bram_vnl, Even in the best case scenario (the password is comprised entirely of lowercase text) there are 2630 combinations. If you had the capability to run 1 billion combinations per second it would take ~89 septillion (1024) years to run every combination. Our sun will supernova long before you discover a 30 character password by way of brute forcing. Even knowing the word "forum" is in there won't help you to brute force it before our sun dies.
Sorry dude, unless you can remember your password you may as well accept defeat.
You forget the exponential growth of computational power. So the time it will take to solve with halve every 18 months. So he may solve it before our sun supernova's but not until after our sun becomes a reg giant and swallows the earth.
But hey those bitcoin will be worth a fortune by then right? It will totally be worth it!!!
Moore's Law is expected to slow to 3 year intervals as it is getting much harder to double the number of transistors at 18 month intervals. Even so it would require constant investment in new top of the line processors in order to keep up.
Processor speed isn't really the bottlehead anyway. You'd be lucky to be able to test 10 combinations per second on a Bitcoin daemon because you'd have to wait for the dameon to test it and return the true/false response before continuing. Even your offer of defeating a strong 9 character password within 3 days seems unlikely if the password was completely random and comprised of a mix of lowercase text, uppercase text, numbers and symbols.
If I were to comprise a random nine character password made up of entirely characters I can see on my English (UK) laptop keyboard (nothing from the character map) there would be 99
9 (913,517,247,483,640,899) combinations. Brute forcing even that in 3 days is a near impossibility.
