If a Bitcoin service were to donate 50% of profits to charity, how much more likely would you be to shop at that service over a comparable one that did not?

This thread is to determine the interest in doing a group buy of a new Bitcoin service.

Over the last few days I've repeatedly looked into group buys for batch #3 and also batch#2 direct buys from Ebay. What I keep getting to a point where I think it would be a much better to invest in a company that rides the Bitcoin popularity wave indirectly though running a Bitcoin service. Why? This would take away having to guess what is going to happen with the Bitcoin price over the next year, which is a fool's errand.

The buy-in and pay-outs would be sent in Bitcoins to allow more privacy, and the person handling any money would be a public unanimously agreed upon individual.

Please throw in business ideas if you like this idea. I'll start with three basic ideas:
- A random number generator with extremely random output. You feed it bitcoins, and it feeds out random numbers over the internet. The results can be public or private.
- A service allowing truly instant Bitcoin transactions. This is just an initial service idea where I have thought out basically none of the details.
- Another competitor to MtGox seeing how they have 80% market share.

I know I'm not even starting to cover what is possible and would be interested to hear other ideas. I think this could actually be much more fun than a joint mining operation.

Last year I joined a payment service run by a very well-known bank service and got money for signing up. I was skeptical it wouldn't work but there is still money in my account from the sign-up even though I didn't buy anything. Now that I know it works, I'm willing to translate your bonus into bitcoins. If you sign up and send me the bonus money (assuming it still works), I'll in turn send you 0.08 Bitcoins.

To try this, PM me with your Bitcoin address and also the email you plan to sign up with for the payment service (obviously use a throw-away address if you have spam concerns) but keep in mind you have to verify your email.

So whats the catch? I believe they ask you for fairly personal details, but you can easily verify that the website belongs to the well-known bank. They may have even asked me for my (US) SSN though I don't really remember too well because it was quite a few months ago. But if they do ask for SSN please let me know. Please note it could take me 24 hours to respond to any PMs!

I believe this only works for people in the USA but I'm really not sure.

I downloaded Silver Thread Software's Bitcoin Vanity Address Generator @ nyhm.net pretty quickly, and installation was not necessary since I already have the correct Java software installed.

Since I couldn't get an address starting with Fractal5 I typed in "fr5" and 8 minutes later I had this public address:
1Fr5c3iaknvQi9w7WuaeiiWxtBoRQ9iNt3

Very nice! I think its actually a good idea to use something than the standard Bitcoin wallet to get addresses because it helps decentralize the Bitcoin protocol. As always there are some security concerns using a small and relatively unknown company, but apparently I trust my intuition enough that just a fleeting glance at their website name and structure was enough. Normally I do a bit more research than that, but don't really have any immediate plans for my wallet and maybe will look more into what I've got before using it for any large transactions.

I imagine a four character address could take a day and a five character address could take a totally impractical amount of time using the software.

I tried out a Bitcoin transaction last year just to see how it worked. First I signed up with Dwolla because they seemed like the cheapest middleman to get money to MtGox. I thought was a somewhat annoying process especially since I had never heard of Dwolla and didn't necessarily trust them. Dwolla had very poor customer service and I was generally unhappy with them. The fact they didn't scam me was their biggest plus. So I started out with an initial few dollars and then sent in the rest when that worked. That took about a week, which is six days longer than I was hoping for.

I repeated that process with MtGOX which also took another week if I remember correctly. They were slightly easier to deal with, but seem to have the same customer service level (approximately zero). Later on I went to pull some USD out of my account they required my complete life story and all kinds of personal info. I'll basically hate them forever for holding my money hostage. I honestly thought I was being scammed, but they eventually gave it to me.

Needless to say, my first Bitcoin experience was a bad one, especially considering the complete round trip. I decided that Bitcoins were the best option for anonymous transactions but the worst option available for practical money.

But, after the recent dramatic improvements, especially the Bitcoin ATM in Cyprus, I'm much more enthusiastic about Bitcoin as a practical currency for everyday use. So much so that I am going to look into mining bitcoins, probably using an Avalon rig if I can manage to get one.

What I'd like to see to really be perfectly enthusiastic is a de-centralized Bitcoin exchange that works more like eBay.