I too have had frightening issues with Quickpay including forced reversals and account frozen twice simply for receiving QP

I always thought CPUs and GPUs are ASICs designed for general purpose computing. A scrypt ASIC might be a fully functional CPU heavily optimized toward a specific task.

The way I think of it, somebody could create chips that removed things not used by mining and beef up things that are.  Example, dump floating point and use that space to add instructions that do several of the operations demanded by scrypt simultaneously.

Sort of the same way GPUs gain mass parallelism at the expense of a constraint that lots of threads must be executing the same code without variation.

Imagine you could make a cheap graphics card that was cheap because it omitted all the components used for video that were unused in mining. This could qualify as a step toward a scrypt ASIC.

In Bitcoin, the costs of the mining rewards are spread equally throughout the community.  We all pay for mining by being willing to accept inflation: we have all agreed to be willing to accept coins as payment which have not yet been mined into circulation.  We accept that as part of the bootstrapping plan, and at Bitcoin's current rate of adoption, it's more than offset by all of the seignorage all Bitcoin holders earn over time due to people continuing to adopt the system.

If and when an organization creates a coin they subsidize themselves with a particular thing, they will be spending an enormous amount of resources providing that "thing" to the user base including those who have mined the coins out of thin air.  They will, in effect, be fully subsidizing the mining rewards forever - or until they stop, at which moment the coin will likely collapse.  That is a huge, huge, huge cost to start your own coin.

Sure just send it to this address: 1111111111111111111114oLvT2

it's well understood that nobody has the private key for this.  It is the bitcoin address that corresponds to a public key hash of 0.

I think it's a reasonable argument that you would have no reason to leave funds in an exchange for 2 months.  How long did you have the bitcoin?  I would be willing to bet that if you simply screenshotted your bitcoin client showing you held those bitcoins for 2 months, that might be all it takes to get them off your back.  If you have anything that could serve as evidence of when you originally bought them and how, that can't hurt either.

The fact that they're volatile shouldn't matter, because you've already sold them and locked in a firm final price.  All that matters, from the sounds of it, is that you can give them enough documentation to persuade a 3rd party that these funds are likely to be yours, free and clear, if they are ever challenged.

Also... Did you say your balance is in an exchange?  I wouldn't be pledging any balance in an exchange until I had it out.

I would say demand for this stuff is pretty high, if I didn't stop taking orders in Nov I am absolutely certain I would have been more than overwhelmed for the Christmas season, it took well into December just to ship out the orders I had accepted up until the time I stopped, and just have a look on eBay at what my stuff is going for now that I'm no longer selling it, only days/weeks after discontinuing it.  Lealana pricing may seem ridiculous but I feel certain somebody's still paying it.

Would be interesting to "transmit" money through the mail using colored Legos.  The Legos themselves wouldn't be the money, just the colors as they are stacked.

Μάλιστα!  Και έμεινα στην Ελλάδα κ στην Κύπρο για περίπου  ενάμιση χρόνο και γι αυτό έμαθα λίγο ελληνικά. Όχι τέλεια ούτε γρήγορα  αλλά καταφέρω.

Όσο αφορά φιν-σεν... Δεν νομίζω πρέπει αυστηρά να σταματήσω αλλά θα χρειάζομαι κάποια licensing πριν να νιώθω ειρήνη να συνεχίζω. Άλλη σκέψη είναι, σκοπός της ζωής μου δεν είναι να δημιουργώ κέρματα... Σκοπός των casascius coins ήταν να δημοσιεύω το bitcoin σε ένα κόσμο που θέλει να το αγγιζει, ένας σκοπός ο οποίος πραγματοποιήθηκε νομίζω.

Money transmitter

They were not specific as to my activity other than it was clear they recognized me as involved in virtual currency.

Μιλάω ελληνικά δεν είμαι έλληνας  είμαι από ΗΠΑ γεννήθηκα Καναδά.

I haven't made a big deal out of this, but I too have registered as an MSB with FinCEN.

It's actually not that big of a deal.  You can do it online yourself at http://bsaefiling.fincen.treas.gov in 15 minutes, even registering yourself as an individual if you felt like it.  Making an account on BSA seemed easier than making a gmail account, and then filling out RMSB (Register Money Services Bureau) was only painful to just get the form working (uses some weird PDF-related plugin and seems to only work in IE7-10) but even still, after having filled out the second form, it was still far easier than applying for Obamacare.

As I understand it, it's the states that impose the licensing requirements, as though FinCEN just wants you to sign up and proactively give them a good feed of data as to who's moving money where and then they're happy (which comes chained to a due diligence burden of KYC since you can't really give "good" data without it).  My sense is that if FinCEN says I'm a money transmitter, the states need to either say in their eyes no I'm not, or let me license, before they declare "you knew you were a money transmitter, the feds even told you so, and you still didn't comply"... and there's 50 individual states.

