I think the only thing standing between bitcoind accepting the minikey is just simply that it hasn't been done.  Devs have no objection to the 30-character minikey, just the 22 character one, for having less than 128 bit entropy, but may not consider it a priority unless presented as a polished pull.

I am ultimately looking for laypeople to use bitcoins as gift cards, and redeem them at merchants like gift cards.  These are people who are not going to download bitcoind, wait to download the block chain, manually create a bitcoin.conf file, learn how to use the RPC interface, and import private keys through it.  The fact that they're redeemable at MtGox and BlockChain.info makes them perfectly good today.

Ideally, I want them to be able to buy bitcoins in person like gift cards and redeem them on Silk Road just like redeeming an iTunes gift card (not because I like or condone drugs, but because it's possibly easier to understand the simplicity I'm seeking by picturing people who have fried their own brains successfully managing it without a need or an ability to understand how it works).

Casascius you rock!

wow howd you make that

FYI this works on my iPhone too. Not that we would be printing from that, but just a good tech tool.

Exciting! and very cool.

v1.9
https://www.bitaddress.org/bitaddress.org-v1.9-SHA1-a487b495d710d6f617d688e5f758e40c8b6c510e.html
 - fixed Testnet Edition WIF and Compressed WIF private keys. It now prepends
   the correct byte (0xEF) for testnet when activated.

I can verify that the BitAddress.org website has been updated and returns the same HTML from the commit with the description v1.9 (770d933029b8bbb56539d866db6b8fa37f262102) in github:
 - https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org


To confirm this I first check the sha1sum hash of the html returned by a request to http://bitaddress.org:

$ wget --quiet -O - http://bitaddress.org|sha1sum
a487b495d710d6f617d688e5f758e40c8b6c510e  -

$ GET -eSd bitaddress.org|grep -i "200 OK"
GET https://www.bitaddress.org/bitaddress.org-v1.9-SHA1-a487b495d710d6f617d688e5f758e40c8b6c510e.html --> 200 OK


Then from my bitaddress.org repo:

$ git checkout master
$ git log --pretty=oneline|grep "v1.9"
770d933029b8bbb56539d866db6b8fa37f262102 v1.9 Testnet Edition fixes

$ git checkout 770d933029b8bbb56539d866db6b8fa37f262102
$ git rev-list --max-count=1 HEAD
770d933029b8bbb56539d866db6b8fa37f262102

$ sha1sum bitaddress.org.html
a487b495d710d6f617d688e5f758e40c8b6c510e  bitaddress.org.html


[Update: Had to update the procedure since there had been commits to master since v1.9.]

Absolutely awesome, printed QR codes look great!  Codes in black toner are much more readable on printouts.

PointBiz,

What is next on your list?

Creating offline transactions from just the script hashes/indexes and private keys?
Or some multisig magic?

N1bor

are there people scrutinizing these new releases to ensure there are no changes to the private key generation or presentment that shouldn't be there?