OK, I sent it!

Can I buy a key?  My interest would be in finding out how you would react if I told you I intended not to use the software (other than to test the key in a throwaway VM), but to publish the key in this thread, and then fill out a report at microsoft.com/piracy with a link back to this thread.  Given that, how much for an Office 2013 key and what bitcoin address should I pay?

I would auction your tablet off to the highest bidder, expecting a premium well above the cost of replacing it with a brand new one.  This, of course would come with the right to keep any of your coins they recover, but also potentially you'd have them sign a non-disclosure agreement with respect to all your other data that might be on the tablet.  You would have to publish whether or not the coins were protected by a password, and be willing to give that password to the winning bidder.

Someone with the right skills may be able to scan all of the unallocated memory for the private keys.  That's why it might be worth paying a premium for.  Private keys are small (32 bytes), and if they're not password protected, one with the right skills could easily scan the entire memory of the tablet indiscriminately and see if anything in its memory happens to work as a bitcoin private key.

Sorry for what appears likely to be a permanent loss.

I incessantly push paper wallets.  Paper wallets behave exactly the way you expect them to, since you already know how a piece of paper works.  If you can create them securely and keep snoopy eyes from copying the private key, they will not forget your bitcoins, except unless flushed down the toilet, burned, lost, etc.

One of the most effective disruptive activities I imagine the Feds or banking industry could do, is publish their own white/blacklists of coins, with the implications that as long as businesses accept only whitelisted and/or refuse any blacklisted coins, that they have the blessings of the powers that be.

Of course, this wouldn't really stop anyone from using blacklisted coins, and especially those outside the US could do as they please... those who didn't honor the fed's coloring of coins would not be impeded in any way... but I will bet that if the fed colors the coins, they could successfully force the market to start tracking a different market price for their different colors of coins.

I was thinking that that it would be a perfect thing to embed in the salt.  A flag or version code could optionally say, "The number in the salt is a hint that will save you (client) time from scanning blocks you don't need to scan".

And I agree that one may as well throw the whole kitchen sink into scrypt where available.  Can't hurt.  (I thought of that as I wrote "entropy" provided by the minikey creator as opposed to "factor" )

It looks like the address has been filled in multiple increments of 324 BTC.

324 = FBI? (telephone keypad)

I am thinking of coming up with a new encrypted minikey spec for physical bitcoins and secure paper wallets.  I wanted to think out loud a bit, perhaps in case there are any really good ideas it could include that I haven't thought of.  I want to include the core features of BIP38 but then also fix what might be its shortcomings.

Here's what I am hoping it would be like:

• 30-character code that starts with P (so, 29 random characters)
• The ability for a person to create the minikeys without knowing the password (they have only an intermediate code which gives them some salt plus G*constant, the ability to know/compute constant remains with the person generating the intermediate code)
• Uses scrypt for hashing the password and deriving the private key
• Tunable scrypt parameters
• The ability for the costly scrypt step to be outsourced (eg by a mobile device, to a web service), without giving that service the key/factors or any advantage other than the single exception of being able to bruteforce the key without the cost of scrypt if they were to come into possession of the complete key independently
• Typo detection on the password, that requires all the expensive computation to be done to know whether the check passes or fails

This coding scheme would ONLY be useful for generating new private keys and bitcoin addresses, not for encoding existing/known ones.

Twenty-nine random base58 characters gives about 169 bits, which I on a whim would think to allocate as follows:
9 bits - typo protection checksum
32 bits - salt chosen by the person who knows the password
4 bits - represents the version and selects the scrypt parameters
124 bits - entropy provided by the minikey creator who doesn't know the password

I'm hoping to hear constructive criticism of the feature set as well as the bit allocation I've proposed.

BIP38 sort of hard codes some fairly expensive parameters where on today's computers, a native implementation does one in under a second, and a typical javascript implementation on a desktop might take ten seconds.  Allowing crazy high values in BIP38 is not really feasible because if they can be set too high, then it discourages developers from supporting it, because their services can be subjected to denial of service attacks by any user who sends a BIP38 code that asks for hours of CPU time just to decrypt.


Sweet, the paranoid side of me is very happy.


Simply use the audit code as though it were a SHA256 brain wallet and it should yield the same private key and address.

I have had a few people contact me and ask me my opinion as to whether Lealana coins are a scam, worried that 2-4 weeks seems unrealistic.

