bob123, based on this
case where user is lost 5 from 24 words of his seed, HCP is calculated that some 20 years more or less would be necessary to get valid seed + some extra work after that. Since this is
only 12 word seed, can we assume that time to recover this seed would be at least a half less then in mentioned case?
Whether it is a 12- or 24- word mnemonic code doesn't matter, i think.
It matters how many combination you have to try out, and this is dependent on the amount of missing words.
Since the base character set is 2048, the difference between guessing 4 compared to 5 words should be 2048 times less time consuming.
Which would mean that it should take
240 (months in 20 years) / 2048 = ~ 0.12 months. So about 3,5 days (given that 20 years for 5 words is the correct amount of time).
But the 20 years were calculated according to this:
Still even at 5 seconds for 1,000,000 mnemonics...
This might not be the actual time it takes. I currently don't know how many mnemonics are possible per second on which machine.
So it additionally depends on the machine from OP and the program / algorithm used.
My calculation above obviously assumes that all known words are in the correct order and the position of the missing words are known.