wallet provider, Wallet with wasabiLaunched an educational bitcoin contest on January 23, asking people to “hack” the seed phrase of a wallet loaded with more than 4 million satoshis.

The project called “Hunting sats, support Swan Bitcoin, Trezor, Blockstream, and several other reputable companies in the bitcoin space. First Bitcoin wallet was generated using a 12-word BIP-39 original phrase. Then the words were distributed among the partners, and every day a new word was discovered.

The event aims to shed light on the nature of crypto account security in an almost transparent way. The chance of anyone guessing the seed of a wallet is practically zero due to the cryptography used. However, demonstrating this to the world through a “hack” contest is a new method of learning.

To further demonstrate the security of private keys, the more words from the original phrase are revealed, the weaker it becomes.

There were many such competitions. Reddit and other platforms. This latter has a solid list of partners who cooperate to keep the wallet secure.

At the time of publication, four words have been revealed: explosion, emptiness, state, and monkey. Additional words will be published by the end of the competition on January 30th. The Hunting Stats website explains the motivation behind the campaign.

“As bitcoiners, we wanted to organize a fun game to start 2023 on a high level with projects and companies that we respect and use every day. The security and privacy of bitcoin is very important and we hope that Hunting Sats can bring together bitcoiners who care about these principles.”

The campaign is rooted in the fact that it is difficult to understand how secure a Bitcoin private key is. The probability of guessing the original phrase of 12 words is 1 in 10^40. However, this number is too large to be easily understood.

bitcoin private key security

To try and visualize the problem, the distance from the Earth to the Moon is about 238,855 miles. To travel 10^40 miles (probability of guessing the original phrase) would require traveling to the moon and back about 42,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times.

For context, the estimated age of the universe is roughly 13.8 billion years, and a journey to the moon and back at the speed of light would take about 1.28 seconds. Therefore, even traveling at the speed of light, it would take longer than the age of the universe to reach the moon 42,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times.

So while the competition is fun, it’s doubtful that anyone will “win” bitcoin in their wallet. However, interest in cryptocurrency is gradually returning. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index recently changed to ‘Greed’ and Google searches for ‘Bitcoin’ hit a high last seen in November. Competitions like these can help new users understand crypto security.

Liam “Akiba” Wright

Editor and Producer of Cryptooshala

Liam, also known as Akiba, is a Blocklight journalist and editor at Cryptooshala. He believes that decentralized ledger technology can lead to widespread positive change. He predicts that the next 10 years will bring the dawn of a new era of technological innovation.

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