Re: Using a password as a private key.

‚‚‚‚Assymetic crypto systems such as Diffie-Hellman, El-Gamel, and DSS, allow the private key to be a randomly chosen number. ‚But, as a cute hack, instead of using a random number, for the private key, you could use a hash of the User Name, and a password.

That has been proposed in the context of elliptic curve cryptography where the keys don't need much entropy. I think George Barwood's pegwit works that way. I don't like the idea though. You're giving everybody the chance to run a password guessing attack on your secret key.