This is pretty safe, although for large bitcoin accounts I'd still be wary of using your day-to-day, internet-connected computer. The original post is going to be a big breakthrough in managing wallets. Everybody with a sizable account is going to have one of these devices.

The next question is how to keep your secret. Ultimately you need to have a pass phrase or little USB drives that have to be read in tandem, or some combination of those. The problem with a pass phrase is you can forget it, or something can happen to you, and your coins are lost forever. The problem with USB keys is you can lose them, something could happen to them, they can be stolen, or you could have to skip town suddenly. Having both is probably a good tradeoff.

I think to make this happen, a couple of extensions have to be written for the standard bitcoin client:

1. Export an unsigned send transaction.
2. Import a signed transaction and send it out to the network.

If you have those two, the arduino device can easily generate Bitcoin keypairs and sign transactions offline. Note that you don't need a keyboard if you go with the USB drive keys. The main computer would never get anywhere near the private keys. This is about as safe as you're going to get. I intend on doing a patch, but I've got some other stuff to do first. I hope someone beats me to it.

Yeah, SgtSpike's reply was great, good points all around. I'm a true believer now

Another suggestion: I realize you want to keep it pure, but how about adding an extra character as a checksum? It's very easy for the payer to mess the address slightly by writing it down wrong or hearing something wrong. A one character checksum would drastically reduce the chances of sending money to the wrong account.

+1

This is critical and not getting enough attention. There are some really hard problems to solve, most of which aren't even technical. Hopefully we'd be able to get some good sticky, best-practice threads up after a while.

Guys, now that we've got you all in one thread, can you explain what the appeal is in being a troll?

Great! It's 1:30am here, I'm going to play with this tomorrow, maybe I can work on those issues.

That sounds awesome! We're all doing this to promote Bitcoin, not to make money. Why not just make it open source, so we can all work on it together and nobody will claim it as their own and make money off it? Also, although I put up the github repo last night, all the code was basically written by Brian.

I'm happy to merge it into the existing github repo if you're interested.

Hi gc40,

I'm working on this with Brian. We're both doing this as a side project so we can't work on it 24/7. I think the best way to do this is for us all to work on it together. Here's the project github page:

https://github.com/joshmh/magento_bitcoin

I'll be glad to help your devs get this working. Then we can get them onboard.

Very nice site!

Hey Guys,

Let's discuss here what kind of features we're looking for in Magento. I just got it running locally and I've been fooling around with tweaking it and reading up on the dev docs.

Here are the features I'd like:

- Add Bitcoin as a currency
- A tool to adjust prices based on MtGox exchange rates would be cool
- Remove billing address stage in checkout -- isn't that the whole point of bitcoin?
- Bitcoin payment module that connects to bitcoind
-- Generate a unique bitcoin address per order
-- Optionally require 0 or more confirmations before accepting the order
-- Display confirmations on the admin order page

I've never used Magento before, so I'm still learning the feature set. Are there features I missed? Which are highest priority?

We all have our own little Bitcoin stash that feels like a present from the gods, and we don't want to give those precious bitcoins away. Hoarding is fine, early adopters deserve the reward, but you can have it both ways. Hoard and Spend people! The Bitcoin needs to move!

Here's how you do it:

Buy bitcoins to hoard until you don't feel comfortable investing any more money on the investment. At this point, any additional bitcoin purchases exceed your risk profile. Now buy a few more. These bitcoins aren't for investment, they're for spending. You wouldn't have bought them if they weren't for spending so you don't have to feel bad about spending them. Did the bitcoin price just shoot up since you bought them so that you now what to keep them as an investment? Great, buy more for spending.

Spend the spending bitcoins as soon as possible. Seek out bitcoin businesses and services and use them. Buy more bitcoins and spend them. This is important guys, every additional bitcoin transaction makes the current price less speculative and more grounded.

The way to do it is to pay in BTC, and at the same time cover the amount by buying more BTC  Seriously, every single additional BTC transaction is huge for Bitcoin.

I'm also interested in Magento integration and might start working on it myself, so it would be great to see what people have done so far.

This is awesome, I didn't realize there was an easy to use program for that.

For OS X users:


Ubuntu / Debian

Could work. The sensitive part is the switch from BTC to uBTC in the client. Might want a warning popup when you send money that you're sending BTC and not uBTC, at least in the first version.

That is a good point. Changing the core code is really scary. It could also lead to really bad coding mistakes down the road.

That's not confusing? I like the analogy to a stock split. Imagine if they changed the IBM ticker when they did a stock split.

July 1st

The LiveCD laptop is still more secure against keylogging malware. I feel like entering your password on an everyday, internet connected machine is scary. It would be cool if you could plug a keyboard straight into the ironkey.

Yes, with the Dead Man's Switch You can program in several layers of transfer. After 30 days, the money could go to your close family. After a year, it could go to some website you sign up for that will specialize in determining your identity in more conventional ways and give the money back to you or your next of kin. Or you could make it go to some favorite charity. You could also have it go to a miner, but I'm not sure what the point is. I guess if a lot of people did this it would bring bitcoin transaction fees down.

One last thing to remember is that when the money finally disappears, it makes every other bitcoin user a bit richer, exactly the opposite of inflation. So in a sense, even then it's not completely lost to the world.