Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Alistair Milne held 1 BTC on his Twitter. He published clues to the mnemonic phrase to access the wallet, until one of the users guessed.

    At the end of May, Alistair Milne announced on his Twitter account that he had created a wallet in which he placed 1 BTC. The entrepreneur said that he would publish tips for the automatically generated mnemonic phrase of twelve words on his pages on social networks for thirty days.

To prevent the use of the brute force brute force method or the launch of programs to decrypt a mnemonic phrase, Milne intended to “reveal the last three or four words at once”.

But he never got a chance to do it, because one of the users was able to decipher the phrase shortly after Milne published the eighth hint. The entrepreneur tweeted:

    “Woke up in the morning from the“ bad ”news. A wallet with 1 BTC was hacked using the brute force method, which is very impressive. This person must have rented a video card farm to do it so fast! I knew that this would happen quickly, but most people thought it would take several weeks to guess the four remaining words by exhaustive search. ”

   In the comments, the “hacker” under the pseudonym Cheta wrote that it took him just over 43 hours to gain access to the wallet, but did not disclose the details.

   Milne mentioned on Twitter that he hoped to make this "draw" accessible to people "not very tech savvy." This puzzle, in his opinion, was also a technical experiment showing how quickly an attacker can decipher twelve-word seed if he knows half the phrase.

   A mnemonic phrase (seed) for accessing a cryptocurrency wallet is a phrase of 12 or 24 words. This is a backup phrase that allows you to access the private keys of the wallet. By some estimates, it will take several billion years to crack such a phrase without knowing any of the words from it. But with every hint and word published by Milne, the seed became easier to decipher.

   Milne was impressed by the speed with which the "hacker" picked up a mnemonic phrase. He was also intrigued by the high commission of 0.01 BTC that the user paid to withdraw BTC from the wallet. According to him, Cheta wanted to withdraw the “prize” as soon as possible, until someone else got access to the wallet.

    Recall that last month one of the users of the Reddit forum reported that he lost $ 1,200 in 100 seconds by accidentally posting the code containing the mnemonic phrase from the MetaMask wallet on the GitHub developer portal.