@paleface: thanks for the offer. I'm in discussions with BitcoinExchange at the moment but I may still take you up on this depending on how that goes. I think I'll go take a look at your thread!

I think I'll be able to get something good out of this. 

1. You set, in your client options, the fee you will include with your transaction. This fee goes to whichever miner includes that transaction in a block.

2. Miners set, in their mining software, the policy for which transactions to include in their blocks. They can set a minimum fee per transaction, or a minimum total fee per block, or whatever they want.

3. The market takes its course. If your offered fee is quite high, the transaction will probably be included in the very next block. If it's typical, it still might be, but if the network is very busy you'll have to wait in line with everyone else. If it's very low, you may wait a long time for one of the few permissive miners to finally generate a block with your transaction in it.

You can get a Dwolla account... it's no harder than Paypal and more accepted by folks around here, since their chargeback policy isn't nearly so one-sided.

There are some folks around here who will accept Paypal for small transactions. Not me---I'm not selling my bitcoins at the moment---but keep looking.

@ataranlen : Wow, those prices are way better than some of the others I was looking at... thanks!

Are there any advantages to my ordering through you instead of doing it myself? Do you have some sort of connections with Newegg?

Yeah.... I think we might need some smaller denominations. 0.2 BTC maybe?

My plan, when I was going to do this, was to go in a 1 - 5 - 20 - 100 progression. You could do something similar, dropping the ฿10 card and introducing a 0.2, and then 0.05 and 0.01 as they become necessary. I don't think 20 is too big though---we used to have $10,000 bills in the States, before everyone got so hung up on drug dealers and money laundering. Hell, I might just buy a ฿100 card now, so I can use it to put my kids through college one day.

The big question would be whether bitcoin is a currency or a barter good. In some areas it won't make a difference, but in the US it makes a big difference and we would hope for it to be considered a currency.

In a goods-for-currency trade, the seller pays income tax, at some exchange rate determined by the IRS.
In a goods-for-goods trade, both parties are taxed based on the value of what they receive. This is exactly as unfair as it sounds.

I will pay 1 BTC to have justcause's IP range banned from this forum. I lost 14.01 BTC because of him.

Don't deal with justcause, I bought a $50 gift card from him and he didn't deliver (in fact he said he had lost all his gift card codes).

I thought you had lost all your gift cards, justcause. That was why you couldn't send me the one I bought, anyway. And you had lost your wallet, that's why you couldn't receive the payment I had put in escrow for you. As you suddenly realized once you ran out of other excuses not to deliver.

Well, there's not much to explain. Each block includes a list of transactions, but it's totally valid for that list to be empty. (In practice it's never empty, since it at least includes the block bounty, but it may be someday.)

This is the raw data in Block 1. Search for the word "out" to find transaction amounts (specifically amounts received). Notice there is only one transaction, namely the 50 BTC bounty awarded to the miner.

For comparison, this is the raw data in Block 104440. Notice that there are several additional transactions listed.

Since each block must include the hash of its parent in the blockchain, it's not possible to "cheat" by producing thousands of empty blocks in advance and pushing them all to the network at once (something I wondered about before). The network will ignore them because they will refer to an incorrect or outdated parent block.

I can't tell if this is a joke or not.

Perfect security doesn't exist. You may as well say that Bitcoin isn't secure for trading, because someone could hack into your computer and replace your client with a counterfeit.

These cards are quite secure enough for trading, as long as you aren't foolish enough to accept huge amounts of them from a single untrusted payer without auditing them first. Right now I'd accept payment of ฿20 or so in Bitbills from a stranger without even checking the balance, if they looked right. For large amounts like ฿100, I'd probably redeem a few of the higher denomination cards, but not all of them.

@jav: How much access do you have to money in an instawallet? It wouldn't surprise me if it's possible to arrange things so you have no access at all. One way would be to randomly generate the URL for each new wallet, but derive keypairs deterministically from that URL, and not keep a record of the URL on your end. (Of course you'd have web server logs, but you could purge them of sensitive data on a regular basis.)

On the legal end, this may protect you from things like bank regulations that might eventually be applied to Bitcoin, since you wouldn't actually be holding anything yourself---just hosting a web application.

On the security end, it would dramatically reduce user risk---even if your server were physically stolen or destroyed, it would be possible for your users to recover their bitcoins and impossible for anyone else to steal them.

I did have the same problem even with the IP. But I went to Comcast tech support and they were able to resolve the problem at their end, so I guess it was just incompetence and not malice.

"Cent" is a standard metric prefix---it's short for "centi-bitcoin" and no one will have a hard time understanding it. But I agree that adopting cents as a common unit of account is a bad idea, since a mil will have enough value to serve that purpose very soon.

If I were deciding the convention, I would say we should:

• Use "bitcoins" for amounts greater than or equal to ฿1, even given sub-bitcoin precision. Example: ฿499.95 is "four hundred ninety nine point nine five bitcoins".
• Use "mils" for amounts greater than or equal to ฿0.001 but less than ฿1. Example: ฿0.23 is "two hundred thirty mils".
• Use "mics" for amounts greater than ฿0.000001 but less than ฿0.001. Example: ฿0.0001 is "one hundred mics".
• If you regularly need to worry about amounts less than ฿0.000001, consider creating a new currency.
  

But this is just one more proposal, and I'll probably accept whatever convention we settle on.

Another idea: If you're going to continue creating small batches at a time, perhaps you should offer them via a second item auction (what eBay calls a "Dutch auction"). Set a minimum bid of face value, of course, or maybe even face value plus cost. It will maximize your profit and get these cards to the people who want them the most, meaning the people most likely to do something interesting with them.

I love the idea of buying a card and using it as a long-term "savings account". In fact, maybe BitBills should offer "savings cards" with no face value at all, for precisely that purpose! (Otherwise there's the small risk that the card will get mixed in with the rest of my money and I'll accidentally spend it for its face value.)

Inspired by this thread and its suggestions, I think it's time for me to buy my wife something nice.

Is there anyone here who is a jeweler, or knows a jeweler, or works for a jeweler, or is otherwise able to get good deals on jewelry? My wife loves blue sapphires and I know she'd appreciate a sapphire ring or necklace. She also loves garnets and pearls, but she has more pearls than anything else at the moment, so I should probably go with something else. She's actually not a fan of diamonds or yellow gold.

I don't really know jewelry and I'm not sure what I should spend on this. My wife is one of those people who gets angry if you spend too much money on her, so I'll set a maximum of 100 BTC or so. (Less is better, of course.) If the value of a bitcoin keeps rising---well, I'll be that much richer, so I should still be able to afford 100 BTC.

My anniversary is in less than a month, so any other suggestions are welcome as well. Anyone own a restaurant?

If I were Randall at this point I would never make Bitcoin a payment option on my store. Apparently people will give you hundreds of bitcoins for free, so why do all the work of selling things?

(This is why I haven't "donated" yet---I'm waiting to actually buy something.)

No takers? Ah hell, I'll drop the price than. 1 BTC each. Some of these games are going for much more on eBay!

On another note, I truly fail at judging the market. I felt like the biggest obstacle for me to do something like this was the cost, and was trying to figure out how to keep fees below something like 2% of face value, and now this guy is selling a 1 BTC card for 1.30.

On the other hand, maybe this just means there's still room for competition!