I was conducting a thought experiment regarding brute forcing mnemonic seeds and wondered what circumstances would have to arise for it become profitable. I know that this would probably never be practical but I was still curious.
the current hashrate is 110EH per second. so one block for every 66000 Exohashes
assume moores law continues as it has been, if someone knew a wallet had 1 blocks worth of BTC, and ASICs could be created in the future solely for this purpose, when would a 12 word mnemonic seed brute force be profitable?
assuming the checksum is just as hard to crack as the other words to be conservative, the amount of hashes would be 2048^(x), where x is the amount of missing words.
punching 2048^(x)=66(10^21) into wolfram alpha, X approaches 7. so right now the answer is 7.
in 6 years, hashing power of the network has increased approx. 1000 times.
assuming this continues (which it wont due to physical constraints of microelectronics causing diminishing returns) then approx. every 6 years you need an additional word to protect 1 block of btc.
66(10^24)=2048^x. X will approach 8
2020+6*(number of words)=2050 for an additional 5 words.
So around 2050, cracking a 12 word mnemonic seed would take the network 10 minutes hypothetically. The block reward will be around 6.25/(2^7)=0.0488BTC. In 6 more years it would be profitable if the wallet held about 1000 times less.
24 word mnemonic seeds would be safe for much longer
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