Topic: CASASCIUS PHYSICAL BITCOIN - In Stock Now! (pic) - page 50. (Read 130386 times)

sipa is aware of it, I have made such a patch you can download now that imports these (git://github.com/casascius/bitcoin.git), but based on the discussion, it is more likely that a redeemer for this round of coins will be in the form of a utility or a web redeemer, as the developers (for good reason) would prefer that if the bitcoin client is going to accept 22-character codes, that it use a much stronger key derivation function than a sha256 hash.  If a more preferred 22-character code gets accepted into the main client, I will certainly begin to release in that format instead.

1.) go to bitcoin-accepting shop, choose product to buy
2.) place cascasius on counter saying "you accept bitcoin?"

joke aside: you're of course right, it's too hard. but for a 50 year old, even using a bitcoin client safely is hard. A lot of people are pressuring gavin to pull the privkey import/export feature. it doesn't do short keys, thought. maybe someonne should talk to sipa about including this or maybe make a patch on top of sipa's "showwallet"? I'm not sure...

Sorry, not sure how I missed your question before.  PM's typically work well.  You had asked about shipping to the UK.  I ship them right away via USPS Priority Mail - haven't been doing this long enough to know how long they actually take to arrive.  From what I am hearing, they leave the US quickly, but end up becoming regular mail afterwards.  Can anyone else speak to how long these take to arrive?

Casascius, I sent you a couple of PMs but I'm not sure you got them. You got an alternate contact method?

Thanks for quick response will try after some sleep.

Yeah, my order taker website will be down till tomorrow morning.  Cause I am hosting it at home, and my main internet connection via Comcast is down.  Guess I should put the site somewhere better.  Try me in six to eight hours.

EDIT: back up now.

My friend came for a visit and seen the coins I just got and wanted some so I traded him and wanted to get some for myself again.

Same, was just about to place another order, lol.

http://www.isup.me/casascius.com

THE WEBSITE IS DOWN

I went to order more coins and site is down.

I have never been a fan of pawn shops, but compared to the modern banksters even the neighborhood fence seems like a philanthropist. Pawn shops are the American Express of poor people, that's where they borrow money. It seems like the marriage of the shiny new technology debutante and the black sheep rebel might work well together. Come to think of it, I know a guy who knows a guy...

I have always thought that pawn shops would do well in the Bitcoin community.

If pawn shops had a secure way to sell BTC without having to personally hold BTC and be exposed to the exchange rate, they probably would sell a ton, both to those wanting to acquire them for gambling / making deposits on anonymous and non-anonymous marketplace websites / as an alternative to paying Western Union for foreign remittances... all of these are the kind of people you'd expect to do business in a pawn shop.

Imagine... they have a bunch of pre-sealed packets with a Bitcoin address on the outside and the private key on the inside.  If they had MtGoxUSD (or any other exchange's USD), and a cash customer wanted BTC, they could instantly buy it, withdraw it to the address on the packet outside, charge customer a marked-up rate, and hand the packet to the customer.

Customer tears the packet open, and redeems the private key on the anonymous or non-anonymous marketplace of his choice, or gives it to his family in Mexico.

Bitcoin would be an instant success story among a new community of people who need know nothing about cryptocurrency.

This thought is why I feel so strongly that these websites (MtGox etc.) need to be able to offer paper private key redemption.  And if bitcoind had an RPC command that took a private key and, rather than touching the wallet, simply created a tx to flush the whole balance to another bitcoin address (where it could be treated the same as a deposit), then the exchanges and these websites wouldn't have difficulty providing this feature.  Every bitcoin bearer object would essentially be a "gift card" to any site that accepts bitcoin.

Next door to a coffee shop that I frequent is a pawn shop so I stopped by today.  I mentioned that the sign out front says "we buy anything of value" and put my Casascius bitcoin on the counter and asked what he would offer for it.  He pulled out his magnifying thingy he uses to inspect it so I warned him that the metal was brass so that wasn't what to look for to determine its value.  

I took a minute or two to briefly explain bitcoin and he told me to hold on and took the coin into his back room.

About four minutes later he came back out and was actually interested in buying it off of me (though used the typical coin dealer approach ... hmm, it is of a poor grade -- scratched and worn down  -- heh).

Apparently, these are also being sold on ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=170698650858#ht_500wt_128
so that gave the broker a point of reference for making an offer.  I was surprised as I was expecting a less encouraging response.

