Bitcoin Forum

The rate of posting is low this month, and there are few real members creation. We don't have enough critical mass for takeoff. I don't know if we're losing momentum, but just to make sure, double the amount of energy into increasing the mass for takeoff. We can't expect others to do their share of the work, we must do it ourselves. Slashdot so far is only our signifigant source of new members blast. We may need a couple more blasts to go to the rest of the J curves but we shouldn't relies on it to make our success. If anything, user blasters will be the product of creating our own "lucks".

Keep showing up on IRC and forums. Keep building web services. Keep writing letters. Most of all, find yourself a niche. Division of labor has made our wonderful civilization like this. Let seize it in our new society.

I know I also need to do my part too, so I shall contribute in some small way. I'll shall begin working on a prediction market no later than this Wednesday.

I think many people loose interest when they see that it is very difficult to generate bitcoins. But buying bitcoins isn't so hard, so getting them is not the problem. I think more in the lines of being able to spend them. Sure, there are some nice ways to spend them, but many things are a bit of a niche currently (relative little people have real use for it). If I have a look in the first few topics in the Marketplace, I see financial related stuff and lotteries/poker related stuff. None of which I would be interested in.

Also, please note that amount of forum sign ups doesn't need to be related to the amount of people using bitcoin.

I think you'll need to express your needs and see if people are willing to offer and try to get started. However, at this point, we have too few users to facilitate much trading since there is a lack of coincidence between what you want and what resources they have.

Two months is too long to realize that generating bitcoin is a waste of time, I believed. It's not a plausible hypothesis.

However, this is September so school is probably a plausible hypothesis pulling bitcoiners from the community a little while.

Another hypothesis is that the community has already say much about bitcoins and that we're running out of stuff to post. That's probably implausible though but I don't know how to determine this.

Just emailed http://www.apmex.com to see if they could start trading bitcoins.

I think the key is to get the big players involved.  Imagine if PayPal started to accept bitcoins.  It's game over for other currencies.

I noticed the same.

I have started accepting bitcoin donations at my blog, and I keep promoting bitcoin at the forums I visit (yesterday for example (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showpost.php?p=2883434&postcount=31)).

But I completely agree that being able to spend bitcoins is the key to success. I have said several times that having business that accept bitcoins is the key to success. Maybe we should do something to target business. Maybe not big business because that would be unrealistic, but local small business. Maybe going to some local business association would be a good idea. Just thinking out loud.

Some things I think bitcoin needs for success:

• Payment processor, well supported, with sandbox, and a shopping cart interface similar to this (http://info.pecunix.com/Pecunix_pri.htm) or this (https://www.libertyreserve.com/en/help/merchants/sci/index.aspx) or this (https://www.globaldigitalpay.com/merchant_api_integration.htm).  mtgox and gazoakley (bitcoinpay.com) both have some merchant tools, but they need to be "fleshed out."
• More businesses accepting bitcoins.  (see payment processor, above)  If you cannot convince a business to accept bitcoins, start one of your own!  We need legitimate, trusted businesses that cater clients other than wholly-anonymous ones.
• Exchange with major currencies (USD mostly there; EUR barely there; needs more asian currencies)
• More generating nodes.  Too easy for someone with US$100,000 to own the entire network.  We should encourage generation for the sake of network health, not money.  It's not worth it to simply make money generating coins.

Note that this list does not include casinos, prediction markets, HYIPs, etc.

Most people use cash because it's widely accepted by businesses and individuals, not because cash is [mostly] anonymous.

I agree that a huge business accepting bitcoins would be excellent and launch bitcoin into the stratosphere, but it just won't happen. When 50 small businesses accept BTC then a medium one will, when many medium ones do then a large one will, when a few large ones do then we will be off. But it just makes no sense for a large established company to jump on the chance to use an unknown, rarely used currency.

If you think bitcoins are valuable, sell what you do for bitcoins. I play poker and win pokerstars money, I am willing to sell it for bitcoins.

I want to learn to program too, I am very glad there are so many programmers and site builders making things like the poker room, lottery, and randomizer. And silver on the bidding pond too! I've bought over an ounce.

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=909.0

This is very important for business to adopt bitcoins. I bet if there was a drupal module to do it automatically a lot of online places would accept them.

The most e-commerce module for Drupal is Ubercart (http://drupal.org/project/ubercart and http://www.ubercart.org/) so making a module for this would be a great asset. I am starting to look into Drupal and PHP because we just started an economic blog (http://www.errorespuntuales.es/) with some friends, but obviously I am no expert at all yet. If someone knows PHP and/or Drupal I would not mind collaborating with him/her to create the module. I honestly dont see myself capable of doing it on my own. My idea before I read this was to learn to create a module for Drupal creating a "Donate Bitcoin" module. So if anyone likes the idea of a bitcoin module for Ubercart (or something similar) pm me.

the way i see it the main problem is that you cannot easily get hard cash for your coins.

"Bitcoin" should get a freshmeat.net account. That will give it some exposure (especially with the many releases).

Another thing that would help bitcoin adoption:

python, perl, php libraries and common code for interfacing with bitcoin.

For example, Perl or Python code that verifies that "17NdbrSGoUotzeGCcMMCqnFkEvLymoou9j" is a valid bitcoin address, and "098123409813lkjasdflkjasdflk" is not, would be useful to anyone wishing to implement a bitcoin web interface.

Hummm, well, I didn't have any luck finding how to determine what constitutes as an address examining the c++ code, but here's a PHP function that should work as expected:


Ah yes, thanks for clarifying theymos.  I updated my code.  I confirmed and of all of my addresses they contain at least one of all alphanumberic characters except 0, I, O and l.

Bitcoin excludes a few normal characters for the sake of readability, and a Bitcoin address can be either 33 or 34 characters long. It's:
1[1-9A-HJ-NP-Za-km-z]{32,33}

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1024.msg12532#msg12532 (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1024.msg12532#msg12532)

In this thread chaord and I have an ideas for the best way forward we believe which is in education.

If people are still generating Bitcoins, I wouldn't be concerned.