Fwiw I think Goat got the very first gold coin I ever completed

It may have not been the first funded but was the first prototype.

When he asked me to sell him a coin i was on my way to Vegas for DefCon and didn't have time to make a new one so I grabbed my own prototype coin and sold it.

It's possible that a counterfeiter could vanity-generate everything to be collisions of the first 8 characters to coincide with my list, or simply just rip prefixes off my list (nothing holds a counterfeiter to actually funding the coins).  Though, judging by the stickers, this particular counterfeiter did not choose to do this.  My list is thorough and complete though, it's safe to say that if you have a "Casascius" coin and can't find the prefix on my list, then it's not genuine.

Heads up, please be aware of possible Casascius coin counterfeits.

http://casascius.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/possible-counterfeits-to-be-aware-of/

Heads up, please be aware of possible Casascius coin counterfeits.

http://casascius.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/possible-counterfeits-to-be-aware-of/

Heads up, please be aware of possible Casascius coin counterfeits.

http://casascius.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/possible-counterfeits-to-be-aware-of/

I received nothing, not even a refund, for the 0.15 BTC I paid.

Here is just a random bit of internal info as to some of my practices for what they're worth.  I thought I'd share just in case they could be useful, or inspire some other beneficial practice.

For the last while, I have been issuing coins with an incrementing prefix that I treat as a lot number, some of those prefixes have included... 1Ag1 1Ag2 1Ag3 1Ag4, 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 12A 12B etc

And have been using different runs to mean different coins: 1Aga 1Agb 1Agc are halfs, 1Ag1/2/3 are 1oz silver, 1Ag4/5/6/7 are gold plated silver etc...  12* are 1/2 btc brass, 13* are 1btc brass... The lot assignment is arbitrary, but at least I leave open the possibility that I can publish a meaningful list for anyone who feels they would benefit from the info.

Creating keys and numbering them this way has helped me manage supplies and helps implement some controls with respect to key creation, printing, and management.  I print keys in sheets and then cut them... each lot corresponds to exactly one whole sheet.  (so each sheet is self-identifying just by looking at the addresses, and they continue to be self-identifying after being cut).  It lowers the possibility of making mistakes because some useful intelligence can be derived from those numbers...eg....that coin that fell on the floor, are we sure we dropped it there today or could it have been left from prior to today?  When production is scaled to a multi-person team, doing this also lowers the attack surface with respect to the theoretical potential of inside fraud.

One of the biggest reasons I've done lots is in the case I somehow had the misfortune of having a large number of coins stolen at once.  Fortunately that hasn't happened, but if that were to happen, it would be much easier to publish the lot number(s) of the stolen coins (which people could memorize or keep as a very short list) so as to maximally preserve the value of the remaining lots that are not involved in the theft, helping people quickly identify their coins as uninvolved.  In order to exploit this benefit, I make every effort to make sure that each shipment contains coins from a single lot, or as few unique lots as possible.  Sometimes rolls of coins contain a mixture of lots - I try to preserve those for occasions other than shipped orders (like if I'm somehow delivering the coins, or breaking the roll apart for my own promotional purposes, or selling single coins, or whatever).

I have been traveling a fair bit in the past couple weeks, something I don't preannounce.  So that has been making me a bit slow on answering emails and funding coins (as well as stickering/keying them as necessary).  Shipments are still going out even when I travel - we stickered the last of the production run gold-plated silver coins today, so if your order contains these, it's likely to go out today.  Any outstanding 2-factor bars were all just finished as well.  If it has any 0.1 btc rolls, that'll be another couple days.  To be honest, there's a bit of relief to not be taking orders - I had no idea I'd even get this far behind.

And just a brief update on where the money transmitter effort is going: evaluating how the state governments will react to FinCEN taking a stand that I'm a money transmitter... since I've come to understand that it's actually the states that are more aggressive in regulating who can and can't "transmit" money... the feds seemingly want more than anything, the unbridled ability to follow money as it moves, and less to prohibit people who are willing and able to follow their reporting rules.  There's a lot of states and I'm sure you've all heard that getting licensed in 50 states is a monumental undertaking, but even winning any sort of victory in my home state of Utah may enable a broad category of orders, possibly including international ones.

I think you have to pay for the Xamarin dev in order to compile for your own phone.  Last I played with it, the free version only compiles for the iOS emulator.

Javascript BIP38 is going to perform very poorly on a phone, if at all.  The Xamarin compiled version is slow but still plenty usable (3-10 seconds to do operations)

I believe if you're using an iPhone model for which there is no jailbreak yet, your attack surface is small.  My app makes no attempt to save your passphrase to the file system.  Just to be safe, keep it off the internet until your private key is totally redeemed.