I'd love to set this up at a small business I work with but they're a Microsoft shop and I'll be honest and say I get DNS as a concept but I know little about the implementation - how hard would it be to make this work with a MS DNS server?

Thanks for the info Casascius. Now if I could just get whatever Bitcoin lib you used in your address utility to convert between a byte array and a base58 string reliably I might actually have something to offer up

I can't for the life of me figure out why someone would write two converter functions  in the form a2b and b2a such that b2a(a2b(x)) != x. I'm assuming it's something you took from the mainstream since I think the great Casascius would write better code than that

I suddenly find myself wondering how much redstone it would take to make a minecraft miner...

I'll +1 this. I'm all about the infoporn and the sooner someone writes a standard for APIs the sooner I get my better quality infoporn. 

I may be a bit biased, given that I'm a mod on the Bitcoin StackExchange site, but I'm pretty sure StackExchange saves the day on this one. Seriously, though, it's like people don't even google.

Well, they do build these things in batches as their parts come in. I'm guessing this "burst shipping" is the reason for the sudden reduction in delay. I'm hopeful at least, given that there's not a lot of orders between me and colin  

Assuming it's preconfigured and easy to use I'd be interested in such a project, esp. if it can be bought with BTC. 

How the hell many transactions do you process a day that you need 25.2 GH/s (worth about 15 coins a day right now) to pay bigger txfees?

The only time transaction time on WalletBit could be improved this way is if WalletBit solo mined and happened to be the solver of the block, and even that is arguable. Even with 25.2 GH/s this would happen on average about once every 3 days 10 hours.

If you want folks to chip in for a hardcore mining rig you really need to look into how others have done it. Typically this involves continued payback from mining proceeds over a long period of time.

I lost ~5 coins and still haven't determined how it happened. I'm about 90% sure it was either an RPC attack or the result of having kept an unencrypted wallet on a work PC. I can't prove either but they're basically the only ways it could have happened.

Realistically the problem isn't that BFL is limiting our options with proprietary software - we sill have plenty of FOSS alternatives to easyminer. The problem is BFL's general attitude of secrecy and proprietary nonsense when selling to a community that loves their open-source. First they claim to be using a totally proprietary design that no one will ever ever reverse engineer. ZhouTong desolders a chip and hooks it up to JTAG headers, finds out it's an Altera Stratix III EP3SL150 FPGA. Now they're telling us the firmware flash mechanism is proprietary - how long do they think it'll be before someone breaks that too? They're handing us closed-source software but as was mentioned it's not hard to sniff COM port activity and reverse engineer that too. Classic "smart cow" problems all - I'm just wondering how long it'll be until BFL figures out that all their secrecy buys them is time. There's no reason to keep this stuff under wraps - there's no harm in letting people experiment with custom firmwares as long as they're clear on what that does to warranty support, there's no harm in just telling people what chip they're using either, it's just confusing how secretive BFL acts.

Note that I'm not saying their product is bad or that I don't approve of it - I'm on the wait list for a single, actually - I'm just saying that they have a very secretive business model and *that* I don't approve of.

This.

https://i.imgur.com/1e8J1.jpg
^^^ Coin movement so far. Previous commenter was correct about those blocks simply being blocks relayed by Bitcoinica.

On a related note, we know they "donated" some of Bitcoinica's BTC to the faucet, does anyone recognize any of the other addresses?

I ended up switching to zbase32 since most of the keys and such aren't multiples of 5 bits, saves even more space. Now I just need to hack together the code to convert between Casascius-style base58 mini keys and their (z)base32 equivalents. Given that I've already got libs on both sides that speak hex I think I'll use it as an intermediate value. We'll see how it works out...

Well, I've already tweaked Casascius' Bitcoin Address Utility to output in b32 as well as hex/b58 and to convert keys entered in b32 back to hex/b58 and I am the weird sort of geek who calls that "fun"... More curious whether I should bother making my tweak available

Ok so let's ignore the 123-bit keys and just focus on a 32-character base32 key that would have the same 160 bits of entropy found in a standard base58 Bitcoin address. The fundamental question remains the same: are there sufficient benefits to a case-insensitive privkey format that I should even waste my time formalizing this crazy thought I had?

Also, as I mentioned, the base 32 standard uses A-Z 2-7. It's explicitly designed for the same things Bitcoin's base58 was designed for - expressing binary data in a way you can write down and type back in elsewhere - it's just not case sensitive. The price you pay for that is that base58 has log2(58) or ~5.86 bits of entropy per character while base32 has log2(32)=5 bits of entropy per character, so the keys will be longer. At 5 bits per character, you'd need 26 digits (not counting optional checksum) to surpass the 128-bit mark you mentioned.