Possible coding bounty.

OK, to help boost bitcoin, I'll sell my PS3 and all my PS3 games for bitcoin at a reasonable rate.  What is the best place for me to advertise a sale, other than just posting this forum?

Kiba, what was your luck with trying to sell gameboy games?

Incorrect. The smallest valid BitCoin address is
1111111111111111111114oLvT2
so the addresses can go down to 27 characters. Also, 34 character BitCoin addresses can't start with "1R" "1S" "1T" etc...
I also have the ability to generate useful novelty BitCoin addresses. The best one for me  so far is
1ByteCosnsUNJun4KL3HSt1NfFdXpzoRTy (pesky s)

ByteCoin 

I have a couple bitcoin addresses that start with 1R, but they are very rare compared to the others. Same with 1S, 1T, etc.. Actually

Starting from 1R, all the way to 1Y, 1Z, 1a, 1b, 1c, .., 1x, 1y, 1z - these are all very rare but still they can exist.

http://biddingpond.com ?

Thanks!!!  I'll try that out!

Show me.

ByteCoin

1RayJSScakAmpRtQRbqyN5xfchKnqQNb9 is mine.  Feel free to send 0.01btc and I'll send it back?

I forgot about that. However, I have yet to figure out the shipping cost and how to do it as well, On Saturday, I think I will be able to put up an auction.

Thanks - but no need. There are 33 characters in the above BitCoin address. This example does not contradict the statement I made.

ByteCoin

I have pretty good skills in Drupal module development. What;s about bounty for it? =) Do someone have real project to use this module?

Ah, I missed 34.  I understand now.

Hmm. I logged into my mybitcoin account today to discover the beginnings of a shopping cart interface!!! On the settings page they are offering a SCI toolkit download, and a bitcoin address forwarder. I've emailed them about it with some questions. I'll post again once I have some more information about it.

They should still get a better SSL certificate. That CACert thing makes using MyBitcoin way too difficult for the average user and too bothersome for many advanced users.

So as to not hijack this thread,  discuss here (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1043)


Better as in?

So as to not hijack this thread,  discuss here (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1043)

Just a quick FYI:

https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1054.msg13028 (https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1054.msg13028)

mybitcoin has full merchant tools / web-based payment processing.

why people should buy bitcoins to spend them? They just can spend dollars or webmoneys without transfering it into bitcoins. Other thing - is to make it for free (generate), but it's very hard to do now. That's why most users leaving this project.

I think the current status of coin generation difficulty and the arms race of private-source GPU coin generation has discouraged some people's interest in the coin generation game/lottery which - rightly or wrongly - has been the motivation for a lot of people's involvement. It also seems to be a symptom of a meta-flaw in the project design, because open source projects want to ENCOURAGE the contribution and sharing of code, but the nature of the coin generation process seems to inherently reward and incentivize closed-source forks. Another set of concerns is the possibility of non-conforming clients exploiting the system (as seems to have occurred somewhat recently causing the 0.3.9 update) and the resiliency of the network to malicious behavior, and the potential fragility of your bitcoin bank account if you mess up handling your wallet file. Last but not least is the meta-issue of understanding how to deal with your local laws and regulations concerning taxes and money.

I love the idea of bitcoin, but I have donated all my bitcoins to the EFF donation thread now and am no longer actively participating in the bitcoin economy because of how the above issues apply to me. This is not intended as criticism of bitcoin, just as a user reporting why they are no longer using the software currently.

1. I'm not interested in running multiple computers at max cpu usage for weeks to try to generate a rather trivial value of coins, especially when I know GPU users have vastly higher efficiency
2. The mechanics of keeping my wallet files private and constantly backed up with a fresh copy gives me "data stress"
3. All software has bugs. Software that is related to money is an inevitable target of attacks, and there is no FDIC backing or legal system remedy available in the case of problems
4. I don't really know how to document and declare transactions in bitcoins for legal and tax purposes and I'm scared of getting it wrong

In other words, I see costs/risks to using bitcoin and trying to participate in the bitcoin economy without seeing practical benefits other than how much I like the idea of bitcoin and think its cool software. I want bitcoin to succeed, but my current evaluation of my economic self-interest is that I have no reason to run the client and no reason to purchase bitcoins. I also do not feel motivated to "promote" bitcoin because that makes me feel like I am basically working to advocate the economic interests of those who already hold large quantities of bitcoin wealth. The have/have-not dichotomy is another structural issue: "come join our economy! you can be a peasant!" is a hard marketing sell.

1) Dollars, we can't spend them here in Europe ;). Joking aside, money transfer is fairly easy within Europe, outside it will be more difficult or very costly. Buying stuff from the US often requires a credit card, which is not so easy to get in Europe as in the USA.
2) Webmoneys, these companies are not banks, so they don't have to follow the rules that banks have to follow. A company could just "freeze" your account or let your account disappear and get away with it. If someone hacks your account, money lost. Nothing you could do against it.

Bitcoin on the other hand is easy to get (bought some via an exchange in Norway via a bank transfer (safe)) and nobody can make the bitcoins I have disappear (or have some other control on them).

That's totally understandable, but I think you are missing the point. The point to Bitcoin is not to generate "free money" (as if there is such a thing). The point is to back the coins with something tangible -- electricity (aka "energy"). Also, this is about the only way you can carefully control the minting of the currency.

All of the world's currencies are backed by energy. Human or otherwise. Bitcoin is a little more direct. The generation (work/labour) creates hashes that are valuable (money) to other computers/people running the same program. Why is it worth something? For the same reasons that FRNs are worth something: people accept it for the trade of real goods and services.

It also sounds like you feel inadequate because you can't generate as fast as others. Why not sell something? Selling real goods and services is far more profitable than generating. Plus, there is the added benefit of adding value to the currency itself. Generating isn't the "be-all" and "end-all" of Bitcoin.

I don't see the point in generating for gains. Some people advocate generating to help secure the network from attack -- sure I can see that point. I also see that as a public service, or a donation to the cause. Where I live the electricity costs are very cheap, but I'd still pay more in electricity than value that I'd get from the coins. I'll leave the generation to other people, and buy the coins from them for my exchange business.


