Has anyone ever opened their favourite book, picked twelve words in a row, and unknowingly created a Bitcoin wallet?
holy-bip39le is a dark fantasy visualization that scans classic literature word by word, searching for sequences that form valid BIP39 seed phrases — the kind used to secure Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets.
🔗 Live demo: https://skfd.github.io/holy-bip39le/
A BIP39 seed phrase is a sequence of 12 or 24 words drawn from a fixed 2048-word English wordlist. Each valid phrase encodes a cryptographic wallet with its own private keys and addresses. The phrase must satisfy a checksum — so not every 12 BIP39 words in a row will work, but statistically a few might.
This project asks: what happens if we run that test against the entire text of classic literature?
- Each word in the book is checked against the 2048-word BIP39 wordlist
- A sliding window of 12 and 24 consecutive BIP39 words is maintained
- When the window is full, a SHA-256 checksum is verified against the last word's bits
- Valid phrases light up with lightning, spawn floating orbs, and play an arcane sound
Words are colour-coded like Diablo item tiers:
| Colour | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Grey | Scanned, not a BIP39 word |
| White | Valid BIP39 word |
| 🔵 Magic blue | Part of a valid 12-word phrase |
| 🟡 Unique gold | Part of a valid 24-word phrase |
| Deep sapphire | Part of two overlapping 12-word phrases |
| 🟠 Set orange | Part of two overlapping 24-word phrases |
| 💜 Runeword purple | Appears in both a 12-word and a 24-word phrase |
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll
- A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde — R. L. Stevenson
- Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse
- The Time Machine — H. G. Wells
- Hamlet — William Shakespeare
All texts are public domain via Project Gutenberg.
| Action | Key |
|---|---|
| Play / Pause | Space |
| Faster / Slower | → / ← |
| Rewind | R |
| Mute / Unmute | M |
Pure static site — no build tools, no dependencies, no frameworks.
- Vanilla ES modules (JavaScript)
- Web Crypto API (SHA-256 checksum)
- Web Audio API (synthesised sounds)
- SVG lightning effects
- Google Fonts: Cinzel & Cinzel Decorative
- Concept & Design — Skyfallsdown
- Implementation — GitHub Copilot (Claude Sonnet)
- Art inspiration — Diablo game series by Blizzard Entertainment
- BIP39 wordlist — trezor/python-mnemonic
MIT — do whatever you want with it.