rich1.0npub10f96gqrsu4qpygfgvuvzce47aavjvql703egfde0l2hua8dzpszs67ej47https://nostr.ae/npub10f96gqrsu4qpygfgvuvzce47aavjvql703egfde0l2hua8dzpszs67ej47njumphttps://nostr.ae📅 Original date posted:2014-03-27 📝 Original message:Le 27/03/2014 13:49, Mike Hearn a écrit : > Ah, BIP32 allows for a range of entropy sizes and it so happens that > they picked 256 bits instead of 128 bits. > > I'd have thought that there is a right answer for this. 2^128 should not > be brute forceable, and longer sizes have a cost in terms of making the > seeds harder to write down on paper. So should this be a degree of freedom? > Here is what I understand: 2^128 iterations is not brute forcable today, and will not be for the foreseeable future. An EC pubkey of length n can be forced in approximately 2^(n/2) iterations (see http://ecc-challenge.info/) Thus, Bitcoin pubkeys, which are 256 bits, would require 2^128 iterations. This is why unused addresses (160 bits hash) are better protected than already used ones. However, people tend to believe that a public key of size n requires 2^n iterations. This belief might have been spread by this popular image: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=508880.msg5616146#msg5616146