[kybernetikos]

He talks about how the XKCD article password is commonly known as if this is worrying for some reason. But it's no surprise for anyone getting started with brainwallets who has gone to brainwallet.org and noticed that the default passphrase entered into their client side generator is 'correct horse battery staple'. The chance of you coming up at random with a phrase that is the default in a popular brainwallet generator is so low as to not be worth worrying about.

The other thing is that the article completely ignores the possibility of generating a new private key in the normal way and memorizing that. It's only the same number of digits as seven phone numbers which while certainly difficult is well within the range of any moderately determined human of normal intelligence. I suspect that most people have 7 phone numbers memorised as it is.

If you're truly paranoid about security, doing that gives you just as much security as anyone else using bitcoin.

[mistercow]

>The chance of you coming up at random with a phrase that is the default in a popular brainwallet generator is so low as to not be worth worrying about.

1 in 2^44, in fact. Unlikely enough that if you tried once per millisecond, you'd expect it to happen only once in 550 years.