...and the bulls stampede for cover...

...as the bears scribble over recent history...

WOOOOOOOOOOOOW!! That was fun 

As seen here the RSI over 1 month or longer suggests down.  10 days or under however 'doesn't see a problem' with the current price/activity.  I'm not selling.  My tendency is to go with the suggestion of the shorter-term chart because the impression I'm getting of the amount of new money coming into play is making looking too far back deceptive.

Am I sad or is this really better than TV? 

 I don't know that I would ascribe the current rampant bulls to high forum traffic but I would guess they both have a common cause?

I've been struggling with loading pages too and had been wondering why.  I'm not meaning to detract from what repentance is saying but I guess an inconvenience with forum response times is a small price to pay for the additional interest and subsequent impact on the growth and spread of Bitcoin

There are no facts written above with which I was not already very familiar - and have even explained to others quite a lot.  Yet for me a penny dropped with what you just said in the last two sentences.

I do believe Bitcoin has vulnerabilities that leaves it open to an immense technological attack (51% or co-ordinated internet-disrupting etc.) but assuming that doesn't happen I now understand that time, competing crypto-currencies, rising value against USD/EUR/GBP really do not matter providing you and I (and a few others) value the fact of its inbuilt-invariable scarcity - and that we have the means of verifiably transfering it to one another.  The increasing in network hashing power, increasingly distributed mining, more full nodes running, increased 'legitimate' use including in developing nations (increasing the political cost of attacking it) etc. will with time both decrease the odds of a technological attack and increase its value relative to gov't issued currencies but I have as of this moment, thanks to your post, a renewed appreciation of the value of Bitcoin today, right now, irrespective of everything else.  Greatly appreciated

[Off topic]

From what I've gathered some things are still quite a lot more civil (literally in the legal sense) than for instance in the UK.

I've been given to believe it is half expected one 'cheats' on one's tax return in Switzerland and if caught, you get a slap on the wrist and told to pay up what you owe.  This is a world away from the current UK situation where not only is tax evasion criminalised but tax avoidance is demonised with 'naming and shaming' and public outrage going on for any person or corporation daring not to hand over to HMRC what joe pulblic's back-of-an-envelope calculations conclude they ought to be paying.
[/Off topic]

I'm amused by the irony of such a statement coming out of Switzerland

OK, I just did a quick Google search on this in case it was represented a meme or something and first result was this thread!  I'm impressed at the speed with which this turned up in a Google search - but none the wiser for now about what it may mean or what was intended by it

I quite enjoyed the Gobry article.  It's interesting to me to look at something from a different angle.  And whilst I could also see straight away why others would get their knickers in a twist over it the reason it didn't ruin my dinner is because of my acceptance that people use the same terms to mean different things.

If we take a second to deduce what both Gobry and evoorhees mean by the words 'fiat', 'money' and 'agreement' it can be seen they are not the same.  If we then read both pieces bearing in mind what each meant by these terms then I'd argue that we end up with something that is very far from the 180 degree argument it at first looks like.

I have no arguments with the use of the word 'fiat' as is used as common currency on this forum.  Whether from derivation or dictionary definition the 'by decree' use seems to me to be the most sensible.  I can also understand that some might say this is the only way in which the word should be used.  But Gobry, by acknowledging and pointing out 'our' preferred meaning in his footnote implies that that is not how he is using it in the body of the article.  So why read it as if it was and make accusations of untruth and sophistry on that basis?

Whether we like it or not the word 'fiat' is commonly used by those with a background in economics as a currency not backed by a commodity.  We can cry foul, that this is an incorrect use, and be as dismissive as we like about professional economists and about economics as a profession but it won't change the fact that it is used in this way.  Forbes is not bitcointalk and it is not unreasonable to assume a substantial number of the readership will have understood what was meant by the word as used in the article.

