As I said: If they really discontinue the cool service and can't (legally?) keep up the site for cash out only, I would expect to see some manual processing to kick in that would also be ok to cost a certain fee.

I'm not sure I understand you right but if by time of my deposit their policy is 90ms warning, I can't complain to see my money gone, no (assuming this is not hidden in some gray on gray small print).
For now they confirmed to not have a policy at all and I assume "some" law would kick in.

No. Everybody should be able to reclaim his belonging at a reasonable processing fee for manually sending the coins somewhere. I assume that what you take for "small deposit" might be worth a fortune when hundreds of old nerds pay hundreds of dollars to recover data from that old backup drive no recent computer has adapters for, so the instawallet group's call center fee should be the least of their worries. By then 10$ might not even be enough for a phone call ... hmm ... dreaming again

Who wants my HD6990?

Fire emerges naturally when two kids play with matches.

SgtSpike, you would qualify for a good scammer I guess. I mean if I don't check that site in 90 days (they can't mail me neither), they should legally own my coins without me shouting "SCAMMER"? No way!
If bitcoin goes through the roof now, they put some notice that the service will be discontinued by blabla and start walletinsta.com instead?
I would expect to have all the funds available for 10$ processing fee for years after closing the service. You can't just take your user's money. (I mean legally you might be allowed to do so after a certain time but for me bitcoin is still very much about honesty, trust and reputation ... or anarchy if you prefer that word.)

Ok, interesting. Very interesting for the advertisement this is doing but on the fact that you don't need an intermediary ... how is blockchain.info not an intermediary? Yes, with bitcoin, you can run your own top level (in the sense that there is no higher authority) piece of banking infrastructure on your phone as you can both run a full client (schildbach) and even mine on mobile devices (although I don't know if phones reach kH/s) but this is not what this app does. Welcome, blockchain.info is your bank.

Hmm ... interesting to know that January is old for you already. Not sure if I touched all my ~20 instawallet urls in that time.

I love how instant instawallet is but also wonder how many of your urls actually hold coins. My guess would be less than 2%.

I would be very interested in figures on how many transactions you process per day from how many users, how is the distribution of coins per url (0, <.1, <.5, <2, <10, <50, <200, <1000, >=1000) or the median of all urls with coins or some other metric that gives us an idea of how people use instawallet.

Are many users actually using instawallet for more than to give a coin to a non-bitcoiner (my main use case)?

... hmm ... makes sense. There should not be a big breach of privacy by sending the paybackaddress with every request so essentially the $secret could require to contain a valid bitcoin address but as long as this is found, any extension to the string could be optional for those that prefer to reuse their addresses. All others should be fine with using only an address.

omg ... so the api could be abused for money laundering. I put in tainted coins and trigger payback immediately. But that's not an issue of the api as the provider can make sure to return the potentially tainted coins to their source. But yeah, every service dealing with bitcoins can be abused in a similar manner. I'm only afraid that in the end bitcoin will be less anonymous than anything we know today.

It has to be something with a positive idea for outsiders. Satoshi's last message (is he dead?) or reward getting split (Am I less of an early adopter now?) are both sad events at least at first sight. Parity day is a USA thing, only and very technical. What if rate goes down to parity again?

I vote for bitcoin pizza day! Pizza is positive. If pizzerias offer pizza for bitcoin for that one day only and if it is with the help of some local geeks, this could help get bitcoins to brick and mortar business in general, too. And the pizza bakers might like the story of those two now super expensive pizzas

buying time while running with our money, huh?

just kidding

Serious question: What will you do with all the dead accounts? How many BTC are lingering around without the url having had a hit in more than 6 months? I couldn't find anything like TOS on that when I last checked but would put some expiration date even if it was 5 years. Or do you rely on any implicit regulations that would make my accounts unavailable after a certain time?

Oh, regarding the TOS issue: If you say the first 10BTC are the fee for regulatory measures, this could even be used in combination with TOS enforcement. So the user may get his 10BTC deposit back within 2 weeks at any time when cancelling his subscription. To have the service simple in this scenario though, the returning address should be given along with the first subscription as otherwise people would try to redirect the refund. Actually a refund mechanism wouldn't be that bad anyway.:

request: {
  "secret":"12abb9eb-959a-4ada-bee2-b6d6539b9dc7", //some uuid
  "upload":"some image data" //the actual api call
}
answer: {
  "error":"unknown secret",
  "message":"Please use the register method to pay with BTC or register for an API key at www.server.com where you can pay with paypal"
}
request: {
  "secret":"12abb9eb-959a-4ada-bee2-b6d6539b9dc7",
  "register":"1u1e6DUsZ7rwX6UrkHqSz1Gs6oKnVCLkTPx"
}
answer: {
  "fund-address":"1Gs6oKnVCLkTPxu1e6DUsZ7rwX6UrkHqSz"
  "message":"please charge the fund address + 10BTC deposit"
}

