Calling an alt coin "Greececoin" is a dead giveaway to Greeks that it is anything but Greek

To say "Greek Coin" in Greek actually rolls off the tongue with a nice ring to it.  (Ελληνι-coin;) Greeks don't call Greece "Greece", this is an English word for their country.

I wonder if it's possible to know what the incorrect behavior is in order to deliberately reproduce it with code in a properly functioning environment, and perhaps to archive a reference version of such a tool that can recover bungled keys.

One of my Macs has Safari 6.0.5.  I wonder what's the best way to preserve the browser in case it's useful for someone's future recovery.  Maybe I .dmg the harddrive.  Also would need to save affected versions of the scripts.  (Note, a quick test on bitaddress.org produces valid BIP38 that I was able to decrypt on a different computer using Chrome)

(also maybe 6.0.5 != 6.05?)

Reasons I'm likely to not sell more coins:

1. Don't want compliance hassle of being a money transmitter (this was a hobby project meant to promote awareness - moving money was never an objective)
2. Don't want security risk (the more valuable bitcoins get, the more professional the security must be and the more sophisticated attacks I must anticipate)
3. Don't want to make a mistake and become a bitcoin poster child (like Charlie Shrem, I feel like I'd be a high value prosecution target if I were to make some sort of legal mistake, just for my visibility alone)
4. Mission already accomplished (original mission was to help people become aware of bitcoin and to help people start conversations about it)
5. An appropriate mission nowadays would be to encourage people to store their own bitcoin safely on self-produced paper wallets instead of trusting others without recourse.  Continuing to produce other people's private keys is perverse toward that objective.
6. I feel like the more coins I sell, the more I accumulate a presumed liability in the form of people who must trust me not to scam them.  What happens if someone calls my trustworthiness into question, even without cause?  Then people might think I lied and kept the keys, and then someone might want to harm me.  Not what I signed up for.
7. I don't want to be in over my head.  Look at Mark Karpeles, his life is probably now ruined.  He could and should have quit while he was ahead.
8. It's honestly fun to see my past coins skyrocket in value.  That was never anticipated in the beginning, but I will be honest, I enjoy seeing them fetch ever higher prices on the secondary market.

Sheets of 22-character codes that were discarded from Series 1 which had the misspelling in the hologram... Series 2 and beyond have 30 character codes.

This may seem like a belated idea, but it occurred to me that a mini unit test that used much less expensive scrypt parameters but ran always would still catch a big swath of potential errors at a fraction of the resource cost.  This is because a bug that breaks scrypt should presumably and in all likelihood break it completely.

Someone has speculated that a certain set of coins belongs to Satoshi, and in particular, they point out that an anomaly in early versions of the Bitcoin software allows someone to determine which blocks were mined by the same person.  The way mining used to work is when you started a miner, it would put a "1" in a certain field of the first block it mined, "2" in the second, and so on... until you restarted the miner, which would restart the count over again at 1.  By analyzing the block chain and looking for those ascending patterns of numbers (and watching them break and restart at 1), someone out there has hypothesized that by starting from the earliest blocks and following the pattern forward, they believe they have a good chance at knowing which coins are Satoshi's.

Even in spite of these issues, any of the exchanges should be able to pay out withdrawals with a short delay of well under 24 hours, just by aggregating the backlog into one single batch transaction and sending it out using the regular bitcoind software.

If I were operating an honest exchange and had a "spreadsheet" of bitcoin payments I needed to pay out, I would pay them all out in one giant "sendmany" transaction.  Even if the transaction got mutated prior to confirmation, there is a 100% chance the transaction would go through.  I'd repeat the same process daily or several times a day, and announce that only "instant" withdrawals are no longer available, they just have to be done in a batch, by hand, hopefully the same day.

I am guessing that even if the other exchanges must temporarily halt withdrawals, the honest ones will quickly find a way to get withdrawals pushed out with a 0-24 hour delay!

I am pretty critical of MtGox and stopped using them more than a year ago because I just don't trust them.

This is illegal, as you likely already understand.  The Bitcointalk forum is probably not an appropriate place to make obvious illegal offers.  (At least the OP pretended like he thought it was legal).

Just as a reminder, if you've followed Robert Faiella's case in the news, making an illegal offer in a public forum visible to the whole internet, where the evidence is available to anyone who cares to save it, selling something that can be positively traced back to you, is probably an unwise long-term career strategy.