Two people can be said to be in agreement if i) they have independently and unbeknownst to the other come to the same conclusion; ii) one has persuaded the other such that they are both now of the same opinion on something or iii) they negotiated and shook on a deal - and these are just three meanings.  Only if we take the word in one particular, narrow sense does 'Never was there an agreement that gold was superior as money' make sense.  Every single time gold has been used as a medium of exchange both parties were in agreement that it was superior to the available alternatives in that moment.  Why they agreed it was better than salmon is not relevant to Gobry's argument but I would venture to suggest it would be for more 'because others do' than 'because I considered all the options and...'.  When it comes to trading with the baker, our employer or girlfriend there is an an implicit consensus in each case on the medium of exchange as well as the explicit agreement on price that may have come out of negotiation.  Of course we can say each has come to his/her own conclusion as to why the medium of exchange to be used is acceptable but as Bitcoiners understand, we may have the best currency in the world but we can only use it if the other side of the trade also agrees that it is acceptable.  I know those of us that tend to hang out here value independent thinking and reasoning and individualism but frankly I think it's silly to deny that agreement has a critical role to play in determining the medium of exchange of a trade.  Not everybody who uses the word 'common' is a statist/communist/anti-idividualist!

Likewise with the term 'money'.  We can evaluate entities as to their potential usefulness as money by objective standards and conclude what money is or isn't but even as a store of value it is only worth something if at some point another will trade something for it.  It requires that they too have concluded independently or otherwise (they share the opinion or have a view 'in common') that it is money.  Gobry calls this preparedness to trade by use of a particular medium 'an agreement' whilst evoorhees prefers 'barter'.  But aren't they essentially talking about the same thing?

Is there actually an argument here at all?  Please someone point it out if there is because I can't see it?

What Gobry did was to give the Forbes readership a reason to question their current possibly deduced, more likely unquestioningly accepted understanding of what money is and what is meant by fiat.  Surely that's a good thing?  I know we are each in love with our own paradigms but is there a need to be so sensitive as to lose sleep, to have ruined meals or to write so scathingly over a well-meaning article just because the author sees the world and uses terms differently than we do?

I hadn't thought of SatoshiDice as an illegal service.  I don't know whether it is or is not.  Are you saying it is illegal because it is an operation based in a place where it is illegal to offer gambling products (I don't know where it's based) or that it is illegal because it fails to build fences to prevent those in nanny states from accessing its services?

If it is merely the latter it seems bizarre to me for anyone to equate the provision of such a harmless and fun service with fraud!

The history of gambling, especially I guess in the States* is rife with corruption and scams, much of which has been facilitated by political efforts to prohibit/control gambling supposedly to protect its citizens.  The beauty of Satoshi Dice to me is the simplicity and provably fair aspects.  As far as I can tell it doesn't get more honest nor simple than that.  If there was ever any justification for gambling laws to protect citizens from cheats etc. Satoshi Dice is to me proof that there is no more**.

* Bear in mind my impression is probably over-influenced by Hollywood!

** I haven't forgotten that some people are still steeped in a world-view that says if a book says something is immoral (regardless of whether the action can harm anybody other than the transgressor) then they have an obligation to prevent/prohibit/punish other people from doing it.  I'm not saying that attitude doesn't exist, just that I can't be bothered to acknowledge it in my considerations.

I'm not so sure.  I guess it would be kind-of apt should a currency that has attracted so many scams and scammers in its short life be adopted by the biggest scammer in the human history!

I've been thinking and talking about this and wondering if I'm blowing its potential impact out of proportion.  What do you think?

I heard about it on the video of Tony Gallipi's talk in the Philadelphia Bitcoin Summit 2012.

With the kind of folk flying Emirates*, whether we're talking about a few of them seeing its potential for moving their own money internationally cheaply, to integrate into their international trade businesses or simply seeing it as something worth bunging a tiny proportion of their immense wealth at 'on the off chance' that it goes somewhere, I see the odds of this not bringing substantial new interest and money, and thereby having a not insubstantial impact on price, as very small.

*If you want an idea of the clientele within the first few pages of ads there's one for precious metals.

