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Bitcoin Brain Wallets: A flawed, dangerous idea.

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Re: Bitcoin Brain Wallets: A flawed, dangerous idea.

#2

Post by nossim »

Bitcoin itself is a flawed and dangerous idea. What makes the value of money is the trust you put into the economics institutions of some territory. Value of money should not be derived from some computational tricks but should be the reflect of the real economy. The other explanations including some from Wall street (remember Subprimes ?) are just big misredirections some conmen invented to take a lot of money from your pockets. Bitcoin is just a modern version of a pyramidal scheme. Think of it as pyramidal scheme 2.0

Re: Bitcoin Brain Wallets: A flawed, dangerous idea.

#3

Post by epscylonb »

Completely agree with the article.

Whether you realise it or not, what you want from a private key is lots of entropy.

A simple pass phrase is easily cracked, a complicated one is hard to remember (and it needs to be remembered exactly).

There may potentially be a small amount of middle ground here, particularly if your memory is very good, but what happens if you get dementia as you get older?.

If you must use a pass phrase, use it to encrypt a truly random private key, this way the only the private key is exposed to the blockchain. An attacker would need the encrypted copy of your private key to brute force it, don't keep this online unless you need to send bitcoins.

Re: Bitcoin Brain Wallets: A flawed, dangerous idea.

#5

Post by venomsnake »

nossim wrote: post #2

Bitcoin itself is a flawed and dangerous idea. What makes the value of money is the trust you put into the economics institutions of some territory. Value of money should not be derived from some computational tricks but should be the reflect of the real economy. The other explanations including some from Wall street (remember Subprimes ?) are just big misredirections some conmen invented to take a lot of money from…

Bitcoin the system and the blockchain is brilliant. The adaptable difficulty and the hashcash chaining can be used for a lot of stuff where for various reasons you don't trust a central authority.

Bitcoin the currency is a different beast. Well if you have to rope the value of money to something - computational power is not the worst thing possible in an increasingly. digital world

Re: Bitcoin Brain Wallets: A flawed, dangerous idea.

#8

Post by DanBC »

That's a lousy article. Pass phrases are strong if you exclude anything that's been in print and if you use random words.

Use something like diceware. Ideally, use a 7 word phrase with a good password safe.

The article doesn't use any numbers, and so the author doesn't have a feel for just how strong a passphrase is compared to a password.

Also, the author seems to be missing the point of the xkcd comic. You can create a strong password. $xK!r88w82;)|@N?c463)fpD2SAtRNQq But very few people do this. Because of poor password policies people have a password. PASSWORD. They then modify that to conform to the policy. Must include numbers? PASSWORD89. Must include specials? !PASSWORD89

These are trivially easy to find. Firstly because the limited amount of modification available means other people would have tried it first, and those words will now be in dictionaries. Secondly, crackers can auto-substitute characters in wordlists.

Re: Bitcoin Brain Wallets: A flawed, dangerous idea.

#9

Post by DanBC »

chrismorgan wrote: post #4

The first one I tried, in similar style, was "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog": http://blockexplorer.com/address/13w4Hn1BJQM4bjZZgYtXpyp4cio... . Fortunately, its balance is also now at 0.

I think I accidentally downvoted you. Sorry!
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