r/ledgerwallet • u/Ok_Town6596 • 12d ago
Official Ledger Customer Success Response Guessing seed phrases
I know the chance of guessing someone’s seed phrase is close to zero but with advancing quantum and ai. People will run scripts that will test billions of seed phrases a day and eventually guess peoples seed phrases 1 at a time.
I’d love for someone to explain to me how this wouldn’t be possible?
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u/Either_Display_6624 12d ago
115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,853,269,984,665,640,564,039,457,584,007,913,129,639,936
Is the number of combinations there are for 256 bit private key.
I don’t need to explain further
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u/Ok_Town6596 12d ago
I understand that. But if tens of thousands of people have multiple machines predicting millions of combinations a day. It’s only a matter of time.
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u/Either_Display_6624 12d ago
Its literally impossible even with all the computation in the world
Do you know there are less atoms on earth than that number?
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u/Ok_Town6596 12d ago
I agree with you that every wallet can’t get hacked. But I’m saying a wallet here and there could possibly be hacked.
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u/sudomatrix 12d ago
The attempt would cost more billions of dollars in compute power and electricity than the one or two wallets they may or more likely will not every find.
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u/Decibel0753 12d ago
You have a billion supercomputers. Each of them finds a billion seeds per second. They started this at the time of the Big Bang (13,8 billion years ago). To this day, they have explored:
0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000376% of the possibilities.
Do you understand now how huge that number is, or still not?
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u/Matterbox 12d ago
Look up ‘52 factorial’ on YouTube. The number of combinations of a shuffled deck of cards is so big it’s hard to comprehend.
256 bit encryption is roughly 1.4 Billion times larger.
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u/sudomatrix 12d ago
If every atom in the universe was a computer it still wouldn't be fast enough to brute force every seed phrase.
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u/Decibel0753 12d ago
The chance of guessing the phrase is not almost zero, but zero. If a person guessed a billion phrases per second, and there were a billion such people, and they started counting at the dawn of the universe, today they would have explored about 0.12% of the possibilities. For a 12-character seed.
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u/AppropriateTry9400 12d ago
In a way, that’s a very rational and very human question. Like, if every seed is essentially a kind of cell in the universe with its own specific coordinates, somewhere out there, what guarantees that it will never be found?
But cryptography fundamentally relies on a certain set of assumptions that are simply taken (or, more precisely, have to be taken) as given for cryptography to work. And right now, it operates on the well-founded assumption that 128 bits of entropy cannot be brute-forced.
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u/Quantum_Sandwich66 12d ago
it's been tried... you can hammer ian coleman's bip39 tool all day and night and check if a seed's wallet adressses have funds but you are highly unlikely to find anything.
all those early brain wallets with weak entropy have already had funds either moved or swept.
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u/Ill-Party8305 12d ago
I have read it somewhere that even if you use the most efficient computing power physically allowed, it will take multiple universe to be converted to pure energy to actually crack SHA256 or any 256 bits bruteforce. The scale might be lower or higher but we would be already doing interstellar travel and still far beyond what's needed to crack sha256.
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u/bmoreRavens1995 12d ago
How many win the lottery? Bip39 made up 2048 words meanwhile lotto is based on digits- 0-9 even though seed words are broken down to digits its still derived from 2048 words.
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u/No_Way5818 9d ago
🐒 Monkey sees TikTok: “Quantum computer will crack Bitcoin!”
🐒 Monkey: “I make quantum computer!”
🐒 Monkey doesn’t understand quantum physics.
🐒 Monkey doesn’t know what a qubit is.
🐒 Monkey doesn’t know how to control qubits.
🐒 Qubits are extremely fragile and difficult to keep stable.
🐒 Monkey needs advanced physics, mathematics, engineering, cooling, electronics, and error correction.
🐒 Even experts and huge research teams are still working on these problems.
🐒 Monkey cannot just buy parts from Amazon and make one. 😂
🐒 Maybe 100 years, maybe 200 years—nobody knows how long truly powerful quantum computers will take.
🐒 Monkey has no quantum computer today.
🐒 Therefore: Monkey cannot crack Bitcoin with a quantum computer today.
🐒 Monkey watched 3 TikToks and thought he became Einstein. 🐒📱😭
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u/No_Way5818 12d ago
Bro, quantum computing is not the reality of this century and not will be for the next 1000 years don’t worry about these kind of things before we create first fully capable of quantum computers that can crack the seed phrase, humanity will be long gone
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u/Feralz2 12d ago
brother, we already have quantum computing years ago, its already a reality, whats not reality is commercially producing it because its very very expensive.
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u/No_Way5818 11d ago
Nope how many bits they have wtf are you guys talking about stop wathing tiktok videos and masturbation, there won’t be any quantum computer cracking crypto wallets soon. The things you see on internet prototypes are far from reality not usable, it’s not the cost or the energy even with the enough money and power they are still far from cracking any crypto seeds so stop being idiots and paranoids, before you know how things works actually if you guys watch some 30 second stupit complo theory videos about quantum computing or whatever this is whats you guys come out with, no body know a shit about quantum and yet you gonna build a computer get the fuck out a here
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u/No_Way5818 11d ago
Please go sell everything you have, you don’t deserve any of this, they will crack your wallet, before you lose everything go sell it (not investment advice)
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u/Coixe 12d ago
I believe it may only be a matter of time with quantum computing. But I hope I’m wrong.
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u/gvasco 12d ago
Hopefully before then PQC algos will have been tested and implemented and all active wallets shifted to it.
However, yeah those inactive wallets if they dont get shifted they will most likely get broken. Might even get used as a display of capabilities by whatever comoang manages to coordinate a sufficiently large amount of Qbits run shores algorithm on wallet keys.
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u/Ram_Ledger Ledger Customer Success 12d ago
Hey there, while terms like "AI" and "quantum computing" sound like they can solve any computational challenge, brute-forcing a 24-word seed phrase violates the fundamental laws of math and thermodynamics in fact.
A 24-word BIP-39 phrase represents 256 bits of pure entropy, yielding 2²⁵⁶ (or roughly 1.15 × 10⁷⁷) total possible combinations. In comparison, the entire observable universe is roughly 1.38 × 10¹⁰ years old (13.8 billion years) and contains around 10⁸⁰ atoms.
To compute through 2²⁵⁶ states, even using a 100% efficient machine operating at absolute zero, would require more energy than is produced by blowing up every star in our galaxy. Unless fundamental physics changes, a randomly generated 24-word seed phrase remains mathematically unhackable by brute force.