A systems architect in Boston, Andrew Fraser, won a 100,000 Satoshi bounty, worth $29, by brute-forcing a 12-word seed phrase shared on Twitter by Bitcoin educator "Wicked Bitcoin." Fraser cracked the code using BTCrecover, a software application available on GitHub, in just 25 minutes. Fraser's success serves as a reminder to Bitcoin users to take crypto security seriously and keep seed phrases secure and offline. Fraser explained that 12-word seed keys are "perfectly secure if the words remain unknown to an attacker or there is a passphrase '13th seed word' used in the derivation path of the wallet." However, he emphasized the superior security of 24-word seed keys, which have roughly 6.24^24 possible combinations.
(By JOE HALL)
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