Passwords · Real speed
How many passwords can a computer try per second?
The answer everyone expects is «millions». The real answer for a modern wallet is «a few hundred». That difference, which looks like a technical detail, is exactly what decides whether your case has a way out.
Why a wallet is deliberately slow
When you set a password on a wallet, the program doesn’t store it: it puts it through a long, repeated calculation, thousands or hundreds of thousands of times, and uses the result as the key. Checking a password means repeating that whole calculation. For you, typing it once, that is two tenths of a second. For someone guessing blind, it is two tenths of a second per attempt.
That is the entire defence, and it works. There are no tricks, no back doors and no shortcut: the toll has to be paid once per candidate.
Real orders of magnitude
| What is being opened | Attempts per second, roughly |
|---|---|
| An old compressed archive | hundreds of millions |
| A leaked website password | millions |
| A wallet from 2012-2014 | tens of thousands |
| A keystore with light settings | thousands |
| A properly configured modern wallet | hundreds |
That six-zero jump between the first row and the last is why the advice you read about «cracking passwords» doesn’t apply to wallets. What takes an hour on an ordinary file takes centuries on a modern wallet.
What it means for your case
In practice: at a few hundred attempts per second, a computer tries about thirty million passwords a day. That sounds like a lot and it is very little. Thirty million covers every combination of a common word with a four-digit number and a handful of variants. It does not come close to covering «any ten characters».
And the inevitable question: what about graphics cards?
They help, quite a lot, with older formats. With modern ones they help far less, because those are designed precisely so specialised hardware doesn’t give such an edge: they deliberately consume a lot of memory. Multiplying speed by ten or a hundred doesn’t turn an impossible case into a possible one; it only shortens the cases that were already workable.
How to know which of those rows your file — and therefore your case — belongs to is explained in the parameters of your file that decide viability.