Quote from: nocube on May 13, 2013, 12:14:15 PM

Quote from: GreenerK on May 13, 2013, 10:13:39 AM

- Would holding back the last 6 or so characters be enough to secure the Private Key?

58^6 = 38,068,692,544

I'd say no.

It is even worse than that. If the private key is in WIF form, the last 32 bits are a check code. So, divide your answer by 2^32 and you get about 10 possible keys that need to be checked

The quirks of the encoding make key recovery a bit harder than that, but it is still WAY less than the 38 billion quoted.