Yep, I went through the same consideration. It is way too easy to see through the paper on the reverse side with a bright light, and so I do holograms on both sides.

Be careful with scratch off stickers. I found that most were removable from the glue layer by applying a little warmth. My first tries were with them, and I was able to successfully take off the scratch off sticker and then re-apply without any issue.

I am currently using these stickers:
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=Hologram+Label+Tamper+Evident+25mm+square&_sacat=0

They are not outstanding, but they do a good job of falling to pieces when you try to remove them. I put a small white square of paper over the qr code for the private key to prevent the hologram from remaining on the actual code.

The downside is that as you can see they are easy to purchase and replace by the hacker.

If you want to go hard core, contact casascius, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2676. He has been working with a company on custom holograms that he could be the central provider of that would have a thermal overprint of your company name. This would be very difficult to forge, and so would prevent the problem of a user scraping off the private key cover and then replacing it with a brand new sticker.

Since double stickering means doubling the costs of holograms, you will realize that this gets expensive fast, and in fact making coins and single stickering is cheaper. You might want to consider this route, and again casascius it the man to talk to. It turns out that coins are cheaper to make than holograms, and people like them more, so it is a win-win. If I sold more of my stock, I probably would go down that route as well, but I really don't sell enough to invest in the bulk order of coins. You may also want to look at plastic cards. They can look good, and if you make them thick enough, and dark enough on the reverse, the private key might not be able to be viewed (experimentation needed here).

In any case, good luck! I would love to see more people making physical forms for passing bitcoins along. One of the problems bitcoin has regarding street-corner purchasing is its need for network access and the lengthy amount of time for a transaction to be recorded (I curse satoshi ever time I am trying to give someone bitcoins and we end up twiddling our thumbs for 10 minutes waiting). It also has the nice side effect of transactions being even more anonymous as they happen outside of the blockchain.

I expect that one day when bitcoin becomes a common currency for transaction, there will be many styles of bills, coins, and cards floating about much like the days before the central banks where currency was being printed on a local level.

What exciting times.

Please write up a wiki entry here:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Urban_Terror

Yep, or you can just store bitcoins on one and put it in a safe.

Really, the most common use is giving them as gifts to people new to bitcoin.

Qr codes work great

Update: I am running as a RP delegate! I should know by the end of the month if I get in.

Would you like me to do another run of those? Printcoins.com is now selling bills again.

After a hiatus for the last 2 months http://printcoins.com is back up and selling bills. Right now I am just selling bitcoin cheques, but will be back to selling denominated bills again too soon.

Also, I am working on making the pdf generation system available so others can print bills themselves, and perhaps in their own language. When I do this, I will make it so other bill printers can advertise on printcoins.com, so it will be more of a hub of mints rather than focusing on being a mint itself.

Where do you get your scratchoff stickers from?

So I have received two baited emails in the last two days. I am only going to guess that the crackers are using the leaked db emails from the security failure in gox from a while back, and many other people should watch out for them.

Today's email:

And yesterday's email (if you click the link it will bring you to a page which has an auto-download for a likely infected xls file):


I am sure they will send many more messages trying to infect my machine or reveal my gox password (amusingly I have never had any money in gox). Just watch out, and be suspicious of all emails.

If anyone feels semi-vigilantie, feel free to whois the domains and track down the ips to shut down these sites. I am a little geek-overloaded with other stuff today.

I think an assumption here is

Fixed monetary quantity = deflation.

The increase or decrease in money value is not entirely based upon scarcity.

A major factor in inflation is monetary velocity (how much the money flows around). If all holders of bitcoin suddenly started using bitcoins for the majority of their transactions, we would face rapid inflation.

Also, whatever equation you use to quantify the value of money goes out the window once it hits perception. How people view a currency is more important to its value than anything else.

Yes, people might hold bitcoins for some time as the price goes up, but if it doesn't go up forever, and starts to flatline, people will want to start getting rid of it, and this will cause a feedback loop that might make it so people will jump ship as fast as they can.