I once wondered what caused so much dust on the inside of my silver coins I was shipping in air-tites since I knew there wasn't dust when the package was prepared, and then I eventually figured it out when I had someone send back their coin.  The dust was always white.  The inside of the airtite exhibited scratches that were circular in shape.

I concluded this happens when the packaging is subjected to sudden rotational forces.  All it takes for the package to experience sudden rotation is for it to be dropped and for it to land on a corner - this causes the package to temporarily take on a sudden but brief violent spin, followed by a sudden rotational stop.  This happens no matter how well it's packaged.  Because the surface area of the coin actually touching the airtite is small relative to the total surface area of coin, sudden rotational forces don't transfer well from an airtite to a coin - all the force must be transferred by that minimal contact area - and it causes the coin to turn inside the airtite and scratch it.  The "dust" is the shavings from the scratch.

One thing that reduced it a lot was when I started packaging a piece of paper inside the airtite, just regular copy paper that I had laser cut to the exact diameter of the coin.  Never heard about airtite dust again after I started doing that.  It served a double (at least perceived) benefit: made it harder for someone to snoop in the package and see bitcoin and .999 fine silver, perhaps making it less likely to be swiped.

What seems a wee bit disturbing is when I compare the closeup of monkeynuts' coin versus the one on eBay, the positioning of the "1Goe6LR2" differs.  In monkeynuts' coin, which is the one I believe is genuine, the number is well centered in the window (it varies, but in this case, it just happens to be well centered).  The repetition above and below is well obscured.  In the suspect coin on eBay, the second line of "1Goe6LR2" is visible, so as to suggest it can't even be a bad/doctored photo of the real coin.  This very well may be a photo of a counterfeit coin (or possibly a genuine coin with sticker removed & replaced with a counterfeit key/sticker/etc)

Also, the rotational position of the sticker is different.  At the 3 o'clock sticker position on monkeynuts' image it's "111"... at the same position on the eBay, it's "001".   Clearly not the same coin.

I suppose if someone's going to fake my coins they should pick one whose story I can't tell.  So here is the story.

The story behind the coin funded on December 9, 2011, was that I gave away 25 BTC coins to everybody who worked in my office at the Christmas party on or about December 19 of that year, cause I"m cool like that and all.  Bitcoins were worth something like $3, so it was no big deal for me to have kept a few of these pre funded...while their value today makes 25BTC an insane gift, at the time, $75... for a christmas gift that's totally sensible. The seller (whose Bitcointalk and eBay username is te_platt - he's invited me to identify him) did work for us at our office, and either got it directly from me, or traded with others at the office.  (We traded bitcoins back and forth like kids trade baseball cards and I would say Bitcoin has been one of the most fun distractions we've ever had at our office.)

The odds of that coin coming from te_platt on eBay, versus a new user on eBay popping up in 2014, are about a zillion (in favor of te_platt) to one.

It's unfortunate we all got to watch out for fakes.  I'd be happy to PGP authenticate any information I can confirm or verify about my genuine coins.

I had a quick email conversation between monkeynuts and the person who originally sold him the coin.  Turns out the seller (who originally sold to monkeynuts) is someone I know personally, lives in Utah, has been enthusiastic about bitcoins and has an in-depth understanding of the crypto that underpins the system, and someone I'm pretty sure would be selling an honest coin.  So the auction in question has likely scraped the image.

There (of course) is only one of each genuine coin and I've gone to great lengths to ensure that I can say that with absolute confidence.  I am persuaded that monkeynuts has the genuine coin.

It was unclear from OP just exactly what the topic was.  The legal stuff went way over my head, possibly because I'm not a lawyer, and possibly because OP contained a lot of terms like "logically impossible", "legal fiction", and "official", used in ways that depart drastically from the meanings for these that I'm accustomed to, and in ways that seem to bear no resemblance (that I recognize) to any of law that applies to me where I live (US).  Even though I'm not a lawyer, I'm a fan of understanding legal topics and feel I have a rudimentary grasp on basic legal reasoning, especially on topics that pertain to my work, such as intellectual property.

Where you live, this might make legal sense, but where I live, even as a non-lawyer I feel comfortable suggesting it does not.  The only sentiment I felt certain I understood clearly was the contempt displayed for the administrators and the way you purport them to (mis)manage the forums so... I hope that helps explain why I replied as I did.

