It's a good thing that I know the secret Duress Grip that sends regular Freemasons running away in terror.

Maybe we can get the Scientologists to embrace Bitcoin, and then we can sit back and eat popcorn while watching the ensuing turf war between them and the Freemasons.

At least as crazy as I am stupid. 

Regarding the salting: The salt adds an additional pseudorandom element into the password prior to hashing. Without it, two identical plaintext passwords would show up in the password file with identical hashes. Once you crack one of them, you've cracked both of them. With the salt, the two identical plaintext passwords are likely to produce different salted hashes in the password file. Even though they both have the same plaintext password, cracking one doesn't trivially tell you that you've also cracked the other one. So, you need to go to all of the same work to crack each instance of that same password. I think the salting also makes rainbow tables impractical, but I'm no expert on this stuff.

I like it! Phin's Pholly should be in the thread title. 

Nah, I love hunting with dogs. They have great noses, and I have color vision and opposable thumbs. The rabbits don't stand a chance against us.

If all fiat currencies collapsed tomorrow, then I'd probably be glad that I've already speculated a lot on .223coins. 

I live in a rural area. It's by choice, because I like to live on a big chunk of dirt, and I need to drive about 40 miles from where I work to be able to afford to do that. Since I live where cable TV doesn't go, and I'm too far from a nearest telephone switch to even get DSL or ISDN, my Internet connectivity at home is horrible (a mix of spotty cellular modem plus a Yagi antenna pointed at the crappy free municipal wifi, plus lots of multiple-hour butt-numbing weekend download sessions at the nearest SBUX, about 8 miles from home). I know that most folks have much better connectivity than me, and that I'm in a relative minority, but still, I have first hand experience with how hard it can be to stay on top of the block chain with poor connectivity. In spite of all of that, I'm not too concerned with the scalability of Bitcoin. Right now, all clients expect to stay in sync with the whole block chain in order to do anything useful. I can think of all sorts of technical solutions for lightweight clients to do useful stuff without maintaining full-time sync with the whole block chain. I think that one or more of those solutions will naturally be deployed at some point long before Bitcoin achieves success, and I think that overcoming that hurdle is a small problem compared to simply getting enough people to accept Bitcoins for real daily expenses.

I agree that scalability is a problem that will need to be solved, but I think that it hasn't already been solved mostly because its solution isn't needed so much yet, and not because it's a particularly tough hurdle to get over. I other words, I expect the scalability problem to be solved before it's the long pole in the Bitcoin success tent.

I don't think you should have to lose faith because of those things. The hacking is a natural consequence of people entering new areas that they aren't experts in (securely handling valuable commodities online) and hackers taking advantage of them; it doesn't reflect negatively on Bitcoin itself. The value plummeting doesn't mean much, either. Bitcoin isn't strongly tied to real, vital day-to-day needs like coffee, gasoline and ammo yet, and its apparent monetary value today is mostly just due to the whims of speculators. If and when Bitcoin becomes a well-established currency, its value will have little to do with today's exchange value, or amy of the other wildly-swinging values lately. Its eventual stable value may be higher or lower than prices we've seen recently.

Some of the people dabbling in Bitcoin are brilliant, and some are idiots. Some are honest, and some are predatory crooks. The hacking and value swings result from all of those different people interacting with each other, but none of it reflects on Bitcoin itself in any substantial way. Bitcoin will succeed or fail in the end, and I'll gamble a reasonable amount of my funds and effort on its success simply because I hope it'll succeed and provide a viable alternative to increasingly non-anonymous fiat currencies.

Maybe BW worked at BofA under the TW alias for fun and profit?

Are you suggesting that Jan van Vliet is/was directly involved with the weusecoins.com folks? Barring some other link that I haven't perceived yet, I could easily see him as being just another Bitcoin enthusiast who stuck the weusecoins.com reference in his signature to promote his area of interest, just as I have been known to link to things which interest me but which I have had no direct involvement in creating. Like the Apple sticker that I stuck on my work-issued Lenovo laptop; I have no relationship with Apple other than repeatedly giving them lots of money for another hit of their sweet shinies. If I recall correctly, and my brain is not too fogged by the cheap store-brand vodka (don't worry, I'm not Russian), van Vliet appears to be involved with web/network service provision. His apparent connection to other People Of Interest may be due to nothing more than having provided them with services, thus learning about Bitcoins in the process, and then subsequently signing up for some of the same popular, well-publicized services as them. Maybe it's no coincidence that his name shows up in multiple particular places, yet there's another quite plausible explanation for that other than direct involvement with any of our favorite scams. Remember: Correlation does not always imply causation.

I think that the single biggest factor keeping Bitcoin from gaining market share and mind share is simply that it has not yet gained enough market share and mind share. It's a Catch-22: until I can use Bitcoins to buy my bread, pay my rent/mortgage, pay for the materials for building any tangible products that I might make to sell, and to pay any unavoidable taxes, Bitcoin remains nothing more than something I speculate in. Some folks (like me) will speculate in it mostly because they want it to succeed for philosophical reasons, and others will speculate in it simply because they see it as something to be exploited without caring whether it eventually succeeds. I don't think there's an easy answer to this. If we want it to gain market share, then we need to create markets for it to share by accepting Bitcoins for goods and services. As long as Bitcoins can't be directly spent for necessary everyday goods and services, people who accept Bitcoins will be doing so out of faith and/or hope that it'll eventually take off. Those people are necessarily gambling, and only those who can afford to gamble on Bitcoins will be able to accept them before they become well-established. I wish that there was just some technical challenge that could be met to allow Bitcoin to finally take off, but I don't think that there is one. It's just a matter of more and more people agreeing to accept Bitcoins for at least some small portion of the goods and/or services that they provide. If enough people do that for long enough, Bitcoin may eventually attain the critical mass that it needs to take off.

