I am glad to help in any way I can.  I love to see businesses join the Bitcoin community.  I see why you want the "from" address - so you can see who sent the BTC so you can credit their account.  The way this is usually done is to generate a new TO address for each order, then when you get the BTC you know who it was from since you see where they sent it to.  If you look at the standard client - at least the version I am using - and click on a transaction the from field is often (always?) blank.  So if you have everyone send BTC to your single address of 14ofhkLgaUzY1z2Zg7jM5Q4BTm1vszpBLF then it is a pain to figure out who sent it (look in the block explorer and look at all the transaction to 14ofhkLgaUzY1z2Zg7jM5Q4BTm1vszpBLF), like this:

http://blockexplorer.com/address/14ofhkLgaUzY1z2Zg7jM5Q4BTm1vszpBLF

If you do that you will notice that I sent you 1 BTC.  You know this because I am in the minority in that I can send from a known vanity address of http://firstbits.com/1burtw.  Most payments from most users will appear to just come from random addresses, many times from multiple addresses for a single transaction.  So it would be best if your site just generated a different payment address every time someone sends you coins, then when you get coins at that address you know you can credit that person's account with the proper number of credits.

OK, I finally read the fine print:


So I will send you 1 BTC and see what happens.  I think with some work this could be a very fun site.

So I guess I am waiting to hear from you as to how many BTC you expect me to send in order to get $1.00 worth of credits?

I think it may be simpler to have the following on the credit sale page when buying using BTC:

1) how many credits to you want? (have a numeric entry box here)
2) I enter 100 and submit
3) next/response page:  That will cost you 0.33783783 BTC, please send payment to 14ofhkLgaUzY1z2Zg7jM5Q4BTm1vszpBLF

BUT to easily track your incomming payments you should probably generate a new address for each order instead of using 14ofhkLgaUzY1z2Zg7jM5Q4BTm1vszpBLF for every order
 

I find this very confusing also.  No one ever asks the address the Bitcoins are coming FROM.  In fact the average user of the standard Bitcoin client has no idea what account the Bitcoins are coming FROM - and really no control as to what address they will come from.  I happen to have created my own vanity key pairs using vanitygen and imported them into a StrongCoin account where I can have total control of the from address - but that is not the usual case.  You should really not ask for this information.  Also I have no idea how many coins to send you in order to buy $1.00 worth of credits.  Your site should calculate this for me and then give me an address and an amount to send.

Whew! Just made the cut.  Got the payment.  Thanks!

bwagner
please use 1Kuktw1ebnL3ySLx3AJK5kEA3xbkibH535

I guess that was my (muddy) point.

I guess my question would be more clear as:  Since you believe interest is immoral then, given a rising BTC value, do you consider the simple act of lending any amount of BTC with no interest to be immoral?  I think you would have to considering the "built in interest" in the loan.

+1!  Interest, if seen as, and if charged as simply compensation for the declining value of the fiat currency cannot be seen as immoral.

What about Bitcoins?  Theoretically, with a fixed number of Bitcoins and a growing use/desire/need/price for them if I borrow 1000 BTC from you today and promise to pay them back to you in 10 years or over the next 10 years I may be contracting to give you back a HUGE amount of value over the original loan amount.  This "interest" may be very high and is in fact almost unbounded.  So it may be reasonable in the future to contract to pay back LESS than the original loan amount.

We currently compensate for the loss in value over time of the fiat currency by charging interest.  Wouldn't it make sense that we will have to account for the rising value of the Bitcoins over time with a corresponding "negative interest"?

Would you consider these "negative interest" contracts to be unethical?

I was one of your customers that reported the payment rejection scenario and because if it I have a couple of rejected transactions in my transaction record.  Could you please provide for a way for me to delete these rejected transactions?  Also I am very concerned that any new retry code NOT retry these transactions as I no longer wish them to be transmitted (they are over a month old).  So please allow me to delete them or please delete them yourself from the database before you implement any retry code that may retry them.

