Passwords · The era matters
Passwords from 2013 versus today: why some open and others don’t
Two people with the same problem, the same memory and the same password can get opposite outcomes purely because of the year they created their wallet. And here the news is good for whoever has been waiting longest: old wallets open far more easily.
What changed
Ten years ago, wallets protected the password with a calculation repeated a few thousand times. Today it is repeated hundreds of thousands of times. It is the same mechanism; only the number went up. That number is the toll paid on every attempt.
Multiplying that number by sixty means testing the same candidate list costs sixty times more. A one-day job becomes a two-month one. A one-week job becomes a year. And that is where many cases cross the line of what is reasonable.
| Wallet era | What it implies |
|---|---|
| 2011-2014 | Light protection: huge numbers of candidates can be tested |
| 2015-2018 | In between: depends on the specific format |
| 2019 onwards | Strong protection: only cases with good memory succeed |
| With hardware devices | A different world: attempts are counted |
The other half: what passwords were like back then
It wasn’t just the protection that changed: passwords changed too. In 2013 hardly anyone used managers and almost everyone wrote human passwords: a word, a name, a year, maybe a symbol. That is exactly what can be rebuilt. Today’s passwords, randomly generated by a manager, cannot be.
What the era doesn’t change
- If you lost the entire recovery phrase, the year doesn’t matter: it is not recovered.
- If the password was random, the year doesn’t matter: there is no pattern.
- If you don’t have the file, the year doesn’t matter: there is nothing to test against.
- If there is a forgotten extra password on top of the phrase, the year doesn’t matter: there is no way out.
Put another way: the era improves a case that was already possible, but it doesn’t rescue an impossible one. Which ones are impossible is in cases with no solution.