Govts or Bankers might choose to corrupt them.

Thanks for the update Waldo and your efforts.

There's a good chance you can recover your coins, you might have to pay a fee to get expert help.
In the meantime, make a couple of backups of your wallet.
Hopefully your wallet is encrypted too.

Good luck finding someone to help

What I like about it is that I can effectively store money in my head, not that I have much to store but...
I believe that a Brain wallet can be strong enough that, yes, it may not be as strong as a similar length, truly random Password, but still uncrackable in any reasonable time period.

I also think that Brainwallets could be hardened against attacks by introducing a slower algorythm in the path,  along the lines of     Sha256(Bcrypt(Password))

And you're right there are more than three ways, another way would be for someone to be peering over your shoulder while you are creating your Brainwallet Password or Passphrase, or using a key logger or screen scraper, or decoding the electrical noise generated by individual keypresses or.....holding a gun to your head.
 

Brainwallets are OK, so long as you realise that any word that is easy to remember has less entropy than a genuine random Pass word.
By that I mean, supposing you wanted to create an 8 character Password, you could choose, for example, 'elephant' or 'xcdrgthy'.
The problem with Brain wallets is that they are effectively mineable unless you use a VERY good password or Phrase.
For example, if you chose to use elephant as a brain wallet (You can't because most require 15 chars or more, but let;s suppose) and you put some Bitcoin in there, you would lose your BTC instantly because bad guys have already pre compiled all the Public and Private keys for all simple Passwords and Phrases.
Eg Elephant1235abcd......JohnsBtcWallet  etc. A high end PC graphic card can calculate 20 Billion password > Brain wallet Private Keys per second and they have been doing this for several years AND saving these to Hard disk, so if EVER anyone uses one of those passwords as a brainwallet password, their BTC will dissapear almost instantly.
For example, the Brainwallet passphrase 'elephantbeardog' quite possibly has never been used but it has quite possibly be precompiled by the bad guys so that as soon as someone uses it, let's say to do an experiemnt just to see how Brainwallets work, their BTC will more than likely disappear instantly because all common 3 word combinations have already been precompiled into Public and Private keys and stored on hard disk and those addresses will be regularly monmitored.
The point I am making is that in order for a BRain wallet to be secure it must be as Cryptographically unique as you can possibly make it and if you are going to use words, it will never have the randomness that a purely random Password will have.
You can compensate for that to a degree by making it longer.
If you are going to use a Bainwallet, use Upper and Lower case, numbers and Special Characters and be more than 20 Chars.
If most of your Password is recognisable as a Word, it is less secure than For example you might think that €L€9h@nt   is a reasonably good password, but in Brain wallet terms it is as bad as Elephant, because once they have compiled all the SHA(2565) derivations of all the dictioary words, they then went on to compile all the common character substitutions for all the dictionary words, meaning that in Brain Wallet terms, €L€9h@nt  is no better than Elephant.
In General there are Three main ways someone can attack your Passphrase or Pass word.

Firstly, they can use Brute force and just try every combination of Characters.
currently, anything over 10 Characters if it contains Upper/Lower case, Numbers and Special Chars is highly resistant to Brute force, unless your attacker has a Supper Computer at his disposal.
The way to defeat a Brute for attack is usingh a Long Password containing Upper case, lower case, numbers and special Chars.

The next method of attack is a dictionary attack, where the attacker can try all the common Dictionary words, common Character substitutions Such as Elephant123    elephant123   elephantabc  €lephantabc   etc etc
plus trillions of other possible words and common character substitutions.
Simple examples like those will get your Bitcoins stolen almost imediately.
The way to defeat a Dictiononary attack is to not use whole common dictionary words

the next way they might attack your password is to attack your personal information.
for example, they coudl collect everything they know about you, your name, your birthday, your tel no, Nat insurance mumber and again, With a Very powerful PC able to compute Billions of rearrangements
per second could, in a few hours compute Trillions of Possible password combinations base don various re arrangements of your name, abreviations of your name, Tel no, Wife's name, Surname, Tel no, etc etc.

Password / Passphrase length is one of the most important factors in security, the longer the better.
you could use your Birthdate Tel no and Nat ins No Plus an abreviation of your name.

that would most liklely produce a Passphrase long enough to resist Brute forcing and a dictionary attack but would be comparatively weak to an attacker who had a lot of personal information on you such as
you Tel no, name, Birthday etc.

and so, if you want to creat a Brainwallet PassPhrase, it must be long, 20 chars or more, possibly contain personal info, heavily abreviated, Your name, shortened or a Nickname, interspaced with special chars, and maybe even a common character substituted dictionary word, that way, they must uyse all three techniques in order to get at your password.
EG,     :-)[Rob12/10/1987/077986]:-)  Would fare very well against a Dictionary attack, and a Brute force attack though you would remain significanntly more vulnerable from an a attacker who had information on you.

