What is a seed phrase?
A seed phrase is a string of words that serve as a password to access your crypto wallet. This phrase allows you to recover your wallet and crypto assets even if you lose your password, phone or hardware device. The seed phrase acts as the master password, so you should write it down and keep it in a safe place. The words in the seed phrase are randomly generated when setting up your wallet. Therefore, this phrase should be written down and kept in a safe place (physically stored, not on your computer/mobile phone) so that you can use it when needed.
Source: cointelegraph
How does the seed phrase work?
The seed phrase works on the principle of BIP-39, which stands for Bitcoin improvement proposal-39. It is the standard way to generate and use seed phrases in crypto wallets. BIP-39 contains a list of 2048 words that can be used to create seed phrases. Each word has its own number from 0001 to 2048. And each seed phrase consists of 12, 18, or 24 words randomly selected from that list. This means that all seed phrases in the world contain words from that list only. However, the number of possible combinations is huge, so it is very unlikely that someone will guess your seed phrase. That is why it is important to keep it in a safe and secret place, because it is your key to access your crypto wallet and your crypto assets.
Source: cointelegraph
How secure are seed phrases?
Seed phrases are extremely safe, and the probability that someone will guess exactly our seed phrase is extremely small. As we saw in the previous paragraph, the number of possible combinations for a 24-word seed phrase is 2048 to the twenty-fourth, which is about 2.96*10 79 . It is a huge number that is hard to imagine. To compare it with some other probabilities from the world, we can cite some examples:
The odds of winning a week on the lotto are about 1 in 14 million.
The probability of being struck by lightning is about 1 in 500 thousand.
The odds of becoming president of the United States are about 1 in 10 million.
As we can see, all these probabilities are much higher than the probability of someone guessing our seed phrase. In fact, the probability of someone guessing our seed phrase is less than the probability of flipping a coin and getting heads 256 times in a row. So, we can conclude that seed phrases are very safe, provided that we keep them in a safe and secret place, because whoever knows our seed phrase also has access to our crypto wallet, i.e. funds.
Source: cointelegraph
Supercomputers and seed phrases
Supercomputers are very powerful computer systems that can perform a huge number of operations per second. They are used to solve complex problems in science, engineering, medicine and other fields. Supercomputers are also of interest to the crypto community, as they could theoretically attempt to crack the security of seed phrases. Namely, the supercomputer could try all possible combinations of words from the BIP-39 list and try to find those that correspond to existing crypto wallets. However, this would be a very difficult and time-consuming endeavor, as the number of possible combinations would be too large even for the fastest supercomputers. By some estimates, it would take more than 10^18 years to crack a 24-word seed phrase using a supercomputer. So, we can conclude that seed phrases are very secure and resistant to super computer attacks. However, this does not mean that we should not be careful and follow the development of technology. In the future, even faster and more powerful computers, such as quantum computers, may emerge, which could pose a greater threat to security. That is why it is important that the crypto community constantly works to improve and adapt its protocols and algorithms, in order to ensure the highest level of protection for its users. If it happens that seed phrases become ineffective or insecure, we will probably switch to a more secure and modern system, which will allow us to continue using cryptocurrencies without fear of loss or theft.
Source: cointelegraph
Conclusion
In this blog, we learned what a seed phrase is, how it works, how secure it is, and what the future of seed phrases is because of supercomputers. A seed phrase is a string of words that serve as a password to access our crypto wallet and our crypto assets. It is generated randomly from a list of 2048 words, which is standardized according to the BIP-39 protocol. It can have 12, 18 or 24 words, depending on our choice. The seed phrase is very safe because the probability of someone guessing our seed phrase is extremely low. We hope you found this blog useful and interesting. Thank you for reading, and if you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them on our social networks ( Twitter , Instagram ).
