Matthew,

You made a silly bet out of ignorance and a horrible understanding of mathematics. Greater stupidity made you extend the bet beyond your means of payment. Even more stupidity made others take financial risks they could ill afford on the good faith and credit of some guy they don't know who sucks at math.

A sincere apology is a appropriate...but, there are plenty of people who took part in making your silly unbelievable bet go way overboard. Heck, half of us on here were part of the pirate scam...taking money from hopeful "investors" under the false pretenses of thinking this pirate guy found a way to make Ponzi level returns without running a ponzi. Even Theymos proudly took pirate money.

I'm not saying what you did was right. It wasn't. But don't forget many people didn't _want_ to believe they were scammed by a guy named pirate (that sounds so silly!) and others didn't _want_ your bet to be fake...At some point the grown ups need to step in and tell the children to grow up.

I wouldn't try too hard to make amends. I mean, heck, you could have outright stolen coins and faced no consequence (not that that would make it right).

Did Trendon ever go to prison? Get arrested? Get more than some phone calls? Someone please tell me the identified thief was prosecuted!

For the record, I vote to keep the scammer tag. Only because Matthew was bad enough at math to believe that he might actually have stood to gain and he had no intention of losing...it was a statistical scam.

As just one Bitcoin Foundation member, I certainly can not speak for the whole organization, but, a big part of this organization to to pool funds to actually pay people to get stuff done. Bitcoin has become something more than a hobby experiment...and we can't keep relying on the good will of smart people to keep the gravy train rolling, so to speak. People tend to think of Bitcoin as this huge thing, almost as if there were no people behind it...in fact, it's a very small group that actually develop code for the protocol. A measly few BTC membership fee, which one could easily spend on dinner and a movie, is a small price to pay to buy programmers to help make your remaining btc worth more.

Very cool. How about a micro u symbol (easy to type on Mac)?

For a split second, I thought this post was stupid. Then I realized the ingenuity in the comparison. HTML and Bitcoin are valuable because they are useful if people agree to use them...otherwise, they're not.

15 min down per day sounds reasonable...with all maintenance extending this downtime as necessary. 1 day off per month. 1 weekend off every 6 months for big upgrades.

Necro warning!

Any way to check the value on these cards anymore? The verify code wasn't the best idea...simply putting the address on the card would have made it simpler on you guys.

I've bought two full sets of BitBills, Casascius coins, and a lovebitcoins.org Bitcoin gift card.

Good job retep. Professionally handled too.

Color is one dimension you could build a scheme out of....I mean, as long as you're inventing an organizational scheme to physically represent a non-physical concept, why not vary the size and shape as well? Maybe have "Reeded" edges like real coins...

I still feel using SI prefixes is the best approach...it's just not as familiar to us Americans because we (like Liberia and Burma) don't use the metric system. I don't think the ROW will see this as big of a problem as our axis of non-metrication fellows might.

Works for me...2 factor auth. They deposit to your bank to verify.

Ftfy

The reference client is not intended to be the dominant client used by regular people...it is intended to show others how to implement the protocol in their own clients.

While there are major improvements needed in the protocol to help make a better general purpose client, this is a separate issue. Things like import /export of private keys is important in non-reference clients...whereas über long downloads are an issue with the protocol (and hence solutions should first be implemented in the reference client).

Wish I had the fiat back then!

Anyone interested in a full set of BitBills? BTC1, 5, 10, and 20 notes. These were the first Bitcoin bills...before bitaddress.org or Casascius coins, there were BitBills! This is your chance to own some early Bitcoin history!

Pm me if interested. Payment in BTC only.

While I'm a Christian, I think I'm going to start giving gelt to my kids...it's a good way to teach them about money...now I have a good reason (for me) to use Casascius'/bitaddress.org's bill printer thing...

Thanks for sharing this interesting bit of culture!

...yes, iOS is for the rich and/or the busy...I like telling Siri to put X on my shopping list and it auto syncing to my wife's phone...or everything just showing up on my new iPhone after upgrading...or apps and books purchased on one device just showing up on another...perhaps other platforms can do all this, I dunno...but ease of use is my excuse for participating in a system I don't ideologically agree with.

3 kids, resident physician (some weeks are equivalent to 2 full time jobs) and no currently active Bitcoin projects...my Bitcoin app for iOS is off the market...I can't pony up the $100 annual apple developer fee to keep selling my $50 profit per year app

And a good web front end will make it all human readable and seamless.

Courts? It's an escrow service...you are the judge

Well, you could send a series of transactions to the address in binary code describing the proposed transaction...then 100% of your communicating could be done via the blockchain itself (and you wouldn't have to post on forums the details of the transactions).

Escrow could work like this: joe registers with Casascius escrow ltd and tells you his credit card info and a Bitcoin address. Bob registers with as well and tells you his Bitcoin address...when joe wants to make an offer to sell, he uses the Casascius offer encoder to send himself some Bitcoins as a string of 1's and 0's that fully describe the transaction (serving as proof of the terms).  Bob likes those terms and sends the coins.  The "Casascius insta-p2p distributed exchange block chain analyzer / trade detector" notices that bob kept up his half of the bargain and issues a charge (according to the terms) to joes credit card.

I think this is your next business...why not?