That reminds me, I should really put 1.0 BTC up for sale on Gox for $100,000 and another 1.0BTC up for sale for $1,000,000.  Then I'll just pray for that liquidity squeeze and an ill-timed, large market order.     Oh - and no stealing my idea.

I'm continuing to stand by my short term prediction.  I am generally in the camp that says chart reading and T/A is bullshit.  Even when chart patterns allow you to be right 90% of the time, its that other 10% where you are going to get burned so bad its going to wipe out the successes.  This same chart pattern, low volatility and very slight rise, followed by a sharp and accelerating break upward, followed by extreme price swings, before ultimately settling down a higher price and repeating the pattern again, I think this has been happening since we broke through $31.91.

Midnight here in the Pacific Northwest as well.  You can go to sleep, I'll stay up and see the price though $150, maybe you can take over the watch again in the morning.

At $144.85.  Once we cross $145, which should be any minute now, I think $150 will fall quite soon after.  I'm not looking at the walls, but rather just the pattern of the past few weeks.

I was just about to start a "I love you all" thread myself, and here it is, already existing.  I'll have to go back and reread the thread after I post this, but I want to use my own words to express myself.

I love you all. This community is what made bitcoin into what it is.  Your all smart as fuck, open minded and funny.  Generous and thoughtful.  I keep buying all the way up (foolishly, perhaps) because of the confidence I hold this group in.  Decentralized trust is a powerful force we are unleashing upon the world.  I can't wait to meet many of you in 40 days in San Jose.  The party is going to be wild.

Smart, courageous, revolutionary free-thinkers.  I love you all.

That worked for me.  I had to use the name and password fields in the middle of the page and click the big green login button.  The fields on the upper right of the page were ineffective.  I am happy to report that my buy at $111.000 executed at 14:19:58.

The only thing you need is the private key.  From it you can generate public keys, addresses, etc.  You could write it down with a pen and paper if you wanted too.

Just paid the fee.  To drive or fly from Seattle, that is the question.  See you all there.

I have a simple work around for your problem.  Take a private key that bitaddress.org has generated, add a recognizable word to it and then make random deletions of other parts of the key equal to the number of letters in you chosen word (so the key stays the same length).  Then make several other 'random' substitutions of your own choosing.  At this point your key should be unknowable and unguessable EVEN IF bitaddress.org was feeding you non-random private keys to begin with.  Then use bitaddress.org to make an address out of your modified private key.  To make sure it is giving you the address that ACTUALLY corresponds with your custom private key, double check by feeding the private key into Armory and make sure the resulting addresses are identical.  Check against a third program if you are still paranoid.  Finally, check to make sure your recognizable word is in the private key at all times, to make sure nothing has been switched on you.

 This method is a little bit tedious, but I believe it ensures against all possible methods of trickery, unless all of the programs you use to do the verification are malicious in the same way.  People might argue that adding a known word to the private key makes it less random.  Sure.  It does.  But even if you reduce the key space from 256-bits to 200-bits, it is still secure by todays methods.  256-bits is no good if someone knows the code.

That is the end-all and be-all of efficiency.  It's called co-generation on an industrial scale, and you are harnessing the concept of entropy to its fullest.  Electricity is a very high quality form of energy, and heat is the lowest.  If you live in a place where electric heat is economical, there is no cost associated with mining in the winter, at least as far as the electric component  is concerned.  I like the food dehydration picture.  Bitcoin permaculture.  Let me be the first to put those words in the same sentence.

Money Services Business - The term "money services business" includes any person doing business, whether or not on a regular basis or as an organized business concern, in one or more of the following capacities:

(1) Currency dealer or exchanger.
(2) Check casher.
(3) Issuer of traveler's checks, money orders or stored value.
(4) Seller or redeemer of traveler's checks, money orders or stored value.
(5) Money transmitter.
(6) U.S. Postal Service.

An activity threshold of greater than $1,000 per person per day in one or more transactions applies to the definitions of: currency dealer or exchanger; check casher; issuer of traveler's checks, money orders or stored value; and seller or redeemer of travelers' checks, money orders or stored value. The threshold applies separately to each activity -- if the threshold is not met for the specific activity, the person engaged in that activity is not an MSB on the basis of that activity.

Source:  http://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/msb/definitions/msb.html

So, stay below $1,000 a day and a miner should be okay?

After a cursory reading of the ruling, I say I believe it to be excellent news.  The ruling itself is pretty bland and overall pretty sensible, and for what is essentially the first utterance of the word "Bitcoin" from the mouth of the US Government, that translates to "excellent" for this community.  It is the first hint of their strategy and it seems to be something other than an all-out assault on the peoples' currency. 

http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html

Get out and Vote people!

I think all those steps are solid and need to be done.  The only thing I fear is some kind on MitM against bitaddress.org and the bad version generating non-random private keys.  The tech savvy can check bitaddress' signatures, but even they may have been spoofed.  I think what my method adds to the steps you outlined is that it makes such a MitM attack basically useless.  My method would effectively reduce the key space vs. true random (due to the non-random, human element), but even if it reduced the random space to 200-bits, it would still be intractable.

I posted by accident before I was finished writing, but I think the rest of what I wrote may address your concern.

Bitaddress.org has a feature where you can type in your own private key and it will generate the associated addresses.  It seems like typing in your own random string for the private key would guarantee that key to be unknowable.  You would not be at risk of social engineering if you used an offline computer, not even an attack from the bitaddress.org code.  Even stronger would be using the purportedly random private keys the program generates on its own, replace a few characters and digits here and there, and then finally replace 4 - 8 characters with a recognizable word.  While a word would slightly reduce the absolute difficultly in guessing the private key, it would help the end user to avoid being tricked by a non-random sequence.  Finally, it would be good to verify your private keys yield the same addresses when computed with a different program.  This would all be hassle and inconvenient, but it is the only way I can think of to really have secure keys unless you can write your own code.  But even then, if there was a flaw in the random number generation libraries that could be discovered, they keys could be much weaker than originally though.  Mixing machine randomness and your own verifiability-human element, in this case, a word, would seriously reduce that possibility.

The idea:  Bitcoin is mature enough that it really needs to be tested against attempts at disruption.  This would include attempts to create forks and to seed  malicious versions of the software.  Other attempts would actively create Satoshi dust, inflate the block chain, flood the network, and just in general, disrupt its smooth functioning.  The benefit of course would be to reveal weaknesses now so they can be addressed.  The alternative feels like just sitting around, waiting for the inevitable attack and not being truly battle tested.

I don't know, is this happening already?  There have been all kinds of attacks related to exploiting the Bitcoin system for personal gain, but how about attacks aimed at hurting or causing a lack of trust in the system?  Would attacks of this nature be a positive development for Bitcoin?

Tomorrow as he walks into his federal palace in D.C., a reporter shouts "what about bitcoin, Ben?".  He stops, turns and faces the reporter.  "As a banker, a staunch advocate of the free market, and as a mathematician, I welcome the competition.  May the best currency win!"  Ben then continues on his way to work.

I don't understand that rational behind any vote between $1 and $5,000.  We are talking 20 years out, people.  BTC is going to either grow or die.  It will not just hover at $100 indefinitely, or even $1,000 for that matter.  If you think it will, please present your scenario that would support it.

Already, the "All" or "Nothing" dichotomy is emerging.  I went with "Nothing" because I think Bitcoin will have turned in Bitcoin 2.0 or higher by then, and this version will become a dead end fork.