Do you keep your life savings in your wallet in the real world? The solution to this is simple: diversify.


Sure. Hopefully with enough eyes on the source code the major bugs can be ironed out. The Bitcoin software will never be perfect, but considering the alternatives I'd say it is pretty good.

The FDIC is bankrupt. Google it. Also, what good is the FDIC if you lose your wallet in the real world?

Legal system remedy? Get real. Have you ever actually tried to sue someone? The lawyers largely benefit from any legal conflicts. The best way to operate is based on reputation. It is what humans do naturally anyway.


That's easy. You don't claim the Bitcoins themselves. You declare the dollar-equivalent value of the goods that you received in trade with Bitcoins.

Cheers! :D
The Madhatter

Thanks for your well considered response. I agree with all of your points. I want to re-emphasize I am a bitcoin supporter and have had only good experiences using the bitcoin software, bitcoin community websites, and discussing on this forum! I take bitcoin very seriously as a fundamentally important project - the idea of a decentralized currency, a p2p economic system, is inherently exciting, and bitcoin's design and implementation seems brilliant once you understand how the pieces all fit together.

All of that, however, still isn't enough for bitcoin to actually succeed and live up to its potential. What can loosely be described as "social factors" (and of course luck!) are in my opinion much more determinative of success than the correctness of the concepts or the skill of implementation. Those things have to be right to create the possibility of success (defined as long-term preservation of value and ability to transact in bitcoins for a wide variety of goods and services), but are not sufficient. The high ambition of bitcoin creates a lot of hurdles to jump over that most projects don't face. Satoshi has guts! As do other people who invest substantial effort and resources in building the bitcoin community, I remain very impressed by what already exists and has been accomplished.

I definitely believe bitcoin has the potential to deliver a "better user experience" of money than traditional systems, but at this point in time I don't think the chicken-and-egg problem of creating adequate diversity of goods/services and ease of transaction in bitcoins without a large user community and vice versa has been accomplished. I will try to offer my best practical suggestion: someone should develop a very easy to deploy "pay with bitcoins!" web widget for people selling services over the web. The kind of small startups funded by ycombinator might be interested in innovative payment systems and they are often at a stage where revenues are so small that even minor paths to monetization would interest them. I don't know exactly how you architect an ultra easy to use (for both service providers and consumers) bitcoin payment button, but I see it as something that could really drive adoption.

Oh, I believe you. I didn't mean to come across as a jerk or anything. :) Thank you for sharing your views of Bitcoin with everyone here.


I'm in awe of what has been accomplished as well. I wonder if having "guts" is enough. :P


This has already been done! :) As of yesterday mybitcoin has a full fledged web-based processing platform not unlike paypal.

Check out my other post about it. I also include a cool payment URL that I generated with the merchant tools, if you are interested.

https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1054.msg13028 (https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1054.msg13028)

Cheers! :D
The Madhatter

This is great news with regard to mybitcoin's merchant services!  I think that will go a long way towards fueling adoption in the long run.

I still think, however, that the thing keeping bitcoin from taking off (virally) is that there is no specific use-value for bitcoin that only bitcoin can do best.  It got me thinking, there is something that bitcoin has been used for all a long that we haven't actually set up beyond the forum.  Payment for good information!  People have been putting bitcoin addresses in their forum signatures for a long time, and good, helpful posts seem to be rewarded at last to some extent.

Maybe we should just keep it simple and build a decentralized, secure forum, much like FMS on freenet? http://blog.locut.us/main/2008/5/11/fms-spam-proof-anonymous-message-boards-on-freenet.html  Rather than a "web of trust" we are replacing it with a "web of prices."  By "keep it simple," I mean build a system such that geeks (like us) would run nodes (normal toplevel domain gateways) and mine currency for our users while also providing them with security and safe passage into the "forums in the clouds."  Nodes would compete for users by distributing the currency they mine to their users.  Additionally certain nodes might offer better UI access to the "forum in the clouds" via mobile apps, sites, interfaces, etc.

Because posters would have to essentially pay to post on these forums, they would be the place to go for "spam free, important, good information."  Much like we reward one another on the current bitcoin forums for good posts and information, a level of reciprocation could be built in to social norms and potentially even automatically implemented by nodes operators.

By limiting post sizes (or maybe paying per character of text) this would result in concise, well formulated thoughts.  Additionally, by using a pay to post structure, I doubt people would reciprocate the postage fee back to the poster if they post porn or something.  You would choose your entry node according to the principles that it publishes to adhere to. Maybe you chose a node that automatically reciprocates postage fees for anything BUT porn/spam?

Anyway, I just wonder if something as seemingly simple as this could be the viral concept that bitcoin needs.  Many people are intrigued by the fact that there are these "uncensored parallel internets" out there, like freenet, i2p, etc.  By bringing introducing pricing while maintaining privacy and freedom we could be bringing the uncensored internet to them in a safe way.  It could be "the place for breaking news and uncensored info."  I think a good rule of thumb is, "you get what you pay for."  That rule still holds for information.  Maybe what the masses need is an easy way to pay for good information and filter through all the bullsh*t :).

I would use this service.

My strategy is not to find specific niches that would work for bitcoin really well but to create lot of mini sites for bitcoins. It can't hurt to have lot of miniservices by which users can spend their money on. This of course, contribute attraction for developers who might develop the right application that will be the viral niches that allow bitcoins to take off. Think of my strategy as a metastrategy for allowing your strategy to be viable.

Fair enough.  I would actually argue that both strategies are on the meta side.  I'm focusing on giving bitcoin an intrinsic value even if it's exchange value is limited.  You're focusing on giving bitcoin exchange value.

Maybe we should start a Bitcoin Network, LLC to drive adoption of bitcoin. You can be the chief extrinsic officer, and I'll be the chief intrinsic officer. :)  Truth be told, I'm quite serious.  I think if there is any way whatsoever that someone can make a full time living solely on bitcoin, I'm in.

