The latest episode of Darknet Diaries interviews someone using the pseudonym Default. He says in the interview that he had nearly a thousand Bitcoins (about $36 M) in a wallet stored on an external hard drive that was seized by federal agents when they raided his home. Default went to prison for five years for some audacious hacking, but now he’s out and the feds won’t give him his hard drive back.
Default isn’t the only person who has lost a fortune because he lost a number. It’s fairly common.
If Default had memorized his account number(s) he’d be rich today. Memorizing a Bitcoin address or a private key would take some work, but I’d do it for a million dollars. I’d do it for a whole lot less than that because it’s not that much work.
I’ll present two ways to memorize addresses and keys. I’ll start with addresses.
How long is a Bitcoin address?
A Bitcoin address is essentially [1] a 200-bit number encoded in base 58. Why base 58? That’s 10 digits, 26 lower case letters, and 26 upper case letters, with four visually similar characters removed. The characters 1, l, and I are similar, as are 0, o, and O. Base 58 keeps the numeral 1 and the lower case letter o and discards the characters that look similar to these. More on base 58 encoding here.
So you can think of a Bitcoin address as either a 200-bit number or a string of 34 alphanumeric characters.
Base 58
The most direct approach would be to memorize the address in its base 58 form. This is a string of 34 alphanumeric characters. As I mention here, I memorize numbers using the Major system, and letters using the NATO alphabet. To distinguish lower case and upper case I have two variants of each NATO name, a large object for capital letters and a small object for lower case letters. For example, golf cart for G and golf ball for g.
Decimal
A 200-bit number corresponds to a 60-digit number. It’s easier to memorize 60 digits than to memorize 34 alphanumeric characters because the digits can easily be chunked into groups whereas the alphanumeric characters cannot.
You can go back and forth between base 58 encoding of an address and hexadecimal using this online calculator and you can go between hexadecimal and decimal easily in any programming language.
For example, I typed the address
1MycacnJaSqwwJqjawXBErnLsZ7RkXUAs
into the online calculator and got back
00F54A5851E9372B87810A8E60CDD2E7CFD80B6E31C7F18FE8
Then I appended 0x to this and typed it into the Python REPL to get a decimal number.
>>> 0x00F54A5851E9372B87810A8E60CDD2E7CFD80B6E31C7F18FE8
6014503356492732657644518984173176634541310227850984525800
There are two ways to group digits for memorization: regularly and irregularly.
Irregular grouping
The Major system for memorizing numbers is typically presented using irregular grouping. You convert each digit into a consonant sound and improvise a way a grouping the consonants into words. Some words may encode one or two digits, some three digits. You might get lucky occasionally and be able to group four digits into a single word. Then you create mental images that string the words together.
In the example above, you might divide the number into 60 1450 33 … which you could encode as “goose drills mummy …” and maybe you’d imaging a goose as a drill sergeant, barking at a mummy soldier, etc.
Regular grouping
It’s easy to get started with irregular grouping, but regular grouping has its advantages. You might group your 60 digits into 30 pairs or 20 triples. If you’re using two-digit groups, you might have a rule that only the first two consonant sounds count, giving yourself the freedom to use words that have more than two consonant sounds. Of course you could have an analogous rule for three digits.
If you break a 60-digit address into 20 three-digit numbers, and convert each three-digit number to a word, you have to memorize a sequence of 20 words. Choose words that are easy to visualize, and you have to remember a sequence of 20 images. That takes some effort, but people go to greater effort to save Bitcoin addresses.
Private keys
Private keys are little longer than addresses, 256 bits rather than 200. The same principles apply. A 256-bit number corresponds to a 77 or 78 digit number. If you divide 78 digits into groups of (average) length 3, that’s 26 words to memorize. Since 26 happens to be the number of letters in the English alphabet, you could associate each word with a letter of the alphabet, say using the NATO alphabet, to make sure you remember the worlds in the correct order.
Related posts
[1] You can find details here. You start with the output of a 160-bit hashing algorithm, and add 40 bits of checksum and version information. The encoding is not strictly base 58 encoding but rather Base 58 Check, which at its core is base 58 encoding.
Photo by Lukas Eggers on Unsplash