Quote from: gjhiggins on May 26, 2017, 10:30:13 AM

... The magic (seed) phrase collect house buttery stable will enable me to recover all of the privkeys generated from this seed (the parent private key or privkey) and thereby enable to me to ...

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As a cognitive psychologist by discipline, to me this stuff is just basic characteristics of the standard i/o routines known to be reliably present in the typical installation of the HomSap v1.0 wetware OS and it's just an irrational aberrance of modern life that people are, by and large, comfortably oblivious to the (entirely predictable) limitations of their own particular installation of HomSap 1.0.

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Just out of curiousity, is this how it works?

1) The wallet can generate a huge number of private keys, too many to access obviously.

2) A seed phrase reduces the number of possibilities from "an extreme number" to a certain range like a thousand or a million keys.

I noticed in one wallet, I think electrum or multibit, there is a file called 'dictionary' that has a list of a few hundred or so words that can be used to generate a key. It occured to me then that this was wide open to problems, since people would try to selectively used certain combinations of words as their 'secret seed phrase'.

As for cognitive psychology, I know it is all the rage now, and of course it will appear 'successful' in a society that is based on a cognitive approach to everything.

But it always disappoints me to see people who have an interest in psychology, the working of the mind, then regress to a cognitive approach. In my opinion analytical psychology, Jung et al, is a psychology. It studies the mind in the context of its environment, history and so on. Other approaches, like cognitive psychology, are more autopsy based.