Concepts · Your time
What your time is worth trying passwords by hand
This isn’t an article to convince you to hire anyone. It is so you know where your effort is well spent and where you are throwing afternoons away, because the answer is surprising: trying passwords is the worst use of your time, and remembering is the best.
The arithmetic
| Who is trying | How many per second | In a 4-hour afternoon |
|---|---|---|
| You, by hand and focused | 0.03 | about 400 |
| A computer, modern wallet | hundreds | a few million |
| A computer, 2013 wallet | tens of thousands | hundreds of millions |
Four hundred passwords in an afternoon is a real, exhausting effort. A computer does that in under two seconds even in the slowest case. It isn’t about persistence: the scales simply aren’t comparable.
And yet your time is what decides the case
Because the computer doesn’t know what to try. It can run through millions of candidates an hour, but if your password isn’t among them, none of it helps. Who decides which candidates get generated is you, with what you remember.
- Half an hour listing the words you used back then is worth more than ten afternoons of trying.
- Remembering the number went at the end rather than the start halves the work or much more.
- Finding three old passwords of yours from that period is more useful than any graphics card.
- Remembering it started with a capital eliminates half the combinations at a stroke.
The cost you don’t see
Trying by hand isn’t just inefficient: it is counterproductive. After fifty failed attempts you start mentally discarding things that may have been right but were mistyped, and that information is lost forever. And if your case is a hardware device, every attempt is literally gone.
I expand on it in when to stop trying by hand, and the productive way to spend that time is in how to build a candidate password list.