Just wondering if I'm missing something important here or if I might have stumbled upon something reasonable...

For physical bitcoins and other scenarios where representing a private key in the fewest possible characters is a plus, the standard current format appears to be the mini private key format: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mini_private_key_format

The standard mini private key format (as used on Casascius' coins anyway) uses a 22-character base 58 string, of which one character is a checksum. These mini private keys would then have log2(58^21) or approximately 123 bits of entropy. For the sake of this question, let's assume that 123 bits is adequate - I know the counterargument but just assume that 123bits = reasonable as a premise and tell me if the rest of my argument holds up.

There exists a base 32 standard consisting of the letters A-Z and the numbers 2-7, leaving out the numeric digits to avoid confusion with similar letters, thus avoiding confusion. If we assume that 123 bits of entropy is adequate then log2(32^25)=125 bits should also be adequate. Add the one-digit checksum back in and you have a 26 digit string instead of a 22 character string, but with only 4 additional characters (about an 18% increase in length) you've bought the ability to use a case-insensitive mechanism. This means such keys could easily be scribbled down for someone, read out over the phone, etc without spending the time and complexity to describe the mixed-case of the aplha bits. At 32 digits (33 including a checksum digit), such a string would represent log2(32^32)=160 bits of entropy, exactly the same as present in an actual Bitcoin address.

Mechanically this could function in much the same way a base58 mini privkey does, simply take sha256(x) and use that as the privkey - or more accurately either sha256(upper(x)) or sha256(lower(x)) depending on how the standard gets written.

Is there some problem I've overlooked or is this a viable method? Would there be any interest in a product utilizing case-insensitive privkeys or am I wasting my brainpower on this?

Here's my argument for Bitcoin's currency status.

I don't care much what economists decide the critera for a bona fide "currency" are, I care how something is used and to really grasp what the use of currency looks like we have to go back to a time before it existed. Once upon a time there was barter. If I were a shepherd and you were a chicken farmer I could trade you sheep for eggs, but there were some problems here: What if you don't want my sheep? What if I can't break down one of my sheep into a quantity that's worth the number of eggs I want? This scenario could easily turn into a long drawn-out series of trades across the marketplace for me to simply trade sheep for eggs in the desired quantities and I probably lose value with each successive trade - and I *definitely* lose value in the time I have to spend making the trades. What's more, I need to know the value of everything as expressed in everything else. I can't trade my sheep for berries then trade berries for eggs if I don't know the exchange rates for all those things. A barter-based market looks like this:



My fellow computer nerds will recognize this as a "mesh topology" - a type of network where everything is linked with everything else. It's very resilient but it's also very complex and doesn't scale well.

Now let's introduce a currency - let's say silver coins (though it could be anything so long as the whole market decides to use the same thing). I trade my sheep for silver and my silver for eggs - the most trades I have to make to get from anything to anything else is two and my mental load is lessened since I only have to know the value of everything in silver. The silver is more divisible than my sheep and in this silver-based marketplace it's almost guaranteed that you'll want my silver since you can exchange my silver for anything else that you want. This marketplace looks like this:



This should also be recognized by my fellow computer nerds as a star topology. The thing at the middle, in this case silver, is the currency. That's my criteria in a nutshell - is there a marketplace that has what looks like a star topology with Bitcoin being the thing in the center? As of today there is indeed a marketplace, albeit a fairly limited and young marketplace, that looks just like the above with Bitcoin in the center, so for all practical purposes, Bitcoin is a currency.

Do note, of course, that having only one bit in the center is an over-simplification. In an old marketplace you might use silver for small purchases and gold for large and in international marketplaces there might be multiple currencies all exchangeable for one another in a mini-mesh, but the point is that there's something small and comparatively simple in the middle surrounded by a great many things that are exchangeable for what's in the center. The fact that many businesses do business in Bitcoin then exchange it for local currency has no bearing (in this example anyway) on Bitcoin's use and therefore status as a functional currency.

You mean like the dendrogram visualization already built into blockchain.info?  

Alternately, here's the current dendrogram in PNG format for those who don't feel like clicking to expand all the nodes: https://i.imgur.com/MGReF.png

It's a RoadRunner customer in Wilson, North Carolina. Also checked and it's not a TOR exit node (though that doesn't rule out I2P/botnet/proxy/etc)