I'd like to publicly state my opinion that I believe Lealana coins to be legit, and 2-4 weeks to be reasonable.  It took me just as long to get my first batch of silver coins out.

It seems like it should be so simple, putting stickers on some coins, and it's easy to ask why 2-4 weeks?  In my case, I have kids and other commitments, so right off the bat, there's time rationing involved.  In my experience, when I release a new coin, there's a relative rush of orders for everyone wanting the earliest spots in the sequence.  There's another part of it - there's a persistent need to be meticulous at every step, as there are some steps where single errors are pretty much unforgivable.  The way I store bitcoins is super paranoid, as I'm conscious of being robbed or hacked... consequently, my activities are also very slow.

For me, just the process of generating and printing a batch of private keys is seriously a whole weekend, because I want perfect front-to-back alignment, I want to make sure the private keys on the back are 100.000% legible matches to the address prefixes on the front, I want to make sure I've printed each key exactly once, and I want to make sure all my overprints and mistake prints are thoroughly obliterated (as even shredding them is clearly not enough).  Afterward, keeping track of the lifecycle of the coins as they flow from creation to shipment to funding requires conscious organization and effort.  Getting the private keys perfect is such a big deal, it is probably the main reason there isn't far more competition in this space after this much time.

The first time I ever went to Hawaii was recent, August 2012 (oh yeah, sometimes I travel and don't broadcast the fact on the internet - that gives the appearance of slowing things down too, certainly so must Noah travel once in a while as well).  Definitely a unique place far different from where I live, and to have a Hawaiian-style bitcoin, I just think is neat, much the same one might consider it neat to have a US quarter coin featuring Hawaii.  I didn't order many Lealana Litecoins because I'm not a huge fan of altcoins, but I felt it fitting to own a whole roll of each of the new Lealana Bitcoins, for which I estimate I'll be waiting 2-4 weeks to receive.  I would be thrilled to see local-culturized physical bitcoins from other places, especially in places where Bitcoin is hot (Finland, Germany, etc.), and I would estimate that they'd be highly collectible.  Also, if someone made a commemorative physical bitcoin featuring that well-known green camel amongst our community, I'd want one .

I think I want me a roll of the pretty Hawaiian bitcoins!

Gold plating added to the remaining 700 or so 1oz coins!  It turned out really well, even better than on the 2012's.  All future orders will be fulfilled with gold plated stock.  Shopping cart added to indicate the change.

1oz coins w/o gold plating are no longer available, however, the 0.5 and 0.1BTC coins are bare silver with no gold plating.

I'm closer.  Sorry it's taken so long.  Am currently doing one-offs upon request as well.

My guess is it would create an unbound burden on clients to calculate limitless addresses to look for payments.  If it's feasible that someone might use such a code to generate 10000 payment addresses and then use them in (e.g.) alphabetical or reverse order such that #9999 might get used first, either the rules must be "Sorry you can't do that, you must fund the addresses in numerical order the payment will disappear into never never land", or clients must increment that index to infinity to be certain no payments are missed.

Why would the FBI dump their coins on an online exchange?  Seems pretty dumb for a known trustworthy seller (from the perspective of large wealthy/institutional buyers who would never touch MtGox with a 10 foot pole).  Such buyers already exist and have an interest in owning a chunk of BTC, especially when they can document their above-board acquisition of it from a legal perspective (as would be possible when buying from an asset sale from the FBI).  I have no doubt the FBI could easily and reliably conduct their own sale without having to even look the way of any of the exchanges.

Whoever buys them almost certainly is going to hold them and not dump them (unless they want a guaranteed loss).

As I understand it, seizing an onion domain involves compromising the private key associated with it - just like a bitcoin address.

As simple as it sounds, that's exactly what I needed.  Thanks.  Payment sent

Hello everyone,

I need a Google spreadsheet or CSV file showing MtGox bid/ask by date dating back to Jan 2011.

Columns I need: Date, bid, ask, and any other info as available (vwap, etc.) and it is OK to take an average or a representative sample as long as the methodology is consistent for each day.

Bonus additional 0.05 BTC if I can get a version by hour instead of by date (so there's another column showing hour from 0-23, which will have 24 times as many rows as the first spreadsheet). (total 0.15 BTC)

First person to provide it in this thread and a payment address gets it!  I am guessing there are probably tools out there to put this together, but I would rather just pay for the help than figure them out at the moment.  Thanks in advance.

Although it's been a while since this idea was presented, I too think an "animated QR" would be a great idea.