33 ms·
> You can do that but you'll need a way to generate the checksum for the seed phrase. A 24 words BIP39 seed contains 264 bits (24 x 11 bits): 256 bits for the s
by olalonde 4y ago
> You can do that but you'll need a way to generate the checksum for the seed phrase. A 24 words BIP39 seed contains 264 bits (24 x 11 bits): 256 bits for the seed and 8 bits for the checksum.
In theory, you could pick 23 words at random with 11 * 23 coin flips, every 11 flips representing an index in the dictionary. Now to find which 24th word passes the checksum, you could guess it in at most 2048 attempts on your hardware wallet :)
More realistically, it might be possible to develop a Ledger app that, given 23 words, finds the "checksum-passing" 24th word for you.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago> More realistically, it might be possible to develop a Ledger app that, given 23 words, finds the checksum passing 24th word for you. Ah that's an interesting thought: I don't know about other hardware wallets but indeed the Ledger allows anyone to develop "nano apps" and it doesn't seem crazy to write one that'd compute the checksum after you gave it the 23 words you got throwing dice (well, 23 words + the three first bits of the 24th word really). Maybe it even already exists?
- olalonde 4y agoI couldn't find one. I'm tempted to give it a shot. I will comment here if I succeed :)
- whatisweb3 4y agoYes, once you have 23 words, there is a finite set of possible words that can be used as the 24th to make checksum valid, and you could pick one at random. But as I understand the private key can be any number, so you do not need to even use the seed phrase technique to create a private key, or if you do it isn’t required that it has a valid checksum in order to operate on the network.
- olalonde 4y agoThat's true but I think the idea was to generate a passphrase that can subsequently be entered into a hardware wallet. And most hardware wallets only support entering seed phrases with a valid checksum.