Though I just got mine and have only shown a few people I see it as an excellent conversation piece.

I DID IT!  It was not easy but it is possible.  Hopefully there will be a more user friendly way to do this soon.  Ideally we can eventually add a way to import mini private keys directly into the wallet through the Windows GUI on the standard Bitcoin client.  For now I would settle for bribing the author(s) of pywallet into adding the mini private key format to pywallet.  Not having that, this is how I did it:

• Bought 11 physical coins from https://www.casascius.com/
• For the heck of it I transferred 2 more Bitcoins on to one of the coins and verified it got there: http://blockexplorer.com/address/12hZaDWWdRHfp6DLzyudiDGBQ4bxxLaLWf
• Installed pywallet from: https://github.com/downloads/jackjack-jj/pywallet/PWI_0.0.3.exe
• Before trying to decode my mini private key I used the private key published at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mini_private_key_format in order to test the decode process.  The mini private key I used was: S4b3N3oGqDqR5jNuxEvDwf
• I then made a file named “short” containing exactly these 22 characters.  This is not as easy as it sounds because most editors add CR/LF and EOF characters to a file.  I used hexedit to make a file of exactly these characters.
• Then I used openssl like so:   bash-4.1# openssl dgst -sha256 < short
• I got the following result and verified it with the result on the wiki page: 0c28fca386c7a227600b2fe50b7cae11ec86d3bf1fbe471be89827e19d72aa1d
• Then I killed my precious unicorn (peeled off the sticker) and read the private key from the sticker.
• I then made a file named “mine” containing exactly these 22 characters.
• Then I used openssl like so:   bash-4.1# openssl dgst -sha256 < mine
• I used pywallet to import the key in to my wallet.dat.  When it imported the private key the Bitcoin address matched the address on the coin so I knew I had the correct private key.
• Finally, I fired up the windows Bitcoin client with a –rescan and I got 3 more Bitcoins in my wallet!

It is your OS - not the hardware.  The OS is refusing the program access to the SHA256 hash implementation.  Microsoft apparently puts OS-related checks on cryptography functions so that they only work if the operating system gives permission.  This would be so they can comply with silly old US laws that restrict the export of cryptography.

As soon as I change the program to use the SHA256 hash implementation within the BouncyCastle DLL, this problem will go away, even on your OS.  I thought both would work the same way, but clearly they do not.  The BouncyCastle DLL does not care about the OS's restriction flags or the silly export laws and will do SHA256 without question.

Are you compiling this yourself or did you download the binary?  (I'm guessing binary)

Just tried it on my other laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad) and got the same result.

There really should be nothing special about my system.  It is a standard run of the mill DELL laptop.  I will try the program on another system...

It looks like it is finding the DLL but apparently the .NET Framework is refusing access to the SHA256 function, which I have used.  Which Windows OS are you using?  I am guessing it is one with restricted cryptographic capabilities for US export or something.

I suppose I need to stick with only using the BouncyCastle SHA256 implementation which won't have this problem.

I installed pywallet and that seems to work.  I want to convert the mini private key so I unzipped your program and dll.  However I get an exception when I try to run the program:

System.PlatformNotSupportedException: The specified cryptographic algorithm is not supported on this platform.
   at System.Security.Cryptography.CapiNative.AcquireCsp(String keyContainer, String providerName, ProviderType providerType, CryptAcquireContextFlags flags, Boolean throwPlatformException)
   at System.Security.Cryptography.CapiHashAlgorithm..ctor(String provider, ProviderType providerType, AlgorithmId algorithm)
   at System.Security.Cryptography.SHA256CryptoServiceProvider..ctor()
   at BtcAddress.Bitcoin.PassphraseToPrivHex(String passphrase)
   at BtcAddress.Form1.btnPassphrase_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnClick(EventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnClick(EventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs mevent)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmMouseUp(Message& m, MouseButtons button, Int32 clicks)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ButtonBase.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Button.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)

It looks like it is not finding the dll.  Am I missing something?

He was assuming their market price dropped to $2, hahaha....

Has anyone started making competing coins yet?

Any news on a new bitcoin client including the import/export features? 

As soon as I have time to figure out how to export and address of mine and then re-import it, and I understand how this works, I'll be buying some.  xmas is right around the corner, and I plan to give bitcoins this year, woot!