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Don't forget StrongCoin.com - they allow private key import in most formats.
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Hi All,
I am new at this but why aren't more people selling physical BTC wallets (coins, paper, or otherwise) on ebay or other more visible exchanges? Is it that the market is still very small, a limited supply, or maybe the margins are too low for ebay fees?
And what's the deal with Bitbills? The website looks nice but they are not processing orders and don't seem to be checking their e-mail?
Thanks,
Pistachio
The main reason is trust. You have to trust the person that creates any physical Bitcoin transport system because they have access to your private key during the time they make the item. You have to trust that they do not keep a copy of the private key because if they keep a copy of it they can then take (steal) the Bitcoins out of the wallet or off the item at any time. So only buy from a very trusted source like https://www.casascius.com or http://www.memorydealers.com/bieq.htmlFrom what I have heard Bitbills is having some vendor issues and are currently unable to make more cards. |
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My parents, er...room mates...just signed the contract for a 33 panel array for our house. Some of that is due to me mining 24/7, hehe. We did it the lease way, where you just pay a monthly bill to the solar company, instead of buying out of pocket up front.
So instead of paying the power company monthly, you're paying the people who installed it monthly? LOL I guess the only reason you would do that is if you wanted to be green. Is it lease to own, as in will it eventually be paid off? These leases are a good idea if you do not have the money to pay for the installation yourself. Usually your lease payment is less than your utility bill so you save money every month and then you own the system at the end of the lease. |
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I am kind of on the fence on this one now. I was very excited when the headline would be something like "Bitcoin saves Christmas for the children - PayPal is a stinky Grinch meanie head" but now that PayPal has backed down - not at excited.
Maybe we just go back to our regularly scheduled program - and find an established charity.
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Yes, I don't think your scrap coins would appear on this list (yet) since they never make it to the block chain. But you could just give him a list of all scrap coin addressess if you have a list and there is interest in including them. Personally I have a list of every coin I have purchased and I do include the scrap coins on my list.
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I don't know how interesting it would be for this stats page but there are also addresses that never got funded and never appeared in the block chain - but were sold (I have some of them).
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Ordered 10 coins, paid a premium for them but got them almost instantly. Nice service. Good luck with it.
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Just ordered some coins. Waiting for them to appear in my wallet. I guess this quote answers my first question as to how you plan to deal with the charge back issues that have killed all other previous attempts to do this: Chargeback Policy: The practice of claiming a refund or requesting a chargeback after having purchased on our site is considered fraudulent. Customers seeking to resolve any billing errors are required to contact us via email or phone. Any chargeback attempted for products provided by SimpleCoin will be firmly defended, and a $150 administrative fee will be assessed automatically and without exception. If the chargeback is completed successfully, and if the disputed amount is not determined by SimpleCoin to have been charged in error, the entire disputed amount will be re-assessed along with a $150 chargeback fee. SimpleCoin will turn the matter over to a collection agency to recover the chargeback amount and the chargeback fees and assessed fee plus any collection fees, and will result in it being reported to credit reporting bureaus such as Experian, Equifax, or Trans Union. So, you are trying to "scare away" the criminals? |
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Well at any rate we all seem to agree that "precious bits" sounds cool and does seem to fit the system (somehow).
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I believe you have just enlightened me to another layer of bitcoin-y-ness. So there is a thingk called the public key address which is not the same as the public key address. And it is not something that is easily reversible to?
Right, and it designed to be impossible to go directly from the public key address back to the original public key (the public key address is a fancy sha256 hash of the public key - see the above mentioned paper for the details). |
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The private key is just a random number.
The public key is just calculated from the private key.
The public key address is just calculated from the public key.
Vanity addresses are just randomly generated public key addresses that happen to match some pattern.
The "precious" part, the part that takes all the time/effort/energy to generate, is the hash of the block that meets the difficulty criteria. For example:
000000000000055a165e49e80b04a7b5df29bedd7bdb23fec6d5d42052d3ad86
Getting all those zeros to happen in what is basically a random number is "hard" so this is a "precious" number that was created by the system and the miner who found it was paid 50 BTC for their efforts.
So I contend that the block hashes are the "precious bits" or "cryptographic anomolies" that are being "collected".
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What Mike is getting at is that if you go to bitaddress.org today you get a private key and a public key address.Currently there is no way to get the actual public key printed out at that web site. In order to do the operation (public key 3) = (public key 1) + (public key 2) we need the actual public keys not the public key addresses. The public key address (called the Bitcoin address on the paper wallets from bitaddress.org) is a number that is calculated from the public key. But you cannot calculate the public key from the public key address. Also since public keys are very long compared to even public key addresses we would need the public key in a QR form so we don't have to type in the whole thing. Here is an example public key to show you what I mean: G = 04 79BE667E F9DCBBAC 55A06295 CE870B07 029BFCDB 2DCE28D9 59F2815B 16F81798 483ADA77 26A3C465 5DA4FBFC 0E1108A8 FD17B448 A6855419 9C47D08F FB10D4B8 This also shows you why we use public key addresses instead of public keys because they are so much shorter than the actual public keys. |
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Not me. The vanitygen program!
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I have also not been able to find a citation for this exact thing (yet) I think mainly because it is such a basic fundamental algebraic concept. I expect no one is going to get a PHD (and therefore have published a paper) from such a simple concept.
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