I this an actual gift card you send to an address or a virtual gift card where you send the card to an email?

Mt Gox did everything right and professional.  If you want to see un-professionalism look at the Fed and the U.S. federal government - what a mess.  Board seems full of plants.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/casper-rw-creator-make-a-persistent-file-from-windows/

Don't know if this is of use but you can easily create a casper partition/file on a usb drive.

I think the transaction fees should have a difficulty to keep the block growth at a goal of 1 mb/day or 5 mb/day.  The island of yap had large stone money, the fed had gold bars, even the lydian lion were too valuable to be used.  But, I think in the future the transaction fee might rise to 0.1 or 1 or even 10.  Now you say that would make bitcoin useless.

You could join a mining pool such as deepbit.  Then directly deposit those coins on an exchange with the receive address they give you.  Buy goods, all without ever installing the bitcoin client.  The large transactions will be part of the network, however the smaller transactions will be done through wallets, exchanges, and mining pools.

This could actually strengthen the network.  In a year no one will have the client installed anyway due to block growth.  However, high transaction fees will allow everyone to install the block.  At the end of the year December 31st, the blocks can be cleaned out and verified before the baby new year and the new fresh block such as block000002012, leaving a little bit of zeros to plan for the future.

So say in 2017 and BTC is worth $5000 per coin and you have 100 of them and the transaction fee is 1.  Now to protect your coins you might leave a computer on 24-7 to protect the network, before selling out to a bigger fish and using exchanges or wallets for your small time $500,000.

The new york stock exchange had a rollback a couple years ago.   If you think it is fair that you were able to buy BTC for $1 and be allowed to keep them I think you are silly. 

Basically this is what I want python, all the various libraries including opencl, pocblm, pocblm with phatk all in a directory.  Thus to use it, all you do is install one of about 10 linux distros to a harddrive or usb, install catalyst, and just run the poclbm from the directory from a usb drive.  Nothing to download or compile.  Maybe a little bash script, with a little zenity or xdialog.  Or a more complete program with freebasic or possibly make guiminer work using wine.  A light version might assume basic python is installed.  No offense linux and windows basically operate the same way.

If you know of a live linux with preinstalled catalyst, then you could run this from a usb drive. linuxcoin is great, but does not detect all hardware and it would be nice to get linux on a usb for fun.

I could not get linuxcoin to detect my Z68 gigabyte network card or a wireless usb adapter that was suppose to work with linux, thus the kernel must be older.  Also my Biostar Viotech 3100+ Via C7-d Cpu 1.6ghz Ddr2 Av Comb  Could not load the 64 bit os.  Maybe 32 bit. 

1. transaction fee with a difficulty such that block growth is set at maximum 1 mb per day.
2. auto clean function on January 1st, of each year to compress blocks such that the only info kept is the owner of each BTC.  block0002011.dat, now is retired for block0002012.dat.  Stop transactions December 31st to completely verify new block.
3. my as well add namecoin to it with possible 1mb/webspace.  Allow you to keep webspace forever, if you pay a deflation fee to the network.
4. put BTC growth on steroids such that most BTC will be out in 4 years.  Halve every year instead of 4.
5. change to a cpu as oppose to a gpu based problem.

This is not a troll topic.  How this would work say you have 207.25 BTC today.  A date is announced say January 1st, 2012 transactions are going to be 1.  So you move 7.25 to an exchange/wallet service online.  A merchant accepts small bitcoin payments from several of the large wallets.  Thus, you still pay pay .1 btc for a flash drive.  However, it is a centralized exchange transaction.  It never shows up in the BTC transactions.  As time goes on you deplete your money at the exchange and refill to say 50 BTC.  The storeowner after getting 100 BTC on his wallet, makes a transfer back into real BTC and ultimately on a USB drive.  The point is we cut 99% of the transactions off the block.  Thus the block will grow slow and not need to be scaled.

Have you looked at the scaling predictions 1 tb a month hard disk space and even worse, massive bandwidth.  To do this will force bitcoin to be centralized anyway.  To keep bitcoin decentralized the only option is to increase transaction fees.  However, the benefits are massive lightning fast millisecond transactions and an easy to download block.

