15
votes
Accepted
Does BIP39 mnemonic construction avoid repeating words?
There is nothing stopping a word to be repeated more than once. In a 24 word mnemonic, with 2048 possible words in the dictionary (BIP 39), there is a probability of at least one duplicate around 12.7%...
- 11.9k
10
votes
Accepted
How much entropy is lost alphabetising your mnemonics?
TL;DR: you get around a factor 500 million attack speedup for 12 words, bringing it not quite in the realm of feasible attacks, but it's getting close. For 24 words, the speedup is around a factor ...
- 108k
8
votes
Does BIP39 mnemonic construction avoid repeating words?
I went to https://iancoleman.github.io/bip39/
and after generating a dozen or so mnemonics I got
audit again guess butter minute predict grid image fresh kit west will before noodle supply magic ...
- 23.1k
8
votes
Is 12-word seed phrase safe enough?
In short: 12-word seed has enough entropy to be safe against brute force attack.
First of all not all 132 bits are random. Seed uses some kind of control sum.
Lets talk about 128 bits of entropy.
Lets ...
- 181
8
votes
Accepted
How does the client know the number of keys and coins when recovering from a seed?
There is a so-called gap limit. In Electrum, it's 20 by default but can be changed. But if you changed it up, remember that! Preferably write it next to your wallet's seed.
This means that the HD ...
- 3,234
7
votes
Where can I view my HD wallet seed in bitcoin core 13.2
To get the extended private masterkey itself (not a seed), you can use the dumpwallet command and provide it with a filename to dump your keys to. The extended master key will be at the top of the ...
- 11.9k
7
votes
Accepted
How are Electrum addresses connected to my private key?
how did Electrum create a new address?
Electrum, and most modern wallets are Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) Wallets. They derive a series of private-keys from the "master private-key".
If ...
- 28k
6
votes
Accepted
What is a mnemonic frequency analysis and why do I only need 4 letters of my seed words?
There are multiple questions being asked here.
Firstly, some background info. BIP39 is a standard that includes word lists.
The English one can be found at https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/...
- 176
6
votes
Accepted
What's the difference between 12 word seed and 24 word seed?
The English-language wordlist for the BIP39 standard has 2048 words, so if the phrase contained only 12 random words, the number of possible combinations would be 2048^12 = 2^132, and the phrase would ...
- 3,669
6
votes
How much entropy is lost alphabetising your mnemonics?
The number of possible 12 word phrases (disregarding the checksum) is 2048 ^ 12 = 5444517870735015415413993718908291383296
The number of alphabetically ordered 12 word phrases is
= ...
- 3,589
6
votes
Can someone explain *simply*, but precisely, how the mnemonic seed phrase is used to produce the bip39 seed
These pictures are from Mastering bitcoin and were so insightful for me.
How the mnemonic words are generated:
How they are used to generates master seed of your wallet:
- 1,253
5
votes
Does BIP39 mnemonic construction avoid repeating words?
No, the BIP39 construction does not avoid repeating words.
It is possible for a word to show up multiple times, but since there are 2048 words it is fairly unlikely for repeats to show up in randomly ...
- 7,727
5
votes
Accepted
How do I import a Multibit HD wallet with seeds into Electrum?
OK found a way! Only cost me $8 to switch wallets! WTF?
Go here and save the web page to disk: https://iancoleman.github.io/bip39/
Download, install, & start TOR browser. https://www.torproject....
- 588
5
votes
bruteforce 12 words seed
The answer is 12! = 479,001,600 possible mnemonics (less if there are repeated words). Out of these only ~29,937,600 (1 in 16) produce a valid seed. This is definitely brute forceable.
No, if you ...
- 3,589
5
votes
5
votes
Accepted
How to get my 24 word seed using bitcoin-cli
How to get my 24 word seed using bitcoin-cli
You write about getting but your commands are about setting. This is confusing.
You can't get a seed-phrase from Bitcoin-core.
You can use the sethdseed ...
- 28k
5
votes
Why are there not mnemonic-seed words in Turkish especially considering the increasing rate of bitcoin adoption in the country?
Because no one has stepped up to do the work or hire someone to do it for them. That's how open source works : )
This repository contains the mnemonic list in different languages (Currently just 8). ...
- 10.2k
4
votes
BIP deterministic seeds, number of words and compatible wallets
AFAIK, the two most common sets of HD wallet mnemonic seeds used are BIP 39 compliant or Electrum Wallet compliant. Most of the more secure hardware HD wallet devices support the BIP 39 standard, ...
- 3,077
4
votes
Why can the same 12 words produce different seeds in an Electrum wallet file?
It's actually a good question. Let's take a look at what is happening. First, Electrum hashes your mnemonic to generate a seed. The seed indeed contains all the information necessary to generate the ...
4
votes
Accepted
How can I generate a Bitcoin address from a 12 word seed without using a computer?
While theoretically possible, the algorithms involved mean that it is practically impossible. You would need to compute the seed from your mnemonic word according to BIP 39, and then derive the keys ...
- 1,035
4
votes
Accepted
Is it possible to bruteforce the seed?
No, it is not true. Both are impossible due to math. The mnemonic is just an encoding of a number that is randomly generated (i.e. just like a private key) so it has the same security properties of ...
- 71.6k
4
votes
How to generate specific private keys from 12-word backup and wallet address?
Mnemonic seeds are based on the BIP39 (seeds) and BIP44 (accounts/multiple currencies).
When deriving addresses, one uses a derivation path to get to a specific addresses. The default paths are ...
- 17.2k
4
votes
Accepted
How are 21 words seeds generated
The base system is described in BIP32 and BIP39.
Essentially, the conversion goes the other way around. We don't convert a list of addresses to a seed. A seed is converted to a list of addresses.
...
- 17.2k
4
votes
Accepted
If anyone with your seed phrase can generate your wallet private keys, what is the advantage of a hardware wallet?
Well, in both cases, your seed words are ultimately the key to the wallet.
If you use a regular wallet, you open yourself up to a number of other attacks
Malware on the device that runs the software ...
- 17.2k
4
votes
Possibility to retrieve BIP39 mnemonic (24 words English dict) from BIP39 (hex) seed?
This is not possible.
The seed words are converted to the hex seed through a process involving a one way hashing operation - it is not possible to go the other way.
That said, as long as your hex seed ...
- 17.2k
4
votes
Accepted
BIP39 English Word List
Is there a standard in BIP39?
BIP39 says:
An ideal wordlist has the following characteristics:
a) smart selection of words
the wordlist is created in such a way that it's enough to type the first ...
- 28k
4
votes
What do they mean by "12/24 words" or "seed words"?
Bitcoin Core does not support BIP39, or any other seed word standard. You are correct that this implies backing up wallet.dat and keeping it safe directly. This is a good idea in any case, even if ...
- 108k
3
votes
Accepted
How to recover an electrum wallet from seed
First download Electrum, try to get a version closest to the one you were using. Get the portable version because you may need to get a higher version if it doesn't work.
Open the program, File -> ...
- 193
3
votes
What precisely are vSeeds "seednodes", how to they work, how to create one for a new network?
Couple of points covering what it is and how it works:
The description might be out of date. You'd need to follow the code to see how seeding is done. E.g. IRC seeding is not used any more (but ...
- 126
3
votes
Accepted
Testing Ledger Nano S wallet seed
If you do this correctly, it would mirror your wallet, yes. BUT!
Doing so is probably not a good idea, because you'll have to type your seed phrase into a desktop computer that may be compromised. ...
- 18.3k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible