Quote from: achow101 on December 19, 2016, 05:41:08 AM

Quote from: piotr_n on December 19, 2016, 12:10:32 AM

I mean, seriously?

What kind of idiot do you think would chose any of the above passwords to protect his life's savings?

Clearly multiple people chose those passwords to protect some amount of Bitcoin.

Or for a different reason.
E. g. to research brain wallets.

This "research" paper does not say how many bitcoins they have collected as the result of cracking brain wallets.
The logical assumption is: because they haven't collected any significant amount, even though they "have been able to crack thousands of passwords including some quite difficult ones".
Because (most likely) they only cracked the passwords that nobody really cared about in the first place.
Proving only how silly the conclusion from their paper is.

Quote

The point is that people think those passwords are strong passwords because online password checkers say that those passwords are strong. If you are recommending people to use brainwallets, they are likely to use those types of passwords thinking that they are strong passwords when in actuality they are not.

Your claim would be true, if you had found at least one person who thinks that "those passwords are strong".
Otherwise it's just what you believe.

I will tell you what.
If you want to prove your point, all you need to do is take any password from the list (e.g. " say hello to my little friend"), find the address it came down to and see how many coins this address ever carried, for a longer period of time. If it was a significant amount, then you are right and I am wrong.
It's all in the blockchain - be my guest.

Alternatively, you can contact the authors of this paper and just ask them how many bitcoins they found on the addresses they cracked.
Tell them that there is a guy on bitcointalk.org who claims that they are a fraud and you are trying to clear their names...