How Impossible Is It to Guess a Crypto Wallet?

When my 13-year-old asked, “What if someone just guesses my wallet words?”, I smiled. It sounds simple. You’ve got twelve words. You try multiple combinations until one works, like brute-forcing a password, right?

Let’s see what that really means.

The Magic Word List

Every Cardano or Bitcoin wallet password is created with words from the same dictionary: a list of 2048 words.

Pick twelve of those words and you get a “seed phrase.” That phrase unlocks a wallet.

So there are
2048 × 2048 × 2048 × … (twelve times)
possible combinations.

That’s 2¹³², or about 5 × 10³⁹ different ways.
That’s a five followed by thirty-nine zeros.

Picture a beach made of sand. Now zoom in so each grain of sand has its own tiny beach inside it. If you tried to count every grain within every grain, you’d finish counting sand grains long before you ran out of wallet phrases.

So How Many Wallets Actually Exist?

Around five million people have Cardano wallets.
Five million sounds big, but compared to 5 × 10³⁹ it’s like a drop of water in every ocean on Earth.