That being said, there are some other challenges that will need to be solved prior to Bitcoin taking off, even if they're much smaller problems that what I discussed above. I think that the biggest one is the current difficulty of buying Bitcoins with fiat currencies without investing a bunch of time and effort first to transfer dollars (or whatever) from your pocket to a Bitcoin exchange. It seems to me that the main reason for this difficulty is Bitcoin's non-reversible nature (which many consider a good thing), vs. the reversible nature of so many ways of moving other currencies around (PayPal, credit cards, ACH transfers, etc.). This enables various sorts of fraud that make it difficult for people to sell Bitcoins for other currencies using those methods on a large scale. The safest method seems to me to be selling Bitcoins for physical cash, and that might become more generally practical as more of us early adopters spring up in more places.

I think that wallet security is another problem to be solved, but I don't think this will be a big deal. There are lots of ways to approach this both as a technical matter and an educational matter, and I think that this will be solved long before Bitcoin has any chance of really taking off anyway.

Maybe one approach would be to try to create some small, well-bounded environment in which Bitcoins could become the normal medium of trade? It's hard for any one person to start accepting Bitcoins for a substantial portion of the goods or services they provide unless they can also spend those Bitcoins for their day-to-day expenses, and the expenses associated with the goods or services that they provide. If Bitcoins could be promoted in some environment that can naturally form a somewhat closed economy (a town, a school, a dorm, a club, a commune, etc.), then perhaps Bitcoin could take off there without some of the hardest problems that face getting it accepted globally. Once it's seeded in many smaller environments like that, maybe one or more of them can begin to grow and spread Bitcoin acceptance into larger areas?

The only things that give any artificial currency value, whether it's a fiat currency or not, is the ability to trade it for real goods and services that people need to live, and/or the ability to trade it for other artificial currencies that can be used to buy needed goods and services. Right now, not many people accept Bitcoins. In particular, we still generally need to use something other than Bitcoins to buy our food, pay our taxes, pay for our housing, and so forth. So, Bitcoin is strongly tied to established fiat currencies because those account for the majority of the things that we can exchange Bitcoins for. Its value is also highly volatile because it's not strongly tied to real goods and services; rather, it's presently mostly an instrument for people to engage in speculation with, and its value is thus particularly strongly tied to people's whims and emotional reactions.

Getting more people to accept Bitcoins for real goods and services is both our biggest challenge, and the solution to the the flaw of Bitcoin being tied so strongly to fiat currencies. I think that it's also the solution to Bitcoin's current extreme volatility in exchange with other currencies. Without a government pointing a gun at our heads and demanding that we use Bitcoins (as is the case to some extent with most fiat currencies), it's a bit of a Catch-22. So, if you believe that Bitcoin will succeed, or even if you just believe that Bitcoin should succeed for philosophical reasons, then I think that the only thing to do is to keep trying to incrementally grow the number of people who accept Bitcoin for goods and services, and to expect to be doing that for a long time before Bitcoin becomes strongly established.

The more I try to make sense of what our friend Phin is posting here, the more I lean towards "hogwash". These so called connections seem to me to be stretches worthy of Mr. Slave. I've become comfortable about presuming that 1) mybitcoin was likely to be a scam from the start, and 2) BW is probably somebody I would prefer not to associate with. Much of what has been presented in various threads also makes me somewhat suspicious that BW may have been closely involved with the mybitcoin scam. Still, I really don't see logic behind many of these other supposed connections. They seem to be based more on numerology than solid logic to me. Well, if nothing else, this thread is entertaining to me.

P.S.  Just in case it's not completely clear, pretty much all of the connections I've proposed in this thread so far have been completely satirical B.S. I was telling the truth about feeding my neighbor's horse, though, and even about securing my hat on my head.

Aha! drumhacker72 and Goat must be the same person, because they (and only they) rated up tien.dat79, and both were invited by dwdollar. We're through the looking glass, people! I still don't see how the Rand Corporation fits in, though.  

I don't even know who Terry Gilbert is; I just googled the name and picked one who had been deceased for an amusingly long period of time. And thankfully, I have never met Ms. Hilton. 

I'll go along with "probably signed up the same day" based on proximity in the password file, but I don't conclude "possibly on the same computer" any more than for any other two accounts that are near each other in that file. Maybe I'm just dense (as a side-effect of entering the afterlife back in 2001), but I'm just not seeing the connection between BW's and EG's pants.

Drat! You figured me out! There goes my 10-year run of posting both anonymously and posthumously.  

LOL! Well, in this case, I meant that my neighbors were running a bit late so they asked me to feed their horse for them. Just hay; no chili. I did give him an extra carrot, though. 

My hat is now securely fastened atop my head. I'll be back after I go feed the horse, if you know what I mean.

I'm not ready to call your whole story hogwash-or-not yet, but many of the assumptions and conclusions you're making seem like big stretches to me, so far.

I see that robert @ mckay.com has more than one account registered there, but I noticed lots of instances of more than one account from the same person last time I perused the MtGox leak file for interesting tidbits. I don't see how that email address is connected to any of this yet, nor do I see a plausible connection to edwardgel or some (*gasp*) Russian person, aside from their accounts being registered at about the same time. With over 60k accounts registered over the relatively short period of time between MtGox's inception and the leaking of their password file, there are bound to be lots of weird-looking coincidences in there.

Ok, I'm going to tell you a secret. Very few people know this, so don't spread it around: NF6X is not the name I was given at birth. I hope that you don't think any less of me because I'm posting here under an alias.