@kiba + chaord: I like your ideas. :)

I think that selling anything that people would want to buy anonymously (like VPNs, materials and content banned where they live, anonymous calling cards, etc) is a perfect fit for Bitcoin.

Without disclosing how much I've made from Bitcoin I'll say this: I've been living off of the proceeds of Bitcoin for 3 months now. Paying bills, mortgage, and buying food. So yes, it is possible. :)

This is actually very comforting.  However, if all of us started operating reputable bitcoin4cash businesses, I wonder how many people would be able to pay bills, mortgages, food, etc.  Incidentally, have you asked your customers what they intend to buy with the bitcoins that you sell them?  I know that is a difficult question to broach in a privacy oriented business, but I only ask because it would be great to know how many people are puchasing bitcoins from you solely as a speculative buy and hold investment (commodity) versus those that intend to buy something from the marketplace.  My gut tells me that most of the exchanges taking place today are for speculative or investment purposes, not for the cash-->bitcoin-->marketplace cycle.  Of course this is nearly impossible to prove ;)

That being said, I would consider offering a $20K USD bounty (and potentially more) for the development of a particular product/service for which bitcoin is the only viable solution/offering with the potential to go viral.  An example would be the paid-forum idea mentioned above.  I guess what I'm saying is that I personally am convicted enough that until a simple use-case for bitcoin is found that cannot be easily served by any other competing currency, it's going to be nearly impossible to get bitcoin to take off.  I am willing to fund, and find more funding (VC?), for such a use-case.  I know it's out there ;).

Goldsmiths probably never thought that they would become bankers, and that their raw input (gold) would become money for the world.  We are in the opposite boat.  We have the money that we want the world to use, are unwilling to use force to make it so, and are therefore relegated to finding the product/service whereby bitcoin is the only suitable raw input.

Probably not very many. :) I am profitable because I found a niche that sells. I'm sure that there are many other undiscovered and productive niches for Bitcoin out there.


Nope. I never ask. Some of my customers are rather poor at hiding their intentions, so I easily figured out what they were doing without snooping around. So far, I haven't seen anything illegal. :)


I know for a fact that some people were buying coins from me to buy something online with them. I can't discuss it for privacy reasons.

Also, link2voip used to publish their stats to this forum. I remember seeing that they were getting around 2 payments per day like clockwork. So there's a real example. Some of those payments are from me for my hosting! lol And I digress... :P


Maybe people will adopt Bitcoin after the dollar collapses.. :P :P :P

Well, there are a lot of smart people hanging around on this forum. Someone is bound to figure out a niche to make Bitcoin go viral. :)

This.

Bitcoin is a solution in search of a problem. It will find it eventually.

Well if you solve spam people will come. Millions of people......just sayin'  :P


twitter spam
email spam
forum spam

all dealt with by small btc microtransactions. Viagra emails wont be sent if it costs the spammers a bitcoin to contact you.All bitcoin has to do is sit in the middle between the spammers and the end users and automatic filtration occurs. You dont even have to tell the end user that it is btc you are using to do this. They make a 20 dollar cc payment and it makes their spam go away. Im sure the more geeky would find out if they dug but there would be no need to scare the non technical user away. Once btc kills all the spam on the internet the mainstream will love it. FFFUUUUU Nigerian email scams!


This can be done because you cant make .001 cc or paypal  payments because of the fees but you sure can with bitcoin and spammers cant fake bitcoin payments. If someone makes their first million using this idea I hope you give me a cut - in bitcoins of course!

Spam is not a technological problem. And you will be unable to solve it with a technical fix.

This idea is the same as email stamps.

How hard would it be to set up an email system with payments attached? If you have that then you just make emails with <.1 BTC or whatever you set attached invisible. You make a "refund" button to send it back on legit emails, or even a refund all from this person, or refund all from everyone button to make it easy.

If your mother refuses to ship your BTC back, just don't write for a while. This works nicely with the celebrity mail idea from before. Celebs just don't send back and everyone knows it. Busy/important people could check their 50+ BTC mail frequently and their 1+ BTC mail when they have extra down time.

Yeah, those are probably the same coins over and over. And it's rarely at 90k, I often see it in the 20-40k range. I mean sometimes I buy 2k on BCM and then send it to MtGox inside of a few hours, and that makes me over 10% of the 24hr traffic. Also if you look in the blocks there are lots of 50BTC transfers, I assume these are people sending recently generated blocks from slave machines to their main, not actual commerce.

Imo, the very beginning was the hardest bridge to cross. There is still a long way to go, but I'm pretty confident.

Not that I know right now, but I having a bitcoin module in the drupal module directory would give bitcoin some publicity. Some peope might give it a try on their shops just for the sake of it.

I'm just back from the Software Freedom Day party here in The Hague and I was able to talk with Bits of Freedom (Dutch privacy organisation) and the president of the Free Software Foundation Europe about Bitcoin. Both were really interested. The person of BoF knew bitcoin already, but hadn't used it for over a year or so and said that it was not interesting at that time, but he would look into it again and discuss with other people within the organisation about it.

About the FSFE, the president asked me to send a mail with the details, so I just send him this mail:


I've blanked out the names.

So lets see where this goes.

Karsten Gerloff?  ^_^

Yeah, easy to find.

This is a good idea.  I would add a few others:

WordPress
vBulletin
phpBB
SMF
Joomla

Maybe when gavin's mime type (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1056.0) implementation is useable, someone could write an SMF plugin and then this forum should be the first SMF forum to use it.

The community should "adopt" one of the large tech related podcasts and support it to help get bitcoin mentioned.

For instance

Security Now/This Week in Tech
Geek News Central
Chris Pirillo
Buzz Out Loud
 etc.....

well. from my practice doing something and not knowing exactly why is not really good way to do things. Once someone will need such module for Drupal - let me know. my email is pavel@yepcorp.com

offtopic: how to make this forum to send notifications to my answers? I think I clicked everything and it still doesn't send 'em.

