Monday, 14 October 2019

How does recovering from seed phrase locate ALL of your previously generated private/public key pairs in a reasonable amount of time?

Apologies if this is a repost or the title/question is a bit stupid. The Reddit search function isn't working for me right now so I wasn't able to search this sub for answers. However, I've had no luck on Google either.

Basically, I understand how the seed phrase works. You use it (a number representation) to derive your "master" key. From this master key you can derive as many private/public key pairs/addresses as you want. But my question is, if you're recovering from a seed phrase, how does the wallet know which private keys have been derived already and used? For example, if your private key was just hash(master key + random integer), and there were infinite possibilities for the random integer, wouldn't the wallet have to try a ridiculous amount of possibilities before getting the right pairs? Or search through every address on the blockchain try to see if the seed phrase yields the private key corresponding to that address?

submitted by /u/redditbay_cfaguy
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