wallet provider, Wasabi Walletlaunched an educational bitcoin contest on January 23, asking people to “crack” the seed phrase of a wallet loaded with over 4 million Sats.
The project, titled ‘hunting sat‘, is backed by Swan Bitcoin, Trezor, Blockstream, and several other respected companies in the Bitcoin space. First, a bitcoin wallet was generated using a 12-word BIP-39 seed phrase. The words were then distributed among the partners, with a new word to be revealed daily.
The event aims to shed light on the nature of crypto account security in a virtually transparent way. The chance of someone guessing the seed phrase of the wallet is next to zero due to the crypto involved. However, presenting this to the world through a “cracking” contest is a new method of education.
To further demonstrate the security of private keys, the more words in the seed phrase are revealed, the weaker it becomes.
There have been many similar competitions on Reddit and other platforms. The latter has a solid list of collaborating partners to promote sound wallet security.
As of press time, four words have been revealed, blast, hollow, state and ape. More words will be posted by the end of the contest on January 30. The Hunting Stats website explains the motivation behind the campaign.
“As bitcoiners, we wanted to have a fun game to start 2023 on a high pace with projects and businesses that we respect and use every day. Security and privacy of bitcoins are essential and we hope that Hunting Sats can bring together bitcoiners who care about these principles.
The campaign is rooted in the difficulty of understanding how secure a Bitcoin private key is. The odds of guessing a 12-word seed phrase are 1 in 10^40. However, this is too large a number to easily understand.
Bitcoin private key security
In an attempt to visualize the problem, the distance from the Earth to the Moon is approximately 238,855 miles. To travel 10^40 miles (the odds of guessing a seed phrase) one would have to travel to the Moon and back approximately 42,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times.
For context, the estimated age of the universe is around 13.8 billion years, and traveling to the Moon and back at the speed of light would take around 1.28 seconds. Therefore, even traveling at the speed of light, it would take longer than the age of the universe to go to the Moon 42,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times.
Therefore, while the competition is fun, anyone is unlikely to “win” the Bitcoin in the wallet. However, interest in crypto is slowly returning. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index recently moved to “greed,” and Google searches for “Bitcoin” soared to highs last seen in November. Contests like this can help new users understand crypto security.
