The problem with this is that a fingerprint is not a private key, so this approach requires the private key be stored on some server somewhere.

A better approach is to store your private key on a smartphone.  Put a QR code sticker on customer side of the cash register (with the cash register's Bitcoin address) and scan it with your smartphone, enter the amount, and the phone sends the payment to the cash register.  Alternately you can have display on your side of the register showing a QR code with the address and amount, so you don't have to enter it.

For protection against loss or theft of the phone, you can have another copy of the private key somewhere.  If necessary, you use that other copy to transfer your BTC a new key, hopefully before someone finds and cracks your phone

Unfortunately Bitcoin doesn't really do "instant" payments, so there are some issues with this.  Search on the forum for "vending machine problem."

He's been on the Selling board for a while.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8864.0

People seem happy with it, but I have no personal experience.

(No, you can't use Prime because he ships it from his own account and Prime doesn't allow reselling.)

bump for lowered price (does anyone actually buy these?)

A graph I'd like to see on there is the transaction rate over time.

Again, I'm not sure how we know that.  Let's say there is a BTCv2 that succeeds as a de-facto (or even potentially official) global currency.  BTC (v1) might still be worth more to collectors even if it doesn't circulate in commerce.  In fact, it could be BTCv17 that succeeds globally, and I would guess that BTCv1 would be worth more than BTCv2-BTCv16.  There is rare currency of various types that isn't legal tender any more and wouldn't be accepted in commerce by anyone, but still has significant collector value.  But none of those are "The First Currency" of their type.  That could be huge.

 

Hmm. How do we know that?  Perhaps they would have pure "collectable" value as the first block chain currency.

We may get to that.  Mining has been exceptionally profitable recently because the sudden burst of attention rapidly drove up the price of BTC to the point where people started building these dedicated mining operations large and small.  Difficulty has yet to catch up (though it's trying hard), but when it does and mining becomes a lot less profitable again, those operations are going to suffer from their diseconomies of scale relative to people who have free electricity and/or free computers.

There are some other issues that might reintroduce economies of scale though, so it's hard to say how things really turn out.

I mostly agree but there is some linkage in the other direction.  Let's say someone wants to acquire 1 bitcoin for some reason.  If he can mine it for $5, he's less likely to want to buy it for say $7.  If it costs $10 to mine, he's going to be willing to pay $7 or even more.  

If he wanted to be careful he could have used a public WiFi or some such.

In progress.  PM for more info or if you want to work on it.

Looks like luck evened out a bit for the US pool at least.  Wow!

0000000000003bac4a297bed795309ac5cbf091a858ddb31e44df0b444a9a873, yesterday at 23:43
0000000000000906ec31ba2f5bf87895383cac3c15b9e8cff3db08accd298388, yesterday at 23:30

If you're actually willing to read this (it's pretty long) you can learn something.

http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=3401

Short summary:

a) Much of the "investment" you describe is useless anyway.  They are copycat products that don't do anything other than allow the copycat to reinvent something that already exists in a non-infringing form.  This is useless (wasteful) investment. 

b) In a realistic model you will be able to profit from your investment even without "protecting" it.

Here's a suggestion for you.  Contact the EFF, and see if they will set up a Bitcoin address for Red Cross donations.  They seem to want to support the Bitcoin concept, so maybe they would do it.

And we are just supposed to trust that you will donate?

I will buy 175 namecoin for 1 BTC or PM to negotiate larger/smaller orders.

EDIT: Update price

It doesn't stop people from continuing to sign up for and use Facebook.  Not only is Zuckerberg getting a lot more out of the deal than any of Facebook's users, but he's also way more of an asshole than any of Bitcoin's early adopters.

Give people compelling enough value and they will overlook fairness.  When the pie (or candy bar) is really small people will bicker forever over how to divide it.

If not, where does it come from?


This argument fails to make a distinction between production and consumption because the same argument can be used in the other direction.  If you want to consume a burrito there is typically a market price at which you can get someone to produce one.  Any argument you can make like that in favor of production being "useful" economic activity can be rearranged to apply to consumption.

The reality is that you can't separate the two in that way; you can't have sellers without buyers (nor vice versa).

I will agree with you though, that the government going and telling people to do this or do that almost never contributes to useful economic activity (and when it does it's by accident).

Now you are moving the goalposts.  You said "economic health" before, now you are saying "wealth."  Sure, eating a burrito consumes wealth, in a sense (though it depends how you value a nourished person relative to a hungry one), but that's different from "economic health."  Producing and consuming burritos are certainly useful economic activities and if they are occurring with any regularity that is a sign of a healthy economy (in fact more healthy than producing burritos when no one is consuming them), even though taken together they have no net effect on wealth as you define it.

This is basically nonsense.  When someone buys a burrito it means someone else is producing a burrito.  It's the combination of both that is useful economic activity.  If you produce burritos and no one eats them, it doesn't contribute to the economy in a meaningful way.  If you were going to account for it at the time of production, then when it goes bad and throw it away, you would have to account for that destruction by subtracting, so you get the exact same overall result as you do when measuring at the time of purchase.

Do you actually need to do those things to store BTC?  I thought you could just send to a new address and recoonect when you want the BTC back.  Sure there is some cost to doing this at the beginning and end, but no cost-for-time, and you'd incur similar beginning-and-end costs if you lent/stored with a third party.

If you also want to use the system to transact while you are storing the BTC, then you aren't really incurring those costs to store, just to use.