HOW SECURE IS YOUR BITCOIN WALLET?

Are you afraid of getting hacked by quantum computers?!

I'm an entrepreneur / cyber security enthusiast risking my entire net-worth and time by building a bitcoin start up, so I had to do the math for myself. Buckle in because it's more secure than you can fathom.

Possible Combinations of BTC wallets per type:

Legacy Address: 25 commas

BIP-39 (12 word): 13 commas

BIP-39 (24 word): 26 commas

Legacy wallets (256-bit private keys):

2^256 = 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

(This is approximately 1.16 x 10^77)

BIP-39 12-word seeds:

2048^12 = 5,444,517,870,735,015,415,413,993,718,908,291,383,296

(This is approximately 5.44 x 10^39)

BIP-39 24-word seeds:

2048^24 = 29,642,774,844,752,946,028,434,172,162,224,104,410,437,116,074,403,984,394,101,141,506,025,761,187,823,616

(This is approximately 2.96 x 10^79)

The math above demonstrates that 12 word seed phrases are the least secure of all three wallet types. If there's 200 million bitcoin wallets and 160m of those are using 12 word seeds, this is the odds below of you getting hacked.

Let's say we have a supercomputer that can check 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000 or 10^12) seed phrases per second. This is far beyond current capabilities but helps illustrate the scale.

We'll assume you're using this computer 24/7 for an entire lifetime. Let's say that's 100 years.

Now, let's do the math:

Seconds in 100 years:

100 years * 365 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes * 60 seconds = 3,153,600,000 seconds

Total number of seed phrases we could check in 100 years:

3,153,600,000 * 1,000,000,000,000 = 3,153,600,000,000,000,000,000 (about 3.15 * 10^21)

Probability of finding the correct seed phrase:

3.15 * 10^21 / 34,028,236,692,093,846,346,337,460,743,176,821 ≈ 9.26 * 10^-14

This means that even after 100 years of continuous checking at this incredible rate, the probability of finding a single valid seed phrase is about 0.0000000000000926 or about 1 in 10 trillion.

To put it another way:

If you had 10 trillion of these supercomputers running for 100 years each, you'd have about a 63% chance of finding one valid seed phrase.

To have a 99.99% chance of finding a valid seed phrase, you'd need to run this process for about 460 billion years - that's about 33 times the current age of the universe.

In conclusion, The number of possible legacy private keys is greater than the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe (which is around 10^80) 🤯🤯🤯

If you've heard this last statement before, they weren't exaggerating.

BITCOIN = HOPE