There's a difference between seeing promise in a technology, and just being bad at assessing risk. No matter what your political beliefs are, you should try to be as unbiased as possible in assessing the risk. It's for your own good.

Yes, 6 per flame, 98 starting points, back and forth.
And other methods beside this.

[CORRECTION] 8 per flame (3 bits)

Thanks.  What I mean by the line is if you look at some flames they are filled with fire, and some just have a thin line of color through the middle. Also I think this is just the beginning, like I think we need to find a message in the flames that will lead us somewhere, and its possible that the flames aren't hiding the private key. I can't believe no one has found any message so far hidden in this pic. Damn this is a tough one.

I have tried all possible combinations that you can get from the inner flames a week ago (3bits and 4bits per flame).
I also covered all starting points and cross-checked the resulting private keys with all public keys involved in the game.
I had no positive results.

Here's my idea, though i'm not patient enough to run all the variations

There flames are actually coded in 16 combinations

Yellow
Red
Purple (could be blue my screen is weird)
Green

Tall
Short
Line inside
Fill Inside

so one flame for example = YPLS  Yellow/Purple Line Short,
thus here all all the combinations

YPLS
YPFS
YPLT
YPFT

YGFS
YGLT
YGLS
YGFT

RPLT
RPFT
RPFS
RPLS

RGFT
RGFS * appears once only hmm
RGLT
RGLS

so each set of parameters could be a baconion cypher, or the flames themselves could be individual letters or numbers, Ucase lcase etc.

On another note, if i zoom in in photoshop on the strange white uneven border, and adjust my levels high, i see some patterns in the noise of the white border, could be just a jpeg artifiact, but figured i'd show you. Here's just  a small cropping from the upperleft corner of the image

http://imgur.com/WTTieOB

3rd idea, if we want to get really crazy, is that she actually wrote all the characters on the painting. I see FO on the dove, an L and d on the Phoenix, a large black C in the darkest black square and possibly a 3 on the bottom of the queen inside the red triangle.....