O RLY?  Kinda liek Bitcoin, eh? ^_^

How about we organize a Facebook Bomb like Mises did: http://blog.mises.org/10552/facebook-bomb/

We set a day where we all agree to promote Bitcoin to our Facebook friends by:
1) setting our status to something like "The Future of Money: http://www.bitcoin.org"
2) join the Bitcoin Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bitcoin-P2P-Cryptocurrency/134466763256650
3) invite our friends to also join the page

There must be 100 bitcoin users on Facebook.  If we each average 120 friends (which seems like a low estimate) that would get the message out to 12,000 people...for free.

Any takers?

Okay, when will be "Bitcoin Facebook Day?" :D

Hummm, what are some significant dates in the history of Bitcoin?  We could mark one of those anniversaries.

Or maybe December 23, since December 23, 1913 is the day the Federal Reserve Act was enacted. ;D

I would say a date around 2 months from now: long enough to get organized, but not so far out that people lose interest.

Too close to Christmas to get many people's attention. They'll all be thinking about charging gifts on the CC!

Earlier imo. But I don't use FB anyway.

Haha, I just realized it's probably no coincidence that the FED was started near Christmas. It's for the exact reason I suggested it as a bad date, people are distracted.

Actually, it was started over Christmas when most congressmen were on holidays.

A larger fraud could not be asked for.

Great thought about facebook and other social media sites. We should do this "bitcoin day".

In terms of timing I suggest it to be very soon (i.e. in the next 7 days). My experience in marketing / PR / ER tells me that we need to eat the potato while its still hot. Now we see a good postiive trend in coverage, and risk is that if we wait too long, we might start from a lower level.

Key question is how to mobilize all bitcoin supporters = how to reach them to align on a date.

Who has a "list" or an idea to communicate to all bitoin owners?

I agree about eating hot potatoes (that's a new one I hadn't heard before), if we can make it happen.  I suggested two months for a target date just because I figured it would take that long to find a large number of Bitcoin supporters to make it happen.

Is there any value in doing media releases?  Has there ever been a full court press on getting Bitcoin noticed by the mainstream tech media?  A mention in Fast Company or Wired would certainly go a long way.  In the Bitcoin community, are there people like yourself with PR experience and connections that could be leveraged to get the word out both about "Bitcoin Day" and Bitcoin in general?  (Pardon me if all this has been tried before, I'm very new here).

Also enlisting the support of various libertarian/hard money institutes and some reliable newsletter writers (I first heard about Bitcoin through Elliott Wave International last Friday) to promote Bitcoin Day would help.

Just a quick note for those of you who don't use Facebook or spend very little time there, just be aware that there are more than 500 million people on Facebook, half of which check their account at least every second day.  If you've seen the Facebook Newsfeed in action, you understand the power of publicity on Facebook.  Facebook is the second most trafficked site on the planet, and for one month this spring actually outpaced Google (according to Alexa).

I would make one short comment: before we make a lot of public hype about bitcoin, let's make sure that the code has matured enough (obviously the main devlopers should have a voice in this).  Why do I say this?  Because I just read an article about the collapse of the supposedly censorship-resistant Haystack project after it inunintenionally exposed political dissedents in Iran: On Writing, Funding, and Distributing Software to Activists Against Authoritarian Regimes (http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/on-software-for-dissidents).  Here are some snippets from one of the developer's resignation letter:


So basically, let's make sure we are very clear and deliberate when talking to the public and social networking friends that BITCOIN DOES NOT GAURENTEE ANONYMITY, but simply pseudonymity (because bitcoin address are public and because trading patterns can be analyzed to match them to people) and should be used in conjunction with TOR and new addresses for every transaction.  Also, make sure they know that the total amount of bitcoins sent to any particular address is public knowledge with bitcointools.

So I think some basic changes to the bitcoin client should be made: For example, having the ability to receive bitcoins by your IP address should be disabled by default, because it presents a small security risk to reveal the ip address of a bitcoin user.  Also, the client should indicate that messages included when sending to an ip address are just plaintext and NOT encyrpted.  Remember, very few people actually read the READMEs and development notes.  Maybe even a "TOR enabled/disabled" indicator should be present on the client.

So I would say let's not be too hasty before we make a collective bitcoin publicity splash.  We should wait at least two months, and make it a great shot...

We should also do this on twitter with a #bitcoinendthefed hashtag  :D. I have over 600 friends on facebook and over 2300 followers on twitter so count me in.

Hummm, you're causing me to pause and ponder this a little more.  Though for me the biggest selling points of Bitcoin are the virtually free micro-payment angle and the built-in inflation protection rather than the implied anonymity.  Maybe we need to have a more methodical approach to 'spreading the word'. 

Maybe this is why the word hasn't spread further already?

I think a big publicity splash should wait until Bitcoin 1.0.  Bitcoin still has way too many rough edges for ordinary folk to use (watch them run away screaming as you try to explain that it is NORMAL for it to take half an hour to download the block chain the first time you start Bitcoin....).

Agreed...  payment systems for businesses need to mature as well.  MyBitcoin just got a payment processor / SCI, but it lacks docs, polish, and support for more than one programming language.

Is the download time going to get better anytime soon?

What bitcoin needs to take off, is a killer app.

The only people who are motivated to use bitcoin at the moment are cyphergeeks, who are attracted the beauty of its internal mechanics, and rabid libertarians, who see it as a tool to spread their ideology. The vast majority of internet users are neither of those. Paypal fulfils their needs just as well as bitcoin, so why would they be motivated to switch?

The killer app, IMO, would be a system for trading bandwidth on anonymity networks such as Tor and i2p. The problem with these networks at the moment is that they are slow and inconvenient as they rely on volunteers to provide bandwith and suffer from congestion.

If Tor users had a way of paying for node providers anonymously, the size and speed of the network would explode.  Anonymous bittorrent would become viable, and judging from the amount of bittorrent traffic on the net, there is no shortage of demand. Increasingly draconian copyright laws, and their increasingly heavy handed enforcement, will motivate even the most lazy bittorrent users to switch.

That is one application where bitcoin has a big competitive advantage. There are few, if any, other currencies suitable for anonymous bandwidth trading.

