IF I ever have enough bitcoins to be worried about them, I will put my "savings account" wallet on a CD-R (or two) and put it in a safety deposit box (or two).

The neat thing is, you can still send bitcoins to the savings account while it is sitting in that metal box, and they will show up on your client when you get the CD-R out and use the wallet with bitcoin "2020 edition".

What's cool about having your savings account on a CD-R in a safety deposit box at the bank is that you can STILL send bitcoins to that wallet!

When you go to the bank and get your CD-R and set the wallet up again, all your bitcoins that you sent to that wallet will magically appear.

If I ever have lots of bitcoins, that's what I'll do

Coinpal/coincard shut down. mtgox under ddos. Now morpheus is shut down too?!

All this uncertainty is why I am now experimenting with selling bitcoins on ebay:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7072.0

Dang. Coinpal and Coincard are shut down, and now MtGox get's DDOS'd!

Because of uncertainties like this, I'm experimenting with selling bitcoins in a much more traditional way (on Ebay). See this thread for details:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7072.0

While coincard is down, I'm experimenting with selling bitcoins on ebay. See the thread about it here:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7072

If you are sad you can't buy bitcoins with your paypal account, you can always bid on my ebay auction. See the thread about it here: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7072

I'm Xenophobic

It's all about shipping costs. They are lower if I keep it to the US.

Really, there's nothing stopping any of you from doing the same thing, so if you want to sell internationally, please do!

I canceled this auction for reasons described in the thread

This service is fantastic. I probably won't use it myself, but I sent a $1 USD donation (0.39BTC) to the donation address at the bottom of the page, just for being awesome.

I miss dollar parity at times like this - then I didn't have to do any math to know how much I'm sending someone. But of course I don't miss dollar parity TOO much

Gavin - please be sure to emphasize the transparency of bitcoin - every transaction being logged publicly makes it slightly less attractive to the drug-smuggling terrorist child pornographers. A careful analysis of the network would yield a lot of information about who is paying who how much, even if it doesn't tell you their name and address. One easy thing they could do is to pay money to some illegal service, and watch where the money goes.

I really want to try out sendmany, but I'm a little nervous about being the unlucky person to find the corner-case bug that sends all your bitcoins to satan. Maybe I'll try it on another PC first.

Nobody jumped up to argue this point, so I guess I will volunteer. It's time to out myself:

I am absurdly, offensively conservative. Take all the most hated stereotypes of conservatives, then exaggerate them, and that is me. I'm the guy who will talk your ear off about Jesus, vote against abortion, gay marriage, gambling, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, adult businesses, etc and generally try to ruin people's fun any way I can. I take my family to church every Sunday, and I teach my kids about heaven and hell. I like my food with a side of hormones, pesticides, and genetic engineering, and I like it as cheap as possible. (I'm not interested in arguing about any of these things - I'm just trying to establish my credentials)

If a Jesus-freak like me can love bitcoins, then being conservative is no barrier.

I recognize that bitcoins can enable many forms of evil, but then, so can cash. Bitcoins are unbelievably useful, and like the internet, there will be both very good and very evil things that come out of that utility. I predict that in addition to laundering money and buying drugs, bitcoins will be used for some things that both libertarians and liberals will absolutely abhor (what if some evil jerk conservative puts a bounty on getting an abortion clinic shut down?). There are many things that I abhor (like child pornography and human trafficking) that will obviously use bitcoins too, but law enforcement will just have to adapt, because bitcoins (or something like them) are the inevitable future IMHO.

I've been considering doing something similar with coinpal. Basically make a website that only accepts bitcoins, and tell them to enter my bitcoin address in coinpal if they want to pay with PayPal. Haven't tried it yet, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Words cannot express how much I love coincard/coinpal. I think you should charge whatever fees the market will bear. Your only risk is that you will attract competitors if your fees get high enough.

