Hi JF
Thanks for the reply
Yes, but the seed should at least be a minimum of 160bit as are the Bitcoin address.
But ideally even more as you have multiple Bitcoin addresses derived from this single key.
Wouldn't it become enough profitable then for someone to keep generating seeds and looking it up against the blockchain until they find the seed of somebody else?
With bitcoin addresses, the task is quite harder since it's actually a hash of a public address (which is even larger than the 160 bit bitcoin address). Hence, the attacker has to work on all the possibilities of the private address - which is 256 bits, so even larger.
But with this seed, it's just 128 bit possibilities (2^128) (and even, divided by the number of wallets used to find one of them)
No, the seed is for your wallet, which contains many addresses.
So that's a 1-to-many relationship. Hence, you will have
less seeds than addresses.
There are many threads here on the forum discussing the
feasibility of cracking a private key. Bottom line,
it can't really be done. 2^128 is simply too big a number.
Although there are 2^256 possible private keys,
if you know the public key (which is possible
only if a transaction was already sent from
the corresponding address), you can use
the elliptic curve math to find the private key
in 2^128 operations.
Otherwise, if you don't know the public key
of an address, you're struck with a brute-force
approach, hoping for a hash collision
with probability on the order of 2^160.
(Something to do with RIPEMD-160,
although i'm not yet up to speed on
exactly how that last point works.)
With electrum, the 12 word seed is
run through an iterative loop... hashing
it 100,000 times through SHA-256,
so if you want to try to brute-force
the 2^128 combinations, each try
will take 100,000 times as long.
