Re:The Wealthy Are Hoarding $10B of Bitcoin in Bunkers
by clarkmoody on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @11:22AM
(#17030511)
Indeed. My caution is against keys that are already in the clear in a written work.
Bitcoin is cryptography's biggest bug bounty.
What you're describing is a dictionary attack and it trades comprehensiveness for speed.
There's many more words than characters in any language. Using words as your alphabet gets you ($WORDS)^N possible passwords of length N instead of 128^N for an ascii alphabet. For humans remembering random words is easier.
Choosing a grammatically correct sentence instead of random words is little different in terms of complexity reduction than choosing a word based password (e.g. Password1) instead of random characters.
Obviously if the attacker can build a target specific dictionary they'll have a higher probability of success.