresponding wallets that were, as expected, empty. While the post may surprise some inexperienced Bitcoin users, there is a fundamental misunderstanding about how seed phrases work.
Seedphrases, the linchpin of wallet security, are generated in accordance with BIP39. They consist of 12 to 24 words, drawn from a specific list of 2048 words. The last word in an initial phrase is a checksum, which serves as a safety mechanism against incorrect word entry.
If even a single word is out of place, or the sequence is confusing, the checksum will not match and the wallet software will generally reject the phrase. This makes the task of “guessing” an seed phrase virtually impossible without using unrealistically high computing power.
The author of the post probably did not guess the existing seed phrases, but rather created new wallet addresses. Since there are countless potential combinations for seed phrases, it is statistically certain that many lead to unclaimed wallets. Therefore, the author's claim, although technically true, is misleading. They didn't hack or access someone else's wallet; They inadvertently generated new and unused wallets.
The BIP39 standard ensures that the probability of randomly generating the seed phrase of a hot wallet, especially one containing funds, is microscopic.
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This article was originally published on U.Today.