A password that contains a Birthday for example might be   13101958  (13th Oct 1958)
You might think that has 99 Million possibilities because it has 8 numbers, but if it;'s a birthday. there are only 31 Possible combinations for the first two chars (days)
Only 12 for the second 2 chars ( months ) and only possibly 2000 for the Next four chars (years), meaning that
there are only 30 X 12 X 2000 Possible birthday combinations in that 8 digits, not Billions as you might first suspect.
Because obviously, there is no 99th Day of the 99th Month.    
Personally I like the Brainwallet concept , put you have to be very very very Cryptic,

Even if you manage that though, your pass word will not be as secure as a true randon 20 char Password even though you might very well be able to produce something that is very highly secure plus reasonably easy to remember for you.

The biggest problem with Brainwallets as far as the general public is concered is that many will try to use them and
not do their homework and try things like   'AlisonsWalletNo1'  or LetMeInABC    or etc etc etc an promptly lose thier BTC. because things like that will have already been pre computed and are now being regularly monitired.

Maybe gender differences really do exist, there, I've said it.

True, I'm dabbling with trading but as others have said, buying and holding Medium to Long term is probably a very good strategy.

I'd prefer 10 Bitcoins 

Would have hoped that Knc would offer something for lost Hashing time, all the while we're not Hashing, the difficulty is going up.
Any news ?

Any News on KNC titans ?

Anybody come across Rebol, seems an 'old' ish programming language I've not seen much, been playing with it, seems interesting in that it's easy to set up 'scripts' to do what we'd probably want a Bot to do, or even just to assist with manual trading.

http://www.rebol.com/

I'm a Millionaire in CENTS 

Just plugged 3Th into Coinwarz and it does indeed give $15 per day, perhaps I was toying with Scrypt mining when I got $30 - $50 dollars at coinwarz, or perhaps I plugged in the wrong figures, but as someopne suggested, the margins are getting less and less each day, so if we are going to profit, we are going to have to think out of the box, and my scenario of using renewables didn't even factor in the initial purchase of the mining equipment.
However, some on here will have already have their own equipment, and it is likely with increasing difficulty, many people will soon be using more in electricity than their rigs generate in coins,  Bitcoin or Alt.
That means that there will be a flood of equipment going cheap very soon, you can already see these things for sale on Ebay ect with people hoping to catch the unwary by selling equipment that will never make ROI.
Possibly, the prices for this equipment will fall to giveaway prices as they are esentially worthless if utilised conventionally.
The idea of using Renewables is so that such equipment could be run indefinatley literaaly until it falls to pieces because, hoperfully, there will be little energy costs.
But of course, collecting the waste oil would be a full time job for someone.
The whole mining thing is becoming unsustainable, massive amounts of energy worldwide expended to generate these coins and I wonder if that is a fatal flaw in many of these coins.
KNC miner might be thinking along the same lines too and looking at renewables, so the time for us little people to get in might well be over.
This might also mean that mining is now centralised with issuance controlled by a few massive centralised mining farms.
How do we the little people take back control of cryptocurrencies. We might still have the nuclear option in that at any time, 'we' could introduce a fork and shut these massive facilities down and run cryptocurrencies in a less centralised fashion, if only we coudl work out how to do it.
I've seen some coins which rely on you contributing your computing power to things like folding at home etc, these are ethical uses of energy and I wonder if that might be the future, but even then, people would then start buying ever more powerful machines to  generate more and more of these coins, not for ethical reasons but for personal gain, and If I'm honest, I'd be thinking aboput doing that too.
Most if not all poeople want to make a gain, however I think most also would like to see cryptocurrencioes serving humanity better rather than go the way of the Dollar and simply serving the 0.0001%
So, how do we make a reasonable profit, while steering Cryptocurrencies to be more ethical, green and serving humanity.  Can we take back these Cryptocurrencies from our darker selves and create a brighter future for our children.

Thanks for putting this list together, and the advice, so what do we do.
The basic idea of cloud mining is sound, if only it could be done with integrity and openess.

Why don't we all chip in and start up our own Cloud mining business.
Here's what I think might be useful.
We'd need energy, Diesel generators using waste veg oil collected and flitered from Restaurants.
We'd need to replace these very 3 - 6 months as they would break down, but a typical small Gernny can output asbout 3KW.
Enough to power 3 x 1 KW miners w2hich migh generate $30 - $50 per day.
So we hold back some of the payout, let's say 25% to buy a replacement generator every three months.
then we need to hold back another 25% to re invest and buy more hashing power to account for the difficulty and possibly, create a rising income stream if our increased capacity can exceeed the increasing difficulty.
Next I'd like thew 50% remaining to be sent automatically to my Brain wallet address.
actually we'd need to donate maybe 10% to pay for someone to maintain our cloud mining set up.

Do these numbers work.

Watch out for condensation on the inside of your Rigs.
OK, while it's running it might be too hot to suffer from condensation.
But supposing your're out and it breaks down or the electricity is cut and it happens to be very cold outside.

A good reasoned article.

That's nothing, I got married once 

What coinmode said.

Looks nice     Maybe this could be the next form of mining, we invest $100 to have in installed in London and get the investment back through fees charged by the machines.