[crystaln]

Deterministically generating wallets is just dumb. It's the exact opposite of randomly generating wallets. We spend all this time on making things cryptographically secure and then mess it up by using a tiny subset of the keyspace.

Why would anyone find this to be a good idea?

[enscr]

For some, P(losing key) > P(key theft)

[crystaln]

P(key theft) is rather hard to calculate, given the entire universe is up against you and you have no visibility.

There are plenty of ways of avoiding losing a key, or generating pneumonics from secure keys.

[intelliot]

Unless this has something to do with the lungs, you mean "mnemonics" :)

[nshepperd]

It's trivial to use a "large" subset of the keyspace if you have any clue whatsoever about information theory. Just pull ten words uniformly at random from a list of the 4096 most common, hash them, and you've got yourself a 120 bit key right there. (Or even hash them another 128 times to give yourself an effective 7 bits of extra security.)

However, obviously idiots who will pick a 2 word passphrase should not be encouraged to use a brainwallet.

[crystaln]

> if you have any clue whatsoever about information theory

I think that describes about 0.1% of the population, maybe 10% of whom are interested in using a brain wallet.

Brain wallets will appeal far more to the other 99.9% of people, who will of course use crappy pass-phrases.