Here is a typical transaction at http://blockexplorer.com/tx/62ab321ced852b835615d0a16dd5cea661b6741a37a5f96657a2a9474a4332e0

I asked to send 0.25 BTC to http://bitlotto.com to enter into the next bitlotto drawing.  You can see my account 1BurtWEejbnKeBRsvcydJvsNztB1bXV5iQ started with 2.49 BTC and you can see the 0.25 going to 123MZyiPrNPRuwxTMcTGhp9EAixrNETqDV (the address for the Dec 7 drawing) and also 0.0025 going to 1STRonGxnFTeJiA7pgyneKknR29AwBM77 (the strongcoin commission address).  0.0025 was paid to the miners and remainder goes back into 1BurtWEejbnKeBRsvcydJvsNztB1bXV5iQ

So 2.49(start) - 0.25(bitlotto) - 0.0025(strongcoin) - 0.0025(miners) = 2.235(remaining)

So the commission and fee are deducted on top of your request.

Burt

This is an exciting day for me!  Finally, a post that I can claim to know something about and answer!  I started designing firmware for hard disk drives in 1987 (a 20MB 3.5" half high) and I am currently working on the next generation SMR drive (>5TB) so I now have almost 25 years experience in the industry.

This myth may have actually been true in the distant past when the data tracks were far apart, there was still a guard band between the tracks, and the data was recorded on the drive in a linear fashion (LMR).  On antique drives (>15years) it may have been possible with extremely expensive equipment to read some of the data left over in the guard band between the tracks after a single write pass.

However on modern drives the magnetic domains are recorded perpendicularly into the media (PMR), there is no guard band, and the tracks are so close together that you are lucky if we can read back your original data at all  In fact on modern drives the data is so densely packed and noisy that almost every single sector read back requires massive error correction in order to recover the original data.  BTW this noise/error situation on solid state flash drives is even worse.  These devices require even more error detection and correction than rotating magnetic media.

Now, on the next generation SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives the tracks are now overlapped. So, a single write pass will cause the entire drive to be re-shingled and this will overwrite every magnetic domain on the drive.

The real issue is that a single write pass of a 3TB or greater drive takes forever and a day.  So I would suggest that if you need to wipe the drive on a regular basis you get a secure TCG Opal or TCG Enterprise drive.  That way all you have to do is change the key and instantaneously all the data on the drive is gone since the old key is now lost forever making the AES encrypted data on the drive unrecoverable.

One final note regarding:
All modern high speed serialized data transmission and storage channels (SAS, SATA, PCIe, hard disk drives, etc.) must randomize the data in the channel in order to minimize RFI/EMI issues.  In other words all the data is randomized so it does not matter what data you write to the drive (all zeros, all ones, 0x55, etc.) it will all end up being combined with a pseudo random number stream before it is recorded/transmitted anyway.

Just curious.  Did you use a CPU or GPU?  How long did it take?

If you check http://blockexplorer.com/address/1GHRsryckBsSfKgv6zbun5egbxq8GCT8f1 you can see that the scammers have now made 53.84 BTC (as of the time of this post).  I suspect they would have made even more if it were not for the quick action on Mike's part.  I know it was a difficult and painful decision for him to send out the warning email but I am glad he did.

Now how can this darn site be taken down?  Surely there are forum members here that know how to kill a phishing web site.  Just checked and it is still there and still taking orders.  How about my favorite alt chain killer BCX?  Can you apply some of your skills to kicking some phishing site's ass?

Mathew,  I want to let you know I really appreciate the difference in tone between your first post to this thread (#40) and your most recent post (#94).  I think you have a lot to contribute and look forward to hearing more from you here and in other threads.

I have purchased coins from Mike several times.  I have many of the 1 BTC coins and a couple of the 25 BTC coins, which are beautiful.

Just got my personal copy of the phishing email and went to the .NET web site.  It is still there and taking bogus orders as far as I can tell so beware.

I have personally removed stickers and tried to place them back on the coins and found it to be impossible.  It is very obvious that the sticker has been taken off.