VERY GOOD IDEA!!!  You should maybe talk to the bitcoin forum member torservers (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1045 (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1045)) who runs Torservers.net (http://www.torservers.net).  He has a thread on this forum where he talks about how he now accepts bitcoin donations (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1004.0 (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1004.0)) so you should read that thread and talk to him to ask about feasibility...and maybe see if he wants to try it out.  Definitely, adding market incentives to the allocation of TOR bandwidth would dramatically increase its efficiency.  It would allow the TOR network to grow because people would be incentivized to dedicate high-bandwidth low-latency routers for it.  Of course poor people could still use free donated bandwidth, but for the rich people living in industrial countries with high copyright restrictions (e.g. US) that want to share copyrighted files quickly and anomalously, fast TOR bandwidth is in high demand!

Maybe I'm not understanding this completely, but it sounds vaguely to me that the suggestion is to use a 'rabid libertarian' tool to facilitate violation of intellectual property rights. 

I'm not being sarcastic, I'm just looking for clarification.

Intellectual property right violate real property right.

Thanks kiba!  Bimmerhead, I encourage you to read the following books:

"Against Intellectual Monopoly" (http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm)
"Against Intellectual Property" (http://mises.org/books/against.pdf)

Basically the argument against intellectual property comes down to what kiba says:


Intellectual "Property" is the legal right to restrict duplication of patterns you came across voluntarily using your own property that you acquired voluntarily.  I prefer to call IP instead "State-Granted Violently-Enforced Pattern-Monopoly".  :o

And yes, Bimmerhead, you are understanding my suggestion perfectly:

This is new thinking for me.  I'm just reading through em3rgentOrdr's recommended "Against Intellectual Property".

So in the context of this discussion, how do you define "real property"?

I'm not yet sold on the against-IP argument yet. I understand the scarce vs. non-scarce goods anti-IP argument that many libertarians are taking these days, but IMO it fails as soon as you say it voids private contracts. Disallowing individuals to enter into private contracts is obviously immoral, and yet some libertarians are arguing exactly that when they argue against IP. What's wrong with me selling you a reproducible good with a contract attached that says you agree not to duplicate it? If you do, it's dishonest and you've violated our contract.

That said, I dislike the totalitarian nature of government enforcement of IP, which is an entirely different story. Since modern IP is enforced using government this removes an important component of the price mechanism from the equation, and so modern IP is really just “fantasy” in the sense that all government-sponsored economic behavior is fantasy. Why should my labor (via taxes) fund the enforcement that is used to protect someone else’s contract, without my consent? This is just as immoral as the contract violations themselves in my opinion, and distorts the market and human behavior – in short, the costs of IP are socialized while the benefits are capitalized upon by a few. (Just like our banking system…lol)
 
Instead, if those who entered into contracts assumed the cost of enforcement, you’d see a dramatically different landscape and the emergence of ingenious methods of protecting contracts and IP without using the extreme expense of government enforcement. As Ayn Rand says, “the moral is the practical”, and I have no doubt that natural market equilibrium in a voluntaryist society would be far more efficient and just than taking a hard statist stance either for or against IP. I strongly dislike violence/coercive solutions (such as government sueing you for piracy), rather than peaceful ones (such as your ISP cutting off your internet because you had a “third strike” pirating from one of their business partners, who pays them a fee perhaps for this service, and it’s all part of your voluntary contract with your ISP, etc). The voluntary solution strongly favors the usage of reputation systems over direct violent enforcement, and IMO is always better. Who knows? Maybe internet access itself would be completely free is it was completely paid for with a share of IP holders profits from the sale of their digital media through the IP-enforced ISP. People who want to ignore IP, of course, would be free to pay for the non-IP enforced ISP.

But my point is quite broad really, which is basically that people should look to voluntary solutions rather than everyone lining up at the government’s door to enact new laws. Getting stuck in the pro-IP/anti-IP legal debate is a very, very statist mindset, since it assumes that the government must either enforce for it or enforce against it -- how about get the gov't out of the way and let people figure it out! Some of the anti-IP crowd is even more statist than the pro-IP crowd: read about Sweden’s proposal to legalize piracy (thus voiding private contracts), tax all internet traffic and have the government decide how to hand out money to “content creators”…. that is frightening and insane IMO.

The libertarians that I talk to know and accept this argument. So you're arguing against quite possibly a strawman. What we're against is involving third parties who have nothing to do with the non-copying agreement.

The Pirate Party is not what I consider to be "anti-IP" people, just "less copyright" people.

Exactly.  And such contracts could be structured in such a way as to have almost the same practical effect as IP enforcement.  Which makes me suspect that arguments in favor of evading IP laws are as much about getting free music and free movies as they are about consistent libertarianism.  But I'm still learning.


However the costs of real property rights enforcement are also socialized, while the benefits are realized by the few (or the particular).


With some of these European countries it's a race between their birthrate and their culture to see which will destroy their society first.

I am a mild libertarian and internet junkie but I am by no means a rabid libertarian or cyphergeek.   My attraction to bitcoin is that it does not charge me the way that paypal does, even if fees are implemented they are not going to be as high.

Currently I am much more likely to use paypal, because I can buy more things with it.  Hopefully this will change before too long, I know that I have seen more products and services being offered for bitcoins, but what looked like an explosion of them when I first started getting into it seems to have slowed to a trickle.

Obviously online services are going to be easier to trade for bitcoins than physical goods, because the postal service does not accept them.  I have seen people offering translation services, IT consulting, Tarot card reading (that'd be me) and I'd love to see more.  I don't know if there are any artists out there who are into bitcoin, but graphic design would undoubtedly be the sort of service that would be very valuable and would interface with bitcoins well.  

Some actual businesses accepting bitcoins that sell physical goods would also go a long way toward helping them establish a foothold.  I know there is one website selling herbs online, but the inventory there consists of only two things, so I assume this is a personal hobby endeavor and not an actual business.  

Not possible in libertarian theory. You can persecute the party in agreement with the contracts but third parties and outsider have no obligations.