I'd still love to be able to send you coins along with a sell price I want, then get paid when the price after your fee hits my target. Yeah, it's more complex, but if you hold more (of other people's) bitcoins and lots of PayPal cash, you can clear more orders without hitting MtGox at all, and avoid paying the transaction fee there. You also avoid the risk of bitcoin price fluctuations since the bitcoins you hold wouldn't be your own.

You are getting big enough that it doesn't make as much sense to clear everything through MtGox. You're just giving money away every time you do that. If you match buyers with sellers directly, you get to pocket all of the spread as well as the MtGox transaction fee, as well as your own fees.

I would love to see a separate coinpal/coincard bid/ask spread and order book. Anyone placing an order could choose between a "right now" price, or setting their own price and waiting for it to clear.

You know you want to.

That is absolutely perfect. I updated my forum post and the wiki to reflect this method. I even put your blockexplorer.com donation address at the bottom  

Since theymos made changes to support what I want to do, I paid the 20BTC bounty using the donation address for blockexplorer.com

Theymos, please support laziness by adding a link to the API description from the blockexplorer.com home page. Thanks!

Nice! That will be much easier. I updated my post above as well.

I found the complete API description here: http://blockexplorer.com/q/

It would be nice if the front page of blockexplorer.com linked to that page.

I solved my problem, and I am hereby paying the bounty to myself the bounty has been paid to blockexplorer.com!

Problem:
Lazy web designer (me) wants to use bitcoins without dealing with installing bitcoin on a server, installing a shopping cart interface, or using ugly merchant services with callbacks.

Solution for sending bitcoins:
Use the MtGox API (https://mtgox.com/support/tradeAPI)

Solution for receiving bitcoins:
1) Input a list of bitcoin receiving addresses to your database
2) Give a bitcoin address to a potential customer
3) Have the customer tell you when they have sent the coins and have at least 1 confirmation (you can choose a number higher than 1 if you are worried about double-spending)
4) Check blockexplorer to see if they sent the right amount (i.e. http://blockexplorer.com/q/getreceivedbyaddress/19hMEAaRMbEhfSkeU4GT8mgSuyR4t4M6TH/1) - the /1 is the number of confirmations you require
5) Give them what they paid for
6) After a reasonable amount of time has passed, you can re-use the address for another customer

You could avoid having a list of addresses and reusing them if one of the wallet services someday lets you get a new address via API call, but this will work for now.

Bad idea:
Selling bars of gold this way (owner of blockexplorer.com could rip you off)

Good(?) idea:
Selling naked pictures of your grandma this way (owner of blockexplorer.com won't bother)

Shameless begging:
If this info is useful to you, please consider a donation: 19hMEAaRMbEhfSkeU4GT8mgSuyR4t4M6TH

Maybe I'm the only one this lazy, but just in case, I added a page to the wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Lazy_API

Thanks to theymos for making changes to blockexplorer.com to make it even easier to do this. Because of those changes to better support what I want to do, I paid Theymos the 20BTC bounty. You can support blockexplorer.com too by donating to 1Cvvr8AsCfbbVQ2xoWiFD1Gb2VRbGsEf28

Being able to quickly and easily buy bitcoins is essential to their success, but the seller in such an enterprise is a HUGE fraud magnet.

Here's some other ideas:
 - Transfer the coins in installments, i.e. 10% of your order per hour
 - Bigger fees for first-time buyers
 - Add donation addresses to your forum post signatures and web pages so we can help support this essential service
 - Consider everyone a scammer until proven otherwise!

On Jan 7th, after some prodding by email, mndrix gave me this donation address, which I assume is still valid: 15VmbbyvpZQk7P4Vs7EvzYrGbtKTnW1f27

Obviously don't send anything there until he confirms it.

Ugh. That stinks. How bad was it?

Remember my idea about using a physical letter to a physical address? All you need is to hook into a service like L-Mail and send the buyer a verification code to their mailing address, and you can have strong proof that the account isn't stolen.

I also think you should automate your SMS verification so you can run that before a new buyer places their first order.

I added this bounty to the list of active bounties: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Active_Bounties