Another thing that could help, if you get the people power, is to get visitors to "thumbs-up" letters that have already been sent, essentially turning them into open letters/petitions. That way they know that it's much more than one or two interested consumers which are represented, and it might be worth their time.

Glad to help.

Lastly, to get people to promote your site (and it's reward system), offer affiliate rewards. If someone sends an email, reward the original referrer a percentage as well. That could be as simple as providing a link with a short tag referring to a given registered bitcoin address. These could be seen in signatures across the board.

You read my mind. You might do well to reserve the right to judge subjectively what does and does not qualify, just to discourage spamming, but dump everything to an open list of submissions including which are excluded and why. That approach would lead to crowd-sourcing options should you need to scale beyond what you can judge for yourself, and increase ability for crowd to report back on merchants who respond. It would also feed the curiosity of onlookers such as myself who would like to see who's been "invited" so far. Upon further investigation I see that you're already doing that.

So far I've directly contacted one hosting provider as well as di.fm to request that they accept bitcoin, explaining that services such as bitpay effectively insulate them from pitfalls, and that it would generate free press.

takemybitcoins.com is a great idea, but perhaps more could be done to add incentives to the process, especially if you have funds to divulge. You could offer and issue rewards based on being cc'd on letters tailored to potential merchants.

Fascinating, big, scary, dangerous idea. It just might work.

I sure hope not. Time will tell.

BTC is the best. If you mine with a pool like deepbit, you can expect stability and steady rewards (though payouts can take 36hrs to clear). If you have at least a radeon 5700 or nvidia card, BTC is the way. I've tried LTC and FTC, but the pools don't seem to work out for me, and you have to fine tune for scrypt hashing. You might do well with radeon and windows vista or newer with the altcoins, but keep in mind that exchanges can have hefty withdrawal fees.

A hash is string of numbers/letters/etc resulting from a one-way cryptographic routine. Any slight change in the input results in drastic changes to the output, but identical inputs always yield identical outputs. The output can be used to "identify" matching inputs without any possibility of determining what the inputs actually were.

Most websites, instead of storing passwords, will store a hash of the password. When a password is entered, it is hashed, and if the resulting hash is identical, they know you entered the correct password.

Traditionally this was done with md5 hashes, but now most md5 hashes can be pasted into google and the input is known. This cannot be the case with bitcoin, as the keys are far too complex and unique, and most transactions double up on the NSA-grade SHA256 hash, making it effectively impossible to break. That said, quantum computing is here...

If you don't want to move it to another qt wallet, you need the private key for your address (use "dumpprivkey <address>" in debug window). Copy it somewhere safe, and keep it private! You can then import it into the aforementioned blockchain.info wallet (Import/Export) or even another qt wallet (using "importprivkey <private key> <label>").

It's not uncommon, I've had this happen. Give it another dozen hours, it'll come through.

As an aside, I do have these bonafide firstbits addresses held if anyone is interested.

https://blockchain.info/tx/f694d1b7e38a832994d2c654941e647d7f96728459d5161ee5c5648eb94754bb


I can also do bulk vanity or special regex searches with split key (no trust required), contact me.

Oh sorry.. I had read fizzisist's "hammering" comments as though they were yours.

I'd like to check up on https://vanitypool.appspot.com/getWork as frequently as is tolerable, seeing as less complex requests will come and go much quicker than the eternal paradoxes which presently dominate the leaderboard. Is 30 seconds cool with you?

Also I might suggest running a secondary pool for case-insensitive searches, which is only a matter of the -i switch on oclvanityminer, and probably a simple quantity to correct pricing for (as opposed to regex work). This could be of greater interest to those looking for firstbits addresses.

Sorry if I hammered your logs for a bit there, is 4 minutes acceptable for get work requests?

I'm putting final touches on a simple WSH script to pick the most profitable request out of the most possible requests, and manage vanitygen based on that. Next I'll add automatic submittal, though I suppose it'll be hard to test.

If anyone's interested in it, I'm fairly interested in donations

Those markets are saturated. This is something unique. There are bound to be a few people who see the value of it.

Exactly. That's just what I've done. Note the big edit to the first post. You send me a key part, I send you the 1000 best results from the 1 GB batch, you keep the addresses and keys, recombining the ones you want for yourself. Fully secure, because I never had your whole key. This could be great for people who like vanity addresses, but don't like re-using addresses in different places.

Yeah it's ain't like the old days, I guess.

Look, my intentions were good, maybe naive, but it looks bad enough that you've talked me out of it. I'm changing the offer as stated above.

That's great. Not everyone can. Not everyone's running CL, either. This is more for the convenience of folks who can't be bothered beyond the 24 h/s they'd get from the Vanity Generator java applet.

Alright, here's a better plan. For a nifty sum of 0.1 BTC I'll take your part-key and deliver the 1000 most-readable prefixes for your personal selection, using the same word-list and scoring system I have in place. Perfectly secure, and all combinations are yours to keep. Does that sound like a deal?