If you want to know what the holograms look like before being taken off there are plenty of high resolution pictures at https://casascius.com/

And now there are copies of all the same pictures at the bogus http://casascius.net/ site as well

Mike has been and still is one of the hardest working members of the Bitcoin community and I for one appreciate his efforts.

Some of you question the warning email he sent out but ask yourself this:  what would you do if someone copied your web site and was attemping to rip off your customers and the Bitcoin community?  I think he did the right thing.

I just "ordered" 7743.74 BTC worth of stuff from the .NET site got the address 1GHRsryckBsSfKgv6zbun5egbxq8GCT8f1.  I looked it up and it appears to me that they may have ripped off people for 53.84 BTC so far.  I am not that familiar with the way things work so someone else would need to verify.  Here is what I see:

http://blockexplorer.com/address/1GHRsryckBsSfKgv6zbun5egbxq8GCT8f1

Both of you seem to know something about this so I have a simple logistical question.  Right now if I want to pay someone I hand them my credit card and they swipe it.  I assume the box then sends this information on to the server and then the transaction is handled.  However if I want to pay with Bitcoins at some store (restaurant, retail, whatever) then what do I "hand them".  In other words what takes the place of the credit card on an unmodified box.

From what I see there needs to be some modification to the box so it can print out a QR or something so that the transaction can be started.  I can see how a modified box could print out a QR and total and this could be scanned by my phone and then I could send the Bitcoins over the network - or something like that.

I admit I know next to nothing here.  I only use credit cards as a consumer and at one point had a small retail shop where we accepted them so please no attitude or flames.

Just would like to see how an unmodified box would be used.  Are you thinking that we would encode Bitcoin related key information on the strip of a credit card that could then be read into the system?

What information would be on the card.  Surely not the private key and encoding the public key does no good as I am trying to make a payment.

Thanks!

This is totally fascinating.  Here are some of the things I gather from it, assuming I am interpreting it correctly:

1) The dark green line represents production.  It should average out to a line at 50, representing the 50 BTC that are produced every 10 minutes.  You can see that from the start through the beginning of 2010 there was a general underproduction of coins.  After that we see a general overproduction of coins with a fascinating peak in production after the July 2010 time marker.

2) If you run the cursor up to about January 2010 the light blue basically fills out the area under the dark green line.  This shows coins being produce and then held by the early adopters.

3) As you move forward from March 2010 to November 2010 you notice that some white area appears below the green line, especially for the coins produced in this middle time period.  This shows that coins minted during this middle time period were mined and then moved.  Notice that the coins minted in earlier times are still being held.

4) It is not until about June 2011 that the coins minted in the early days start to move.  And if you run the cursor all the way to the end you will see that there is still a majority of the early minted coins that have not moved.

I have two suggestions:

Change the y axis to a logarithmic scale so we can see the tops of all the lines.  This will also smooth out the dark green line.

Overlay BTC price, also on a logarithmic scale.  That would be totally cool.

Thanks.  That explains it.

NEVERMIND - I understand now this is just a bogus (but honest) address which states exactly what will happen if you send any Bitcoins to it.

I have been playing around with vanity address generation.  For fun I ran http://firstbits.com/1bitcoin thinking to myself that surely someone had already claimed that address (if not I was going to get it).  What I got really shocked me:

1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE  

I find this amazing and a bit concerning.  

I was very concerned because my first thought was that someone has enough hashing power to almost reproduce an entire public key address.

I am less concerned now that I figure the search was some sort of regular expression of English words.

Still, I wonder how long this took and how much computational power was used.

This also leads to my main question:  assuming someone could reproduce an entire public key address would they be able to steal the BTC from the original account with that same public key address?

Maybe the owner of this address can tell us how long this took and how they did it.

 

That is what I was thinking.  I believe we are running at about 5 blocks per hour and the retarget is about 1.5m and only about 100 blocks away so if this keeps up long enough the difficulty may drop below 1.5m.