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September 26, 2014, 11:50:15 PM |
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Hi,
I've read about and tried testing BIP38 encryption of private keys and have succeeded in creating and decrypting BIP38 keys.
I have BTC in cold storage, on pen and paper, in an envelope in a secret place that contains my key in WIF format. I also have an identical copy at a trusted family member's, in case of burglary/fire/etc.
Now, here's a hypothetical situation about encrypting my private key:
I want to create a new cold storage BTC address with BIP38 key and send my BTC to it, with a copy at my family member's house.
My question is about the length of password to use. I could use a single character ("0", or "1") to encrypt my key. This would prevent my BTC being immediately useable if it fell into the wrong hands (burglary, etc).
If it was stolen (and supposing the thief knew what Bitcoin was), is it possible to determine the length of password from the BIP38 format, or would the thief have no way of knowing and simply have to brute-force the key blindly using incremental passwords of varying length?
Obviously, I'm not going to use a "0" or a "1" as my password, but I figure a 5 or 6 character password would make the thief's life hell and give me enough time to act and shift my coins somewhere safe.
I know that decrypting BIP38 is a time consuming process on an average PC, so would anyone like to guess how much time, say, a 6 character password would buy in this situation? How many uppercase and lowercase combinations of 6 characters (plus 0-9) are there, and how much time would this allow me to save my coin?
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