However, if you know the location of some of those words it would be easier (maybe possible) to brute force it. Because the difficulty increases exponentially
With good hardware, btcrecover will descramble a 12 word BIP39 seed phrase in an hour: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Usage_Examples/2020-05-02_Descrambling_a_12_word_seed/Example_Descrambling_a_12_word_seed/. Although not exactly the same due to the checksum, lets assume that if you know 12 out of the 24 words then you could descramble the remaining 12 words in roughly the same amount of time.If you don't know the position of 13 words instead of 12, then there are 13x as many combinations to try, so that would take roughly 13 hours.
For 14 words, 7 days.
For 15 words, 16 weeks.
For 16 words, 5 years.
For 17 words, 85 years.
For 18 words, 1500 years.
No point calculating beyond that really.
Sorry to take back an old post, but i'm really curious about that thing.
when you say "For 18 words, 1500 years", you mean to just generate ALL possible combinations, right??
if my secret/mnemonic phrase is:
"cat15 cat2 cat3 cat4 cat5 cat6 cat18 cat8 cat9 cat10 cat11 cat12 cat1 cat14 cat7 cat13 cat16 cat17"
and my script generate that exact sequence as the 4th result, is it not the same ??
have i found it in some seconds?
and what about the "last" word, you call CHECKSUM, in my case "cat17".
it is not just a word "cat17" ??
