.02 BTC received! Thanks!

Watch out for that first step. It's a duzy!

+1

Corporations spend huge amounts on advertising and PR for good reason.

Send it to the US government, with a big red stamp that says 'TOP SECRET'.

Any existing players of MineThings on this forum?

pretty cool:

I guess this "Add To Search Bar" plugin takes the actual url of the form action and adds that as an url in the search bar. It doesn't show me the url though - it's embedded in the search bar.

Here's the home page for the add-on
https://firefox.maltekraus.de/extensions/add-to-search-bar

I just see a form field and right click on it to turn it into a search bar item.

Donated to the cause. Good work

Firstbits: 187G (Helps if you received coins before 0.3.18 with the 100 default addresses)

Can we tell if all 3 char combos are taken, how may 4 combos left, etc?

I was going to say - what this really needs is a Firefox Search plugin that makes it so the web site doesn't need to be there, or get hammered, it just goes to the block chain.

But then I remembered my "Add To Search Bar" add-on and tried that. Sure enough one -right-click and FirstBits is now a search entry on the Firefox Search Bar. I can drop an address in there and it does the magic.
 

But another thing, does the lookup in "block explorer" search in oldest first order or most recent first order. Because if the latter it seems someone could gen a new address that matches your address prefix and use it to get it in the chain. If it searches and finds the match more recent it would find that one as the single match. But you thought of that I'm sure...

If you find the first partial version of an unused address and add two more correct characters would you be reasonably safe to use that for a new address? It seems to me quite safe. Not sure of the probability though.

I agree.


I disagree. The 34-some string requires a checksum because it is so darn long. A 1+4 or 5 character (of size 34 domain) does not need a checksum (like a phone number). I expect we'll have a MIME type so that firstbits.com/1xxxx resolves a very well defined string (perhaps a meta tag). I've seen discussion of a bitcoin:123456789012345678901234567890+payment format. But the key advantage of firstbits is not verbosity, but brevity.

As for UX, if the user comes in through a URL, I see no reason to present much more than the fully resolved address. But if the user uses the form/input, then more likely than not, he's playing with his own address. I'd highly recommend you explain what the user is seeing. It has not tiny-url-ed the address (as many like me initially assumed). Even now that I know how it works, I'm still manually typing in 1+8 characters and cutting one then another until I find the minimum. Its a trivial, but strange, procedure (partly because the client doesn't yet let me 'copy-paste' from the transaction history).

I would expect the interface to dynamically inform me of the number of collisions (always showing me the 'firstbit') as I type, cuz I'm probably typing with the full string at my side, otherwise, I would have used a link.

I agree and even said the exact same thing in a previous post.  How do you get people to see the light though?  That's the difficulty.  Too many people are think BTC's will be worth $100 or more per coin someday despite having no logical explanation as to how that will happen under current conditions.