Why Hacking Digital Wallets Using Bots to Try All Possibilities is Virtually Impossible and Impractical?
April 11th, 2023

Hacking digital wallets using bots to try all different possibilities is virtually impossible for several human-like reasons:

  1. Imagine this: there are 2048 words in the BIP39 list, so the number of potential combinations for a 12-word seed phrase is a mind-boggling 2048^12. That's about 5.44 × 10^39 possible combinations!

  2. Now, let's say a bot could try an impressive billion (10^9) possibilities per second. It would still take a staggering 1.72 × 10^23 years to try all possible combinations. To put this into perspective, our universe is estimated to be just 13.8 billion (1.38 × 10^10) years old. In other words, this attack would take way, way longer than the age of the universe itself.

  3. Think about the costs involved in an attack like this: the hardware, the energy to run and maintain the computing equipment, not to mention cooling and maintenance. Suppose the bot used specialized ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) devices for encryption. These devices could cost between $1,000 and $3,000 each, and you'd need hundreds or even thousands of them to try a billion possibilities per second.

Don't forget about the power consumption! If each ASIC device gobbled up around 1.5 kilowatts/hour, and you had 1,000 devices, you'd be looking at a whopping 1,500 kilowatts/hour in total. Depending on local electricity costs, running such equipment around the clock could set you back thousands of dollars daily.

  1. Lastly, brute force attacks are pretty noisy, making lots of repeated attempts to crack a recovery phrase. This means there's a good chance the attack would be detected, allowing countermeasures to be taken to stop it. These could include tracking the attack's source or beefing up security measures to protect digital wallets.

So, there you have it - hacking digital wallets with bots trying all different combinations is not only virtually impossible but also impractical from a human and financial standpoint.

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