What is someone going to do with all these firstbit addresses?

[CIYAM]

After playing around with vanitygen and spending a while looking for "available" vanity addresses by searching blockchain.info I discovered that already a very large number of plain english words have single tx's with a 0.00000001 BTC balance.

To get a good idea of what I'm referring to take a look at the following tx:

http://blockchain.info/tx-index/1009186/4e7b84a7ee19b7ea9f2d69fcb2734fb096cb012b413f8897b4f42871b225faba

So it seems to me that someone went rather gung ho with vanitygen to try and own all the simple "firstbit" addresses they can possibly get. But what really can you do with them?

(maybe I can expect to see small amounts appearing in my wallet from these addresses after this post)

Code:

1WhoaKiRPrZWRWxjCcs4J2NTnyM9nezTq
1LikEsho5kfz1Ex9pw4keH9DYQ6S9gAWNH
1siLLyaisPRd8BsKsxmikSMkuw3KpxDh6
1PoStsmYCvbqsFJxdKC1h8gyhBEJLvAcN8
1LiKEc4Zx9AKcxT6xnYjtXzexweSwEYwpL
1TheSen7LCVi7dWW3hFN14SG2zn3MNdbM 

[proudhon]

If bitcoin ever gets big enough I imagine they could be sold, but there'd need to be some sort of 3rd party verifying that private key transfers were legitimate and that the seller hadn't retained, transferred, or sold any other copies of the private key; and they could arbitrate disputes or hold sellers accountable for selling keys to which they still retained access.

That was dumb.  Nevermind.  I'm going to bed.

[bitclown]

The addresses was generated before Firstbits was announced. The whole thing was obviously created to harvest misspent transactions. Luckily no one relies on Firstbits, it's a bad idea: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=74917.msg830230#msg830230

Not sure why sites like Blockchain.info displays Firstbits representation of addresses so prominently...

[kangasbros]

The addresses was generated before Firstbits was announced. The whole thing was obviously created to harvest misspent transactions. Luckily no one relies on Firstbits, it's a bad idea: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=74917.msg830230#msg830230

Not sure why sites like Blockchain.info displays Firstbits representation of addresses so prominently...

The argument against firstbits is "it encourages block chain spam". But that is like saying that people are not going to throw trash around parks, because trashing the environment is bad. People are actually using firstbits, and will continue to do so, because using firstbits makes their own lifes easier. They don't care about the block chain. Tragedy of the commons.

[niko]

The addresses was generated before Firstbits was announced. The whole thing was obviously created to harvest misspent transactions. Luckily no one relies on Firstbits, it's a bad idea: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=74917.msg830230#msg830230

Not sure why sites like Blockchain.info displays Firstbits representation of addresses so prominently...

The argument against firstbits is "it encourages block chain spam". But that is like saying that people are not going to throw trash around parks, because trashing the environment is bad. People are actually using firstbits, and will continue to do so, because using firstbits makes their own lifes easier. They don't care about the block chain. Tragedy of the commons.

Most of people don't throw trash around parks. Last time I looked there was much more trash in the trash cans than scattered around the park. The argument against firstbits is rather sensible.