How do you convince the network, as the disk space increases from 5 mb/day as it is now, to 100 mb/day in one year.  There will only be 1 dozen nodes to the network anyway.

This decision will either be made now or in 1 year.  The only difference in waiting is the the size of the old blocks you have to download.   

The transaction fees should be raised to 1 or 10.   The reason for this should be clear if you go back to the Gavin Andresen video where he showed the stone money.  What will happen you will be forced to use a wallet.  A small wallet will operate just like bitcoin, in a centralized fashion your money on an exchange or on a bitcoin mining pool is a wallet.  Thus, your wallet will be fast.  However, the real money the "gold" is stored in the bitcoin chain.

Now you say it would make BTC worthless.  Think about how the gold was stored in the federal reserve large bars worth about 2 years income.  When the 1st coin was made, the lydian lion, its value was set at about 1 months salary.

What are the benefits?  The block chain will be extremely fast to download, less than 1 mb a day. It will also use far less bandwidth.  The usability will be fast you can use an exchange like mtgox, for instantaneous transactions.

However, I think the goal should be to set the transaction fee, to keep the block size growth less than 1 mb a day.  I would estimate that to be 0.1 today and possibly 1 at the end of the year.

Your small wallet could also be decentralized, possibly.

The transaction fees should be raised to 1.   The reason for this should be clear if you go back to the Gavin Andresen video when he showed the stone money.  What will happen is for small change to use a vending machine, you will be forced to use a wallet.  A small wallet will operate just like bitcoin, in a centralized fashion your money on an exchange or on a bitcoin mining pool is a wallet.  Thus, your wallet will be fast.  However, the real money the "gold" is stored in the bitcoin block.

Wouldn't buying a usb stock and putting a linux on it, and running it do the same thing.  Save yourself a hard drive purchase.

Interesting but don't want to put php on this computer. Code looks well formed.

I wonder what you get with:

11.4
11.3
11.2
11.1
11.0
10.X

Yes but it is an order of magnitude more safe.  If you download the wrong javascript app or addon they might be able to get your wallet now. 

RULE: if YOU can access it, then THEY can access it. Unless it is on a usb drive.

I use to belong to a linux group and we held our meetings at a Dennys.  They have backrooms and if you buy food they let you in.  I would not go to someones house.

"Users have reported two separate spam runs, one promoting a more efficient bitcoin mining tool and one claiming they broke the forum rules.

According to security researchers from F-Secure who analyzed the piece of malware, the trojan searches for wallet.dat files and sends them to a hotmail address via a Polish SMTP server."  from softpedia.

Anyone know what tool that was?

Bitcoin Security Guide (gpl)

This guide is to show you how to maintain a safe wallet with no more than a $3 usb stick or other media device.  But do so at your own risk. When choosing a device I think you should choose one that you don't use in a camera or any other device so you don't mistakenly overwrite it.

Any hacker can easily find the path to your wallet.dat file.  Click on your user directory where you can find folders for Documents, Pictures, Music, and other files that belong to you.  Click on tools at the top then folder options and finally View.  Click on show hidden files and folders.  There are a couple of different ways to view hidden files and folders and it is generally a good idea to leave it on.

To find wallet.dat go to the user folder and click AppData which is a hidden folder.  Then click Roaming folder and then the Bitcoin folder.  In this folder is wallet.dat an readable text file that is your wallet on bitcoin.

Do not delete this wallet.  But you can move it to your desktop, if you do, when you run the bitcoin client, a new wallet.dat will be created.  If you buy some more coins with the new wallet you have a problem you now have 2 wallets with coins in them and I don't think you can combine them.  However, you could take the address in the 1st wallet save it.  And with the second wallet.dat send all the new coins to it. The balance on the 2nd wallet would be zero, wait for a few confirmations.  Then when you put the old wallet back in the appropriate spot, it the new transaction should show up.  you just combined wallets and the 2nd wallet can be deleted.

