Donate your used addresses to charity

[odolvlobo]

After you have decided to no longer use a particular address, don't discard it. Donate it to charity. If you look at the block chain, you will see thousands of addresses with no bitcoins. I want to collect those addresses in case coins are ever sent to them in the future. The idea is that if an address is discarded, any coins that might be sent to it will be lost forever. If you donate the address, those lost coins will instead be spent on a good cause -- I'm thinking something like Habitat for Humanity.

Email your used private keys to odolvlobo-charity@yahoo.com. I will import them and scan them periodically over the next few years to see if there are any coins to spend. Please don't send me active keys. Please don't send keys that have never been used -- they will be discarded.

F.A.Q.

This is crazy.
Crazy like a fox!

This is stupid. It won't work.
Yeah. Maybe. Do it anyway. Nobody is forcing you.

Scammer!
Whatever.

[Stephen Gornick]

This is crazy.

Not at all.

A wallet cemetery service.

Having bitcoin on many computers and virtual machines, I have many wallets that I've used at one time but don't think I will ever use again.  I'ld simply delete these but I never know if, for some reason, someone at a later time would send another transaction to the same address that is now in a dead, deleted wallet.

A service I think might be useful would be to accept my empty wallet as an upload, which would then import the keys from that wallet and associate them to my account.  If any funds are ever received to those addresses, I get a certain percent, and the cemetary service gets a cut for their efforts.  I would use it even if I only got back just half though I suspect the rate could not be too excessive or competition would emerge (and because I still might have the wallets backed up, the competitor could become even as far as ability to spend any coins that arrive.)

I do know that once the merge capability is in the bitcoin client that this cemetary service will be less necessary, but at the same time, uploading a wallet and entering an email address is going to be the simplest solution -- which often becomes the winning solution.

I'ld love to see someone offer such a service.

and it had earlier been discussed here:

 - http://bitcoinforums.net/threads/wallet-cemetery.143/


So if there were a method to upload a wallet.dat to you (and the encryption passphrase if encrypted) and your automated service pulls keys from there would be something that would be used.

[arsenische]

So if there were a method to upload a wallet.dat to you (and the encryption passphrase if encrypted) and your automated service pulls keys from there would be something that would be used.

Probably it is safer to run some script locally than to upload original wallet.dat. I think it shouldn't be hard to modify fixwallet.py and wallet.py scripts from bitcointools (to add an inverse of "--clean" option).

[Stephen Gornick]

So if there were a method to upload a wallet.dat to you (and the encryption passphrase if encrypted) and your automated service pulls keys from there would be something that would be used.

Probably it is safer to run some script locally than to upload original wallet.dat. I think it shouldn't be hard to modify fixwallet.py and wallet.py scripts from bitcointools (to add an inverse of "--clean" option).

Well, if you are handing over all the addresses in the wallet there isn't much additional information in that wallet.dat.  Maybe labels, that's about it though AFAIK.

[arsenische]

So if there were a method to upload a wallet.dat to you (and the encryption passphrase if encrypted) and your automated service pulls keys from there would be something that would be used.

Probably it is safer to run some script locally than to upload original wallet.dat. I think it shouldn't be hard to modify fixwallet.py and wallet.py scripts from bitcointools (to add an inverse of "--clean" option).

Well, if you are handing over all the addresses in the wallet there isn't much additional information in that wallet.dat.  Maybe labels, that's about it though AFAIK.

Oh.. For some reason I thought that only part of wallet addresses need to be donated (the ones used for change)... But if you can give away the whole wallet - then you are right, it is much simpler just  to upload the wallet.dat file