// fund the address ...

request: {
  "secret":"12abb9eb-959a-4ada-bee2-b6d6539b9dc7",
  "upload":"some image data"
}
answer: {
  "result":"2.5MB uploaded",
  "api-balance":"1.0012"
}
answer: {
  "error":"funds depleted",
  "fund-address":"1Gs6oKnVCLkTPxu1e6DUsZ7rwX6UrkHqSz",
  "message":"please fund or request a return of your deposit with a call to returnDeposit"
}
request: {
  "secret":"12abb9eb-959a-4ada-bee2-b6d6539b9dc7",
  "returnDeposit":""
}
answer: {
  "result":"1.0012 sent to 1u1e6DUsZ7rwX6UrkHqSz1Gs6oKnVCLkTPx. The deposit of 10BTC will be sent there within 10 days. Review pending.",
  "api-balance":"0"
}

subscribing.

I guess this should run in parallel to established services. Most API-keys I retrieved so far were not connected with a fee but with registration and signing to obey their rules. Not to make the data available to others, not to excessively use the data, not to push illegal data, etc and none of them was connected with costs.

Your scenario though is where you don't have rules where the service provider would want to lock out one API key for TOS violations. It would be a simple, read only service. Therefore I doubt there is any benefit of reusing API-keys when the bitcoin charge is depleted. As bitcoin is not well suited for micro transactions, it would be necessary to charge for many calls, so the API key would only be a token related to a charged account.

Why not allow the user to define the secret?

request:
{
  "secret":"12abb9eb-959a-4ada-bee2-b6d6539b9dc7", //some uuid
  "function":"tellMeTheFuture" //the actual api call
}

answer:
{
  "error":"funds depleted",
  "fund-address":"1Gs6oKnVCLkTPxu1e6DUsZ7rwX6UrkHqSz",
  "message":"0.0001BTC per call to the fund-address or register for an API key at www.server.com where you can pay with paypal"
}
{
  "result":"you will live long and prosper",
  "api-balance":"1.0012"
}

*lol*

Uhm ... I see that differently. If the project would be ready to market by 12 months ago, I guess it would work .. somehow .. as the kids playing don't necessarily pay the electricity bill

Starting this now is simply too late as within months, FPGA-mining will rule the market, so the return per kWh will go down massively for GPU-mining. Same as CPU-mining was defunct in the client centuries ago, GPU-mining is a dying dinosaur now. The gamers missed their wave of bitcoin.

I'm in Valparaíso trying to sell some. Can meet in Santiago. I will PM you.

Das Treffen ist eine lustige Zusammenkunft mehr oder weniger lustiger Gesellen ... also zahlenmäßig mehr oder weniger. 1-12 sind glaub ich so die Extrema. "Wir" fachsimpeln über Themen aus dem weiteren Umfeld von Bitcoin. ""Wir"" und nicht "Wir", weil ich selbst grad in Chile weile, aber Deine Frage kann ich ja trotzdem mal beantworten

Soweit ich weiß, sind die alle schon vor paar Jahren umgefallen. Laut Nachrichten gab's keine Verletzten, aber ich hab die zerschrammte Hand ja auch nicht gemeldet, die ich mir beim Flüchten geholt hab

I love the idea and my router, that promotes pirate party now in its name would definitely be configured to run this for a ridiculous low bitcoin fee as I see this far more as promotion than as a way to make money at this point.

Only problem is, getting this up and running involves flashing my router? I mean it means messing around with my connection to the world? Carefully reading through books of how-tos before so I don't break anything?

You get the idea: I'm not an IT illiterate person but out of all bitcoiners, only a small fraction would take the hassle of messing with their routers, so providing a click and play solution - if possible - would be one way to go and another - also mentioned above - would be the router with preinstalled bitcoin welcome page, for sale for bitcoin of course

Damn! We are screwed.

Hi Anu,

danke für Deine differenzierte Einschätzung

Liebe Grüße aus dem eben von einem 6.7-er Erdbeben geschüttelten Chile,

Leo

Bin in Chile. Nicht der nächste Weg, vorbei zu schaun, aber ich lese (gelegentlich) gespannt, was bei Bitcoin und bei Euch so abgeht Hier hab ich noch keine Coiner gefunden und auch nicht so richtig Zeit, zu suchen

@Anu: Wie war's in Nigeria?

@Shamrock: Wie geht's der BFL-Kiste? Wieviele TH/s macht die so?