Operating a discussion forum has nothing to do with subject matter such as software licensing.  The forum is not source code or intellectual property, and its administrators and moderators have the right to administer and moderate as they see fit.  It's also private property and its owners and management have the right to manage it or dispose of it as they see fit, and also have the right to define the mission and vision of the forums, to update these as needs and circumstances change, and to make administrative decisions consistent with them.  I am not certain why this is even a question.  The MIT/X11 Open Source License has about as much relevance here as the Book of Mormon.

I agree that alts should start their own forums and move out of here.  As the number of alts tends to infinity, so must the resource burden dedicated to them.  I don't think providing space to every indiscriminate offshoot from the Bitcoin source code is the mission of the BitcoinTalk forum.

I think there's limited subject matter pertaining to alts that are totally relevant for this forum (e.g. debating scrypt vs sha256, proof of stake, coins that purport to solve problems of academic interest to Bitcoin such as "premine coin" etc).  They however may not even merit their own subforum, as they appear to me to fall under the same umbrella as the categories we already have.

It's my opinion that all discussion beyond what's relevant to Bitcoin proper, especially promotion and announcement of new "coins", has got to go.

Great collection of photos!  Nice work!

My best explanation as to why there would be discrepancies in the two tracker sites has to do with the following:

1. I understand they scrape data from other sites and may not do it consistently, there could be bugs.
2. Although it's simple and straightforward to monitor an address for 1BTC to appear ("funded") and then to disappear ("spent"), there is likely to be differences between the way the two sites interpret balances on self-funded bars, the "roll-your-own" addresses I sold in the past, and the relatively frequent cases where people add extra funds to their coins, reload them after redeeming, or otherwise keep a non-zero balance on the addresses after opening them.

+1000

Trying to "get" merchants to keep their bitcoin is a waste of our efforts and a self-destructive cause with respect to the perceived objectives of our community.  Merchants will do this if and when it makes sense to, if they haven't already, and meanwhile they will not feel obligated to update the public on their choice to keep BTC.

For merchants, not keeping BTC is one way they limit their exposure to whatever uncertainty is in Bitcoin's future.  It also keeps their accounting from developing soft spots where parts of the books are maintained based on best guess as to proper accounting principles for Bitcoin, rather than generally accepted accounting principles established for fiat currency.  In a nutshell, it's their prerogative to not keep BTC and their privilege to not be harassed by us in the form of petitions from us to change.  Believe me, they see the potential, that's why they made the choice to get involved in accepting bitcoin today.  Thank them, do business with them, but as for their choices as to what do do with their bitcoin, respect their freedom and let 'em be please!

The real concern isn't whether any particular kind of medical equipment can read the characters, it's whether or not they can be read at all with any equipment an attacker could have access to.

I'm not concerned that any particular kind of coins are attackable, as I assume they all are, somehow.  Rather, I object to anyone's claims that they've achieved perfect physical security.

Keep in mind that the purpose of a Casascius Coin is an educational tool and functional proof of concept, aside from the collectible the market has decided it also is... and not intended to be money or a currency.  Although "trust in Mike Caldwell" is an important element of my product, the trust extends to my assertion that the coin contains the only copy of the correct private key as promised (and that I've taken adequate steps to ensure the keys are unreproducible, sufficiently random, and not duplicated).  I'm not a bank, and I feel implementing a system like that is far out of scope of my project.

I am actually more likely to just have the hologram say "ZERO BTC" to make this clear.  I already have used holograms of this sort for the bars etc.  I had originally considered "SELF FUND" but I'm not at the point where I'm irreversibly committed to the text, and "ZERO BTC" twice, next to the address, is probably more likely to send the right message to a broader audience.  The word "SELF" might be misinterpreted (who's self? myself? yourself?), and so might "FUND" (verb? noun?)... but "ZERO" has a pretty clear meaning, and so does "BTC".

All such holograms will still be applied by me, not by the buyer, and self-applied Casascius holograms have never been proposed or offered.

And this probably doesn't need to be said, I don't agree with your argument that offering an unfunded version of a coin is fraud.


I will definitely use a different design, but let's be clear: Casascius is a word that identifies me as the origin of the item, and is not an indicator of anything else.