Hey Terk, just wondering if there were any updates on this, maybe a wall you've run into we can help you through or something?

Can we add a custom address option to the feature list? Someone on Reddit made the point that since so many people aggregate Bitcoin content it would be cool if they could put in the author's tip address when they aggregate. It could also be useful for people who roll their own solutions on the BTC side etc. It would also be useful to be able to simply disable the widget on a post-by-post basis.

Didn't know they repeated the callback, that should be adequate then. For the record, though, WordPress has a pseudo-cron built in since they expect that not everyone will have access to cron. It fires at intervals but can only fire on a page load.

BTW Terk, did you ever get ahold of blockchain.info about your banned domain or whatever? I have a contact or two over there I could ping for you if you need it.

Good to know, I'll go update my article. Thanks!

I also just noticed that blockchain.info has a callback url in their payments API that could be used to populate donation information instead of relying on a cron job, although I think I'd prefer to use both methods in case something goes wrong with the callback, at least I'd have good stats updated every n minutes/hours/days.

Found a problem. The blockchain.info payments API won't forward any amount less than 0.001BTC, currently worth about 13 cents. I know this because someone tried to donate 0.00015384 BTC to me, worth about 2 cents. I'm not such a broke blogger that I care about 2 pennies, but I don't like that blockchain.info is apparently microtransaction hostile. Time to go email Ben 

Assuming you already know the blockchain API it shouldn't be too hard to pull the # and btc amount of tips and add those to wp_postmeta too, right? Toss something like that in wpcron? This is all coming together so much faster and easier than I thought it would 

0.2 BTC tipped (because that's all I had in my phone wallet here at work) and more on the way as new features are developed. I like that you used wp_postmeta to store the addresses, that should make it easy to extend the functionality in the future.

I deeply dislike the statement that someone deserves to have their coins stolen if they don't do XYZ things to protect them. Should people do their homework before storing that kind of value? Absolutely. But saying they deserve to have their coins stolen is like saying that a woman deserves to get beaten or that some "heathen" city deserves to be destroyed by a natural disaster.

I can get behind the statement that some people will never learn until they learn the hard way but no one deserves to be stolen from simply because they were a bit of a noob. I lost a fair amount of funds because I got busy and didn't manage my account balances well - did I deserve to be stolen from? If it turns out that whatever system you use has a faulty random number generator do you deserve to be stolen from because you "should've known better" than to use a non-quantum entropy source? There's always some extra step you can take to secure your funds better and to blame the victim because they didn't take as many steps as you is a terrible attitude. This was a theft, blame the thieves.

That said, this is one of the many ways in which Bitcoin has a long way to go still. Properly securing a keypair isn't impossible to do and we already know plenty of ways to do it, but it's not common knowledge and we place far too much of the burden of security on the individual who, frankly, almost certainly has no idea what they're doing. Key management is a pretty specialized skill and we need solutions that don't rely on every single user to have that skill. If you have that skill and want to manage your own keys, good on you, I'm happy to manage my own keys too, but most people are going to be incompetent at this particular skill and that's ok - I'm incompetent at carpentry but if I want something built of wood I hire someone to do it. Not everyone has to be good at everything they want done.

I still haven't received a real answer as to how my particular robbery happened but evidence points to one of two scenarios:

1. Most 2FA codes (GAuth and such) are good for a short window after generation. A keylogger which transmits to the attacker in real time would be adequate to allow an attacker to log in with a 2FA code I entered on my PC - this was actually a common method of circumventing 2FA to steal WoW gold back in the day. Anyway, since the passwords I need to send coins are the same as the passwords needed to change settings, view private keys etc the attacker could have compromised my account and exported my private keys without my knowledge, then waited until I had a worthwhile amount in the account before acting.

2. Blockchain.info doesn't require the 2FA code when sending from a phone. Prior to adding the PIN lock to the app there was no auth beyond passwords - a keylogged phone would be a much more sensitive attack vector.

In the end it was my fault for keeping more in a hot wallet than I was willing to lose - about $1,000 worth of coin - but it still stings.

Way cool of you. Every penny we can get to guys who see a good idea and just make it happen is a penny well spent.

Edit: Didn't realize that was my 1,000th post - it still came out as a pretty awesome 1,000th post though.

That's absolutely brilliant. I will be testing this out first thing tomorrow on a dev system and picking through the code to see where I can possibly help. I'm very excited to see this become a reality and you can bet once I verify functionality and finish doing a happy dance there will be a tip/bounty heading your way.

This is one of the things I love most about this community: if the idea is good enough someone will just do it.

I don't think it would require that much extra work, but then I've never written for WordPress before - that's why I'm wanting to hire this out, in addition to my notable lack of time.

I also wouldn't mind tracking the stats myself, but one of the ideas I loved most about this stemmed from that stat-tracking: a "top content" page that's sorted by the # of donations. Once you've got those stats in WordPress it can be extended to so many things. Want to make the most donated-to page in the last 2 weeks sticky at the top of the site? Want to make a "best of" page with the top donated content ever? Want to have a "what's hot" page with the top 10 pages in the last 30 days by donation? All easy once you've got the data.

Also, how much would you want for the entire plugin as described?

You caught the part where the donation address on each post is different, yes? I can do my own analytics on the back-end but it's important that the addresses be distinct to each piece of content.


Thanks Adam, I meant to plug the video but forgot

After Adam B Levine's lovely talk at Bitcoin 2013 I was discussing some ideas with him on taking the concept beyond YouTube and an idea came about that I love but frankly do not have the time to build from scratch so I'm hoping there's either already something like it that I can modify or that someone out there has already put in the time to learn how to write wordpress plugins that I can just beg or hire or whatever.

The basis of the idea is this: Individual Bitcoin donation/tip addresses for each piece of content with user feedback and back-end tracking. I'm thinking something like http://coinwidget.com/ on each post but instead of configuring, copying and pasting each and every time simply have a plugin add an address field to each post. Additionally, I'd like the ability to view internal reports from within WordPress, maybe even a dashboard widget on aggregated donations and top-performing content, maybe even the ability to publicly post a "top content" page or select a featured/sticky post automatically based on some kind of donation criteria.

Really, though, those are all nice extras I wouldn't mind having, simply the ability to paste in an address is the baseline requirement and if someone knows of another plugin with similar functionality that I could just modify that will do for now.

On the other hand, if someone wants to write me up a quote for full functionality or if others like the idea and want to start a bounty with me, I wouldn't be opposed to the idea either. Regardless of how we get to the final result, though, I intend to open source whatever I get so the community can make full use of it.

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I'll just go ahead and leave this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma

Ah, so it's only the online client that sucks down 4 to 8 gigs of RAM as indicated on their site

Definitely more hammer than I need for this particular nail, but I like the idea of a VM being part of a DiD approach. I might just set this up with two different offline wallets, one stored on the offline computer directly and one stored in a VM's disk a hardware-encrypted external disk that only ever gets plugged into the offline computer... But maybe I'm over-thinking this.