The problem with evading IP laws to get free musics and movies is that they're only promoting the monopolist's interest, not the business interest of copyfree entrepreneurs.

Piracy[1] is a poor use of promoting free markets and libertarianism.


[1]: Piracy has apparently evolved into a catch-all phrase for "Things that Short-Sighted Commercial Dudes Don't Want You To Do". For our purpose, it means illegal copying of a monopolist's pattern.

Sure, but you can make the penalties for violating the party in agreement so onerous that they would never get into the hands of third parties.

For example.  I make a movie.  I license showing of the movie exclusively to theatre chain XYZ.  Since XYZ has exclusive distribution it would therefore be necessarily true that any copies of my movie that find their way into the public realm would necessarily have come via XYZ.  XYZ will therefore make sure nobody enters the theatre with a Sony Handycam.  They will also ensure their staff do not remove copies of the movie when they end their shift.

Now this doesn't prevent someone from making their own version of the same plotline.  But really, practically speaking, does anyone care if they do?  No one is going to come over to my house to watch a homemade version of Avatar.

Likewise, if Justin Bieber sells his latest masterpiece on CD with the stipulation you are only buying the right to listen to the music, not reproduce it, then even if a third party hears "Baby Baby" and makes their own version, would anybody actually care to listen to this inferior version of the timeless classic?

Yes, personal contracts cannot duplicate IP law exactly, but where the bulk of internet file sharing is concerned (music and video) it would have the same practical effect.
   

So are the bitcoins in my wallet real property?

If they are willing to accept the agreement in the first place and the cost of enforcement does not exceed the profit from persecuting said violators. This is especially dubious when you have million of people with CDs. This is even more dubious if they can do it anonymously with no easy way to track the anonymous leak.

If people actually stop pirating in the said ideal world, than GIMP and other copyfree business will eat and run away with the copyright holder's lunch.

if you make something artificially scarce, you better have the quality to make it worth people's livelihood to host it at the movie theater.

I supposed the thief owe you money after he spend it or destroy it.

Very true. Here's some relevant reading: http://www.autotelic.com/windows_is_free

One of the biggest (unknown?) enemies of OSS is piracy...

Great arguments as well for how piracy actually *helps* proprietary software

Business beget business. Before you can have physical stores, you must do it with cheaper capital business.

This is why I do the evil laugh when Short-Sighted Commercial Dude do something stupid like stopping piracy of their software.

But how can he 'destroy' my bitcoins?  How are bitcoins 'real' property anymore than the music on a Celine Dion CD?  That's what I don't understand.  Aren't bitcoins 'artifically' scarce?

By deleting your wallet, of course. It's like deleting your Celine Dion mp3. That's a destruction of property. You can alway download another one from the internet though. However, if you don't back up your wallet, you lose it forever.

Well, I don't know how to decide bitcoins. I mean, bitcoin can only be spent once and you can only discover a bitcoin. So if the thief spend your bitcoins, it mean that your bitcoin in your wallet are invalid. It doesn't matter how many time you duplicate the bitcoin.

Not any more than the US dollar bills in your real wallet are real property, which they are not beyond pieces of artwork on fancy paper.  The currency value is symbolic in every currency, as they are just units of measurement.

Incidentally, there is nothing in your wallet that could be contrude as a coin.  The use of the term, "wallet" to describe that file is a misnomer, as it contains only hash pairs and some transaction data.  Your bitcoins are nothing more than a collection of transfers recorded in a massive ledger that we call the blockchain.

A convenient metaphor from the age of physical money. Let leave it at that.

Except that convenient metaphor spreads an inconvenient meme to newcomers about how the system actually works, and such persistant memes can harm the adoption of Bitcoin.

Thanks Kiba.  Us anti-IP folk are not arguing to "void private contracts".  Kiba has the right answer: while it is permissible for Person A to enter into a contract with Person B forbidding Person B from sharing some intellectual creation, such a contract cannot prohibit another Person C (who may have obtained that intellectual creations from Person B breaking the contract, through some other prohibited manner, or maybe from independently discovering that intellectual creation) from sharing that intellectual creation with any other Person D who never entered into any contract with A or B.  As Kiba says, this would essentially be "involving third parties who have nothing to do with the non-copying agreement".


Voluntary solutions are the preferred method for protecting and profiting from your intellectual creations.


Yes, currently real property rights are enforced through socialized police and courts.  However, in a libertarian society, private police and private courts will do a much better job.

Whether or not bitcoins are real property or not is irrelevant.  Of course the physical embodiment of them as a sequence of magnetic polarities in your wallet.dat file stored physically on your harddrive in your computer protected by a password is relevant to property rights, because stealing your harddrive, computer, violating your computer to perform a coldboot attack to get your password, extracting your password by gunpoint from you, etc. are all relevant since they all violate real property rights.  But no, you don't actually *own* the pattern of bits representing your bitcoin wallet or password, but you do own your body and your computer.

No. The data in your wallet can be freely reproduced, so it is not real property. The password to a physical safe or the exact specifications of a physical key would not be real property, either.

I didn't mean brick and mortar businesses.  I just meant online businesses with a reasonably wide inventory.  Selling things that a reasonably wide section of the population want to buy.

Well, I mean store that sell physical items, not brick and mortar businesses. In my sleep deprivation  I slipped up.

Why arent the makers of multifunction printers and computers sued because they enable you to copy things?
The answer is that its easier to go after the weak link in the chain which is the end user rather than the companies who provide the tools. The whole process is about creating artificial scarcity through the use of government force.

No, it's not just about downloading music and movies...
This whole IP industry is "lost".
I've worked in companies that pay you just for creating them patents. Whether these patents will be used or not, it's not important. Many are just kept as "protection" or to attack competitors that decide to implement it. Many small companies specialize in create ridiculous patents and use them against companies that have been doing that for a while. And due to different regional laws, many of this "patent trolls" succeed.
In the end, a legal resource meant to protect and stimulate innovation is actually preventing it from happening.

I doubt that in a society of voluntary law such a thing could happen.

