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Replying to Avatar Michael R. Sullivan

I've been playing around with some numbers regarding the security of 12 word seed phrases in a hyperbitcoinized future. The Fugaku Supercomputer is 542 petaflops and could test ~322 billion different seeds per second.

If all eight billion humans have a 12 word seed phrase, it would take this computer ~67 million years on average to find a single one. Obviously the incentives are massively misaligned for anything like this to make sense. But what if Moore's Law continues as the same pace for the next 70 years as it has for the previous 70?

This malicious actor with a hypothetical future supercomputer would be able to find one of these eight billion (assuming little population growth) roughly every 17 hours.

There are MASSIVE assumptions made in this super rough math. But generally, I'm curious how the bitcoin protocol might need to adapt to prevent this kind of issue if Moore's Law does continue?

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zach 2y ago

Nice note and interesting thought experiment.

Seems that given enough time a future supercomputer will crack anything.

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Michael R. Sullivan 2y ago

That's what I'm curious about. Anything increasing that exponentially is overpowered given enough time. It's a super hypothetical problem, just curious if anyone smarter than me has given it more thought.

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