In the end, without some large economic event, I think bitcoins are fairly stable, and will just get more stable over time. That means they will become a pretty piss poor investment, especially if they end up only deflating at <5% annually. Investing in revenue generating businesses would end up being more lucrative. Also, investing in things that would provide immediate happiness would be more valuable.

Only about 7200 per day are being produced right now, and I am sure speculators are already adjusting their valuations for output halving (it is not like it is a surprise). So we are looking at moving from $36000 per day to $18000 per day in "quantitate easing." With the number of people in bitcoin, I consider that to mean that for all purposes, we have practically reached the end of money production.

So here you are. The train has basically reached the $21M quantity. Look around you, because at this point, I think speculators are going to get bored soon, and move on to some other new beanie baby. We have some stuff you can buy and sell, and it makes a great currency for gambling and buying drugs. I see a super bright future in its use in games, and if the USD ever falls apart, bitcoin and precious metal holders will be laughing all the way to the bank (not to say they will be rich, but just that they have weathered a storm). Bitcoins will go up and down in value, but really I think it is pretty much in the right ballpark now. The economy will grow one storefront at a time, and hopefully it will be a boring useful part of the economy, and not a long dead fad.

Anyone have an idea as to why the reward drops are so sharp. Any theory as to why the drop isn't monthly, but in smaller portions?

My only guess is it was easier to do at the time (I consider that this was a hobby project at first, and corners were cut).

Yeah, I might do that. I might also run through a thorn bush and pour vinegar all over myself.

I am sorry, but $2500 of faith in paypal and yourself not to reverse the transaction I do not have. Also it is against the rules of paypal to sell bitcoins through them. (I am interpreting here, it doesn't specifically say so).

I will happily sell unfunded checks through paypal though.

There is a porn category

I misread this too, and would have had the same response.

Anyone recommend a VPS provider which will give me root access?

Yeah, 1000 isn't that big of a deal, and really 10000 isn't either (as far as storage). This extra bit of data will make it so backups for 99.99% of people would be unneeded, which is awesome.

Um... isn't this wrong (unless you are using a deterministic wallet). Every time you create a new address for receiving, or for change when sending, the wallet.dat gets a new keypair added. If you don't backup after this, then that money is lost (in the event of failure).

Wallet.dat needs to be backed up with every new transaction, or at least when enough transactions have occurred that it the loss would matter to you.

To me, I find this is the biggest problem with the software. When you do a lot of transactions, you need to make backups frequently. Practically this means that your backup device is likely sitting right next to your computer (not in a cd mailed to ma and pa). If my house burns down, my bitcoins are lost.

Now, I might be ignorent of a recent change to the software, but that was my original understanding of how it worked. Maybe it is smarter now and allocates 10K addresses for itself so that you don't need to be backing up all the time.

Sorry to be a downer, but it is pretty easy to send someone bitcoins in email.

Go to https://www.bitaddress.org/
and generate an address. Fund it with whatever you want, and send the private key to the recipient.

If a year rolls by and the person never uses the bitcoin, they can be "reclaimed" by just importing the PK into your wallet.

Be sure to tell them that you will do that otherwise you might get an angry email.

Nudge.

Site is still up and running, but no so much traffic anymore. Feel free to use it if you like.

Good for the miners. It looks like they are pushing for higher fees.

If you give them 50BTC for mining the block, you better give them something comparable to record those transactions.

A transaction doesn't have a TTL, so if you store up a few thousand transactions with really small fees, you might be able to make a little money off of applying them all to one block.

Or, if you want to be abusive, you could save up all the free transactions and just record them all in one block many years from now.


Accepting empty blocks is not a valid way to handle the situation, and their is no profit in doing so. Ignoring transactions is a way to signal users that they have to pay up. It would be great if miners had a way to advertise the price they would have accepted in fees.

Yep it is. It is a technology free way to give bitcoins to someone. In the end, I prefer to just have someone install bitcoin spinner on their phone and send a coin to them.