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If your entropy (or randomness is bad), it can in effect make guessing a very large amount of numbers, into a matter of guessing a much smaller amount of numbers.
This is the part I'm looking for more clarity on. I get why it's true for a known process, but why would it be true for an unknown process?
How would someone narrow down the search window without having an idea about the process behind a particular low entropy seed?
why would it be true for an unknown process?
I think I'd still be a bit concerned if you "hand-rolled" your own low-entropy-but-unknown process. The problem is the "if I thought of it maybe someone else would've thought of it" problem.
It not only has to be an unknown process, it has to be a process that someone else isn't likely to think of or stumble into
This is not financial advice. The questions being posed here are for academic curiosity only.
Another thing is some types of randomness are easy to quantify, like number of coin flips or dice rolls.
But if you are relying on the obscurity of your process, it's hard to quantify how unknown it really is.
Is that the issue?
If so, I think we talk about this in a misleading way when describing security.
I think most people just haven't thought about it as deeply or as meta as you.
It matters for helping people understand the actual threat environment they're in, as well as demystifying some of this stuff.
I'm usually just content if I can get people to understand that bitcoin doesn't "exist" in their wallet...
If the process were unknown, but enough known keys were generated from said process, mathematicians could probably work out a way to guess the search space.
That makes sense. Is there any risk for a single key, other than the process becoming known?
Just that, to do it well enough to not get guessed, is more complicated to work out, than just using dice lmao.
A one time use psuedo random process could be created, but....no lmao
This was to help me check my intuition about what's going on.
Even if I rolled my own process, I'd do enough reps to have high entropy.
Your seed phrase is access to your Bitcoin. Entropy is making sure that the words in that seed phrase are random and very hard to guess. If the way you came up with those words was easy to guess, then someone can get your Bitcoin.
Deeper than ELI5 here:
Your seed phrase is actually a really big number. The BIP39 word list specifies how to take every 8 places of that number and encode it into a word. Therefore, making sure that the number is difficult to guess is really really important.
Guessing a number between 1 through 10 is much much easier than guessing a number 1 through 100. Guessing a number 1 to 340282366920938463463374607431768211455, checking if that number is able to spend Bitcoin, and then guessing another number, is much much harder.
If your entropy (or randomness is bad), it can in effect make guessing a very large amount of numbers, into a matter of guessing a much smaller amount of numbers.