How your encryption works
A cartridge only performs if every component is right — the case, the primer, the powder charge, the projectile. Miss one and the rest does not matter. Your records work the same way, and the component you control is the one that decides everything.
Time to break in
Assume the worst case: someone has stolen the encrypted file, they are grinding away offline where nothing can rate-limit them, and they know exactly how we derive keys. Here is how long each kind of password holds.
It is already in a cracking list. Nobody brute-forces it; they look it up.
Capital, symbol, digit — it passes every strength meter and follows three patterns a cracker tries first.
Against someone who knows you — an ex, a sibling, a roommate. The people most likely to want your serial numbers already have most of the answers.
Random beats clever. Three words is already stronger than Mustang!7 by a factor of two thousand.
One more word moved it from days to a human lifetime. This is the floor we would accept, not the target.
Roughly the age of life on Earth. Still six things you can picture in a row.
This is why the recovery kit is the one thing we tell you to print and put somewhere physical.
Not a big number — a different category. Counting to 2²⁵⁶ would take more energy than the sun will ever emit. This is never the part anyone attacks.
Priced at one million guesses per second — a rented cluster several hundred times faster than a high-end graphics card actually manages against our key derivation, which is memory-hard by design and lands around 2,000–3,000 guesses per second in practice. Times are expected-case, meaning the attacker finds it halfway through on average. We use the unfavorable number on purpose; a table like this is only worth reading if it errs against the people who published it.
Where the jump happens
Look again at the table and find where it stops being measured in days. It is not at a stronger algorithm. It is between word three and word five — the part nobody else can do for you.
Our key derivation buys you about twenty bits. Roughly two free words. It turns three words from seconds into days. It cannot rescue a bad password.
Nothing here is sent anywhere — the words are drawn in your browser and this page has no database to send them to. These are sample words; the generator inside your account draws from a 7,776-word list, which is the 12.9 bits per word the times above are based on. And a passphrase you did not choose yourself is the point: a word you picked because it means something to you is a word someone who knows you can guess.
The components
Handloaders already understand this page. You do not trust a round because the box says so — you trust it because you know what went into it and you measured the charge yourself.
The only component we never see, never store, and cannot reproduce. Everything downstream is ignited by it, and nothing downstream can compensate for a weak one.
Measured deliberately heavy. Each guess an attacker makes has to allocate 64 MiB of memory and work through it — which is what drags a graphics card from ten billion guesses a second down to a few thousand.
The cipher that actually does the work, on your device, before a single byte leaves it. Nobody attacks this part. It is not the weak component in any real break-in, which is exactly why we spent this page on the primer instead.
160 random bits we generate once and show you once. It is the only other way into your records, which is why it belongs on paper in a safe — not in your email.
The honest part
Encryption is a specific tool for a specific job. Any page that tells you it solves everything is selling something. Here is the actual boundary.
If you take one operational thing from this page: the passphrase protecting your collection should be used for this and nothing else, and your recovery kit should live somewhere physical. Those two habits matter more than every technical decision listed above.
What we can actually see
Plenty of products say "zero knowledge" and mean it loosely. Here is the specific, checkable version, including the parts that are not encrypted.
If a court orders us to hand over everything we have, we hand over an email address, a billing record, some timestamps, and a pile of ciphertext we cannot open. That is not a promise. It is the shape of the system.
When you ask for an AI value estimate, the only things that leave your device are the descriptive fields you are asking about — make, model, caliber, condition, era. Serial numbers are not in that request and never have been, no account identifier goes with it, and nothing is kept once the estimate comes back.
Your collection, your ledger
This is a record of what you own, kept the way records of what you own ought to be kept: by you, readable by you, on terms you set. Not a registry. Not a database someone else queries. Not a product that studies your collection to sell you something. You hold the key, and the arithmetic on this page is what that sentence is worth.