Am I screwed?

It’s said many times before, but I feel obliged to point out that posting your amount of ADA isn’t a good idea. It’s like waving your millions of USD (that’s what it’ll be worth one day :grin:) around saying “try to rob me”.

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I wanted to point out this Medium article by Tron Black. By far the best explanation I have seen as to how the magic works.

** Seeds of Freedom** https://medium.com/@tronblack/ravencoin-seeds-of-freedom-a3a3ff0fa1
Have you ever wondered why crypto wallets are asking you to write down 12 words? …

128 bits gives us 2 raised to the 128th power combinations or roughly 340,282,366,920,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations.

As long as this SD card never goes to a computer with internet connection, ok. But I’m sure 99% of the people will read it on the same computer they use for internet.
The most simple approach is the most secure: Write it down by hand and write it down several times so you can be sure not to have typos in it.

or go to walmart with the sd card and print it :slight_smile:

and have a copy of your photo with the 12 words saved on the walmart computer cloud? If you like…

they are usually inserted directly into a printer … those arent necessarily in the “cloud”

I would guess they are connected to the internet for diagnosis, service, updates,…

Concerning crypto wallets I always assume the worst possible case and go for the KISS principle. The most simple and therefore secure form to write down the 12 words is still a pencil.

Well a pen probably has a better chance of staying legible in the long term, no?

Maybe, I don’t know. If in doubt: Use both and hammer the words into a stone tablet. Maybe you should get a larger safe deposit box for the stone tablet… :sunglasses:

But joking apart: I heard of people who engrave their words into a metal plate. That’s the kind of fireproof handwritten 12 words.

Then you have to kill the engraver… :smile:

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Either that or do it yourself.:man_factory_worker:

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Suicide? :grin:
Like QuadrigaCX CEO? :grin:

Hi isferos, I was wondering what I would need to change in this script to help me find the last word of my 15-word seed phrase. I have 14 of the words, but can’t find the last one!

Many thanks

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Same problem sir. 14 words, missing one (not sure about the order)… I’m trying to adapt isferos’ code to work with 15 word seeds. I have a data science background so this stuff for me its quite hard :confused: By the way if you are sure it’s just the last word, it would be guessing the words until you get it right from this list BIP 39 Wordlist – Blockplate

That was somehow answered in:

But: The script is for old 12 word phrases.

I have written a script with the same idea that works with 12, 15, 18, 21, or 24 word phrases:

Also, in contrast to @isferos’ script it takes the words on the command line. So you don’t have to change the script and risk (part of) your seed lying around on disk.

Hi @HeptaSean , this is great! I really appreciate the help! I’m very much an amateur in coding, do I need to do anything to the script or can I just run it?

It does not need to be changed. The part you know is given on the command line with a _ replacing the word you do not know. (It expects exactly 12, 15, 18, 21, or 24 arguments on the command line, in your case 14 words and _ for the 15th that you do not know.)

Attention: Never share the part you know here or somewhere else on the Internet. Even if you can’t crack it now, it might help others to crack it before you.

It is Python 3, so you need that. If you are on Linux, it should already be there. If you are on Windows, it seems to be pretty easy to install that lately: Python on Windows 10 for beginners | Microsoft Docs

You run it in a shell (some kind of terminal with some kind of shell on Linux, PowerShell on Windows):

$ python3 bruteforce-BIP39.py word01 word02 … word14 _

Is that enough to get you started?

(In theory, the script can handle more than one unknown word, but it will take very long and the possibilities become too many to check manually already for a second missing word. My script cannot handle if you are not sure about the order and also there, the possibilities become too many quite fast.)

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Thank you so much! I think I can go from here :slight_smile:

@HeptaSean it took a while but i managed to get it back by trying a bunch of combinations :slight_smile: thanks so much for the help!

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I have written a far better usable script and presented it here: