Dr. Violet Howard explains how to recover a lost cryptocurrency seed phrase. One missing word is easy to brute-force, but five missing words would take over 1000 years on a PC. She covers three recovery tools and emphasizes doing this work offline.
Questions this video answers
1 out of 2048.
Each missing word multiplies the search space by 2048 (i.e., 2048^n for n missing words).
About 4 seconds (video claim).
> A PC would take more than a thousand years; effectively unrecoverable.
Chapters
What do you do if you lost your seed phrase? First, let's take a look at the probability of recovering your seed phrase depending on how many words you've lost. One missing word has a probability of 1 out of 2048, which would take about 0 seconds for a PC to solve. Two missing words has a probability of 1 out of 2048 to the power of 2 aka 4 seconds for a PC to solve, and then for each missing word you go up by another power. So as you can see in the table, if you try to recover five missing words, it will take a PC more than a thousand years and beyond. Five words it's safe to say that it is definitely lost, but if it's less than five words or maybe four, you could have a pretty good chance. Some people in the industry, like the Smart Ape, have described a few ways to recover up to four missing words in a seed phrase using tools like the GitHub project called Mnemonic Recovery, BTC Recoverer, or ChatGPT. Let's take a look at three methods you can use to recover your seed phrase if you've lost four words. Method number one mnemonic recovery There is a well known GitHub project called mnemonic Recovery which you can download and use to recover your missing words. Run the tool and enter your seed phrase, replacing the missing words with a question mark. The program will then try to find all relevant options for the words that can be used with that particular string of words in that particular sequence. Method number 2 BTC recoverer BTC recoverer is an open source wallet, password and seed recovery tool. This tool runs on Python which is a programming language often used for software development, building websites, automating tasks and and conducting data analysis. All the support and guides you need to run the tool are available on the BTC Recoverer website. Once you have launched the tool, you will need to provide it with a seed phrase and add a question mark for the words that you have lost. And then after a short while, the tool returns the complete seed phrase with the lost words. Pretty cool right? Let ChatGPT do the work for you. This method consists of asking ChatGPT to generate a Python code for you to recover the missing words in your 12 word seed phrase. Go. Good old ChatGPT for this method you will need to use Anaconda for Python which is a free open source platform that allows you to write and execute code in the programming language Python, copy and paste the code provided by ChatGPT, enter the incomplete seed phrase and execute the code. This method might take a bit longer, but it is more secure as all the executed code is visible to you and you know that there isn't anything malicious hiding in there. If you lose part of your seed phrase, you can use one of these three methods to complete it. But please remember the safety of a seed phrase is paramount to the security of your cryptocurrency assets, so make sure you store them in a secure location. And please remember to use these tools without an active Internet connection so you're working in an offline environment where your seed phrase cannot leave your system. And that's it. Remember to like and subscribe for more helpful content. See you guys in the next one. It.