It should be noted the wallet.dat in the fixed location is an extremely easy item to steal with one line of code, if a sinister program is ever put on your desktop.  Thus, even a weakly encrypted wallet will provide and order of magnitude of protection to your wallet.

So you have a wallet.dat on your desktop.  It still is very unsafe and new scanners will probably search your whole drive for wallet.dat.  You can zip it and name it something weird, that actually will provide another layer of protection and you can even zip a file with a password.

However, probably the best protection you can provide, is to put your wallet.dat on two usb drive.  Doing so is uncrackable.  If you choose to maintain an encrypted file on your desktop or gmail it to yourself you are always open to a hacker that can get this file and un-crack it.

On the usb drive you might name a top level directory pictures just to trick not only theives, but friends and family.  Then I would make another directory for each wallet.dat.  I would call this directory awallet40, where awallet might be the first wallet and the second wallet might be bwallet, the third cwallet.  The number might contain the approximate number of bitcoins in it.  If you like to reuse wallets.  You might put another directory in say cwallet55 called 20110625.  This would should the day you put this wallet in your directory.  In this directory you would put wallet.dat, I would prefer unencrypted.

This may seem a little redundant and you could just throw wallet.dat on a usb drive and be fine.  but, you have to be extremely careful you don't accidentally overwrite a wallet.dat and that you know what, where and when the wallet comes from.

As you collect more coins you might want to put coins on other usb drives and you might want to use usb drives in different shapes and manufacturers to visually tell them apart.

Hard drives and usb sticks can fail but generally last more than 5 years.  Thus if you have one copy.  Odds are that one will fail pretty often to someone creating a nice long-term deflation in BTC.  Don't be that guy or gal, maintain backups, but not so many to confuse you.

You can also spread you coins around on different exchanges and mail boxes you at least have some coins around for emergencies.  You never know those BTC on AOL might get you out of trouble on a vacation in South America.

1. The best place to store BTC wallet.dat is on an unencrypted usb stick, sd, or cf device. 
2. If they are at mtgox, I would call the fbi and mtgox the part that deals with mail fraud.   At mtgox, they most likely will transfer it to someplace where they can get cash.  Those places can be tracked easily.
3. Don't install any software.

There are two types of rats that work for government, the government itself and the recipients of government welfare.  If you are not in the loop you are paying for the governments tyranny.  A typical kid might spend a day working on a painting a house at the end of the day he or she might receive $200.  Should that person get to keep that money and use it at later date, or should he waste to to keep all the employees at the fed, post office, banks, lawyers, congresspersons, medicare fraud all with full wallets.  While the poor soul that actually worked, the painter has to struggle to save and plan in a corrupt system.

"That enable the most optimal trade".  How is taking from the corporations that work and giving it to those that don't work good for trade.  We should be eliminating all corporate taxes, and taxing school teachers and firefighters.   Intel, AMD build chips.  Catepillar builds tractors. Samsung builds printers.  GE builds phones.  McDonalds provides a meal for $1.   Governments don't enable trade they ruin trade by forcing minimum wage laws, regulations, taxes on the wonderful corporations and the people that work for them that provide the goods and services people actually use.  So you say the medicare program is a great program for the people, if it is so great why not give seniors the public option to opt out and get the $10,000 a year in cash as oppose to the great ripoff medicare?

"Leave the country and take you bitcoin with you."  How about this deal everything west of the mississippi uses gold and bitcoin and everything east of the Mississippi uses dollars.  In 20 years the bitcoin side would be sending food relief shipments to New York.

"Civilized Societies" killing 100,000 in Iraq so the military can justify their military budget is civilized?  The word "civilized" should be changed to neocons and liberals.  You are the men of "the new world" order.  You are the men that don't work and con the poor and middle class out of the money so the jerks that of Bernanke, Clinton, Gore, Geithner, Bush, Reich, Kennedy, et al et al et al. can live like kings while the serfs can continue to feed them.  

In summary you lose caveman, get to work. You can still elect officials in a bitcoin society.

1JFZkRqGaASJoXoVC3mhtf6kgwX5QcL7F7 if you like post and want more.