Edit:  Link to article (I know dunand linked to it below but I thought I'd put one in the OP too)

And another thread discussing this article

Thank you For my part, and I guess I'm not the only one, it's a breath of fresh air to hear an analysis like that about which we can have great confidence

Thank you  That really made me laugh!

That's an intriguing sentence to me.  Would you mind elaborating?  As I understand it not only is it is essential for Bitcoin but more distributed mining also increases security.  My argument would then go that therefore indirectly, by giving people reason to be more confident in the security of Bitcoin, they can have more confidence to participate.  If the activities that have the biggest long-term impact on the Bitcoin economy require personal and financial investment then anything that increases confidence in its security, in the likelihood of it ever becoming more than an experiment I would have thought makes a massive difference.

But I'm ready to listen...

I agree.  And I guess it is not the first time the pros and cons of brainwallet have been discussed here but a precursory search prior to my going ahead and putting real money on it had not yielded the considerations ThomasV and notme are discussing otherwise my decision may have been different.  Maybe some of these points could be added to the brainwallet entry on the wiki to make it easier for those who follow in my path to make a better informed decision?

One suggestion I would like to see added to the wiki page, which is so obvious in retrospect, before sending any money to the generated address, to close, clear caches etc. then go through the same process again to check that the pasphrase you think you've used and memorised actually generates the same address a second time..  This stage would have saved me this trouble.  The other one I didn't think of till I started writing the OP was that I should first have tried it out with token amounts to gain a better understanding.  Live and learn

But getting back to the problem in hand.  Once again I'll thank you all for your suggestions.  Now that I have slept on it my plan of action is as follows:

I will manually try a selection of the most obvious variations, using Excel as I said to at least ensure I'm doing that systematically and without typos.  If I get no success at that I think it's time to accept this is a longer-term problem (there is no rush to access the funds) and rather than spending a lot of time cutting and pasting, instead to learn the skills necessary to try something along the lines of the scripting/capybara options helpfully suggested by notme and DannyHamilton.  If it's not going to be a quick solution I may as well used my time constructively towards learning something than on a repetitive task.  In answer to your question Danny I'm using Win 7.

But the security discussion has brought to my attention if what I did possibly wasn't as secure as I thought it was in the first place, by now with all the copying and pasting, with the public key saying how much is on it, with having loads of variations of the passphrase in a spreadsheet, with having (by broadcasting this here) drawn a big fat arrow pointing at the vulnerability on my computer and with (as ThomasV has pointed out and as is apparent from other threads here) people going by different ethical codes, some of which would say if I don't know exactly what I am doing I deserve to lose my money; maybe the first things to do are things I've been putting off like encrypting my qt wallet (done now just before clicking Post!) making decisions on Truecrypt v. Bitlocker/EFS for file/disk encryption etc. implementing them and then get back to the original problem when my system is less vulnerable to attack.

I will keep this thread updated even if it gets really old and needs a necro-bump!  Let's hope if and when there is eventually news it is that I have recovered the key, not that it has been hacked by another and that the funds are no longer there!

Thanks all for your recommendations.

Do I need to try using the private key it generates every time or is my understanding correct that if I put the passphrase in correctly the same address I paid the bitcoin to will appear?  Also, if I am unsure whether or not I clicked on the Uncompressed/Compressed buttons I'm guessing I need to try both for each variation on the passphrase?

At the moment I'm using string manipulation in Excel to give me all the possible combinations for the 11 most likely errors I made which I will cut and paste one at a time into the brainwallet.org generator.  Any ideas as to how I could speed up this process?


This may well turn out to be a long-term project but with the amount on there if I manage it it will have been worth it!

I know what I did deserves a load of replies calling me a dipstick so I really do appreciate your trying to help me out and recover from this one.

Edit:  Thinking about it, I think the question regarding the address is:  Could the brainwallet.org generator be producing a different publik key (address) associated with the same private key (wallet)?  Because if it can then as I understand it I really do need to test each private key generated and not depend on recognising the address I initially used.  Am I right?