But you can treat your CD, with whatever it has in it, as your property. The same thing for your hard drive and the bitcoin keys in it. They are your property, and if I use them without your consent, I'm violating your rights.

But as long as you allow a friend to copy the content of your CD to his property, without imposing any sort of contract, then the copy this person has belongs to him only. Celine Dion can't accuse this friend of yours of violating her rights. Maybe she could accuse you, if you had signed a particular contract to obtain such CD that prevented you from doing that. But your friend has nothing to do with it.

(The bitcoins themselves can't be reproduced.) Your password, key shape spec or bitcoin keys are not property but the stuff in the safe and the bitcoins are. Morally and in any reasonable legal system.

And what if XYZ does violate the contract? How harsh would the penalties be in absence of a government-sponsored MPAA racket?  Yeah, you could draft a contract that said "if you leak the film you owe me $100 million compensation", but good luck finding a theatre chain who would be prepared to take that kind of risk. On the other hand, if the mutually agreed penalty was more market-realistic, say $1 million, that would no longer serve as deterrent onerous enough to prevent a leak. All it takes is 1 out of 10,000 employees being careless, or dishonest, and the damage is  irreversible. XYZ would not bother investing millions in airport-style security scans for every cleaning lady that enters the cinema building. It would simply accept the risk of paying the penalty.

Right, so there is a point in your example somewhere between $1 million and $100 million where the theatre owner and the film producer can come to agreement.  Some point where it is feasible to take the movie and risk it getting out in the world and duplicated for free, and some point where the theatre operator can make money showing the movie even if he has to pay the fine.

The point is, somewhere along the line somebody is going to have to violate a contract in order to have the movie available for 'free'.  Either the theatre owner is going to start making copies, or a person who viewed the film, or an employee of the theater.  In a society of all libertarians, someone is going to have to violate libertarian principles in order to supply a free movie.

Therefore it does not make sense for present-day libertarians to advocate piracy, or using bitcoins to facilitate piracy, in the pursuit of libertarian goals.  At least not in the context of the present discussion around movies.  Maybe things are different regarding software, drug patents etc.


At no point am I saying that if A and B create a contract, C is somehow obligated to follow the contract.  I am just saying that for a large number of scenarios A and B can create a contract in such a way that the likelihood of C "somehow" acquiring the IP for free is very low.  Or at least B will have to compensate A in such a way that even if C gains access, A won't care.

Theaters would just show public domain equalivent and be done with it. Smaller risk, and smaller profit maybe. Heck, public domain books these days sell, sometime like hotcake.

If somebody can make a million dollars worth of movie quality, and don't force you to sign a non-copying agreement you're basically screwed.  

It doesn't make sense. Bitcoins are only a sum that the network agrees belongs to some person. There are no contracts between any participants, so why should it be illegal for someone to cause these independent entities to change their mind about who the coins belong to?

Good discussion above.

I want to come back to the original question about HOW TO DRIVE CRITICAL MASS.

Some people have express their belief that we should wait a couple of months before trying to make it bigger, but still think we should build on the momentum BITCOIN has currently. For example, bitcoin transactions, prices and turnover of coins have started to increase significantly over the past days.
If we wait to long, it may die.

I also agree that we need to look for ways to have BITCOINS used in the right target group, i.e.
Gaming, online shopping, etc.

What can we do more and faster???

In a prosperous economy, everyone narrowly specialize and consume diversely.

Not everybody have a niche in the bitcoin economy, so there are no diverse consumption.

This forum could be used as support group for entrepreneurial activities and niche finding effort.

There is a difference between advocating violation of contracts, and providing a tool that *may* amplify the harm caused by the violation of a contract.  The act of selling a crowbar to a know burglar does not  in itself constitute advocacy for burglary.

Also, believing that people should have the freedom to behave in a certain way does not mean you necessarily approve of that behaviour personally.  It's still a freedom worth advocating, even if it means more of that behaviour will take place.

In any case, there are plenty of ethical uses of Tor that would also benefit from bandwidth trading.

One small thing that could be done right now by everyone is:

Install this Facebook game http://www.facebook.com/#!/apps/application.php?id=157118501301&ref=ts (http://www.facebook.com/#!/apps/application.php?id=157118501301&ref=ts) which is also listed in the bitcoin.org trade directory http://www.bitcoin.org/trade (http://www.bitcoin.org/trade).
The game accepts bitcoins in payment.
Invite 10 different Facebook friends to install the game everyday for a week.

Its free, fast and takes almost no effort.  And who knows, it may go viral and all of a sudden everyone will be asking 'what are these bitcoins?'

Just be warned, I found the game addictive.

When you beat the game, it made a post at your blog bragging how good you are. Just by playing sweepmine, you help promote bitcoin and the game at the same time.

Makes sense.  providing services definitely has a lower overhead than providing goods.  I don't think we need bitcoin only physical good stores right now, it would just be nice to see some sellers of physical goods accepting bitcoins in addition to paypal, credit cards, or what have you.  I know that currently tobacco cannot be purchased with paypal, so this looks like a big possible opportunity.

Link didn't work for me.  What is the game called?

It's called Minesweeper.  Try this link: http://apps.facebook.com/sweepmines/ (http://apps.facebook.com/sweepmines/)

Still doesn't seem to work.  I see a minesweeper game, but it looks like ti is just the standard windows game, no option to buy anything with bitcoins

Its there.  When you start to play the game (click on a square), you will be taken to a screen to place a bet.  On that screen you can buy more minesweeper 'money' with BTC.

I assume you can't go backwards? Or can you?

I don't know what you mean by 'go backward'.  Do you mean after you have uncovered a square?  No, once the mine goes off you're done.

No sorry, I mean trade points on the game back to BTC.

No, I don't think so.  That would be a violation of Facebook TOS as I understand it.

This is simply another place to spend your BTC, and a pretty effective implementation he's done too.  If only we could get all app developers to do it.

The developer behind this project has done well. Now we will need to reciprocate by making something that he might want to spend bitcoin on. Fostering trade relations and interdependence is very important for a successful bitcoin economy.