Bitcoin Forum

Re: So you think you're going to start a Bitcoin business, right?

Okay, it's not a crime. It's just the first step down the road which brings pretty much 9x% to crime within six months to a year. So, here are some simple easy steps for your convenience.

0. Starting a bitcoin business is a liability. The first thing you need to understand, and you need to understand it well. At sixteen hundred hours while you were sitting around your living room scratching your ear you were worth X. Your life, your ideas, your business, the shit around your house that you own, all that which makes up your life, added together, worth X. At sixteen fifteen, eight minutes after you had started your Bitcoin business you were worth X-k, where k is always positive and SIGNIFICANT. Starting a Bitcoin business is a liability, it makes you worth less. In fact, all the rest of your life in Bitcoinland will be attempts, more or less successful, to limit and reduce that liability. This is the outlook you must have not in order to be successful, but in order to have a shot at it. This is the outlook you must have in order to not guarantee failure.

1. Identify yourself to the community. This means, at the very least, creating a WOT account. If you do not have a WOT account you are not part of Bitcoin business. This is the criteria, no matter what you might think. That's where everyone looks, no matter what social media might be telling you. If you aren't in the WOT you aren't in Bitcoin.

This might also mean making a few social media profiles. The difference between an account on StumbleUpon called MyBTCBiz, a reddit account called BtcBlaBla, a myspace, tumblr, whatever and a forum account called MyBizPr is nil. They're all the same thing: social media profiles. Sure, they may be useful. You wouldn't think to substitute a forum registration for a company registration IRL, now would you? Same thing here.

2. After completing step 1 spend at the very least six months learning. This attitude whereby you think you're great and valuable, so great and valuable in fact that you had the business idea first, then you ran into Bitcoin and then in the heat of the moment saw to that formality of a forum account so now you're ready for "investment" five hours later after dealing with the pesky minimum posts rules is bullshit. Pure bullshit. This isn't how it works, if you've not been in the WOT for six months you are not ready to start a Bitcoin business for reason of intellectual incapacity, irrespective of what you might think. (And yes, of course you will think you're the exception to this rule. You are not the exception, you are just unskilled and unwarare of it (http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/unskilled.html). The rule is exactly about you.)

Yes, maybe if Warren Buffett decided to go into Bitcoin he'd just put a notice on his Berkshire Hathaway website identifying his WOT handle and be ready in five minutes. The reason Warren Buffett can do that and you can't is that you're not Warren Buffett. Yes, one day you might become the next WB. That doesn't mean you're it today, consumer credit does not work in this field.

So, what you do during your six months is that

2.1. You buy some Bitcoins. Get a good idea of what the options for doing that are, how the exchanges work, how the OTC market works (if by now you do not know what OTC or WOT stand for add two months to your lockdown as punishment for being the sort of idiot who, when he encounters words he does not know, instead of investigating their meaning brushes them off to "get on with the reading").

2.2. You sell some Bitcoins. Get a good idea of how that works, how you get your money back out, what the limits are, so on and so forth. You wouldn't want to discover later that you have a billion dollars in Bitcoins you can never spend in any way, other than by donating to the Bitcoin Gates Foundation now would you? What sort of WB would that be?

These are not a waste of time. They are here to give you an idea of how your future customers will be seeing life. You want to buy some Bitcoins even if you don't need them, and sell them even if you don't need to and buy back just on general principle. You are unit testing the currency. Boring? Fuck you.

2.3. You read, on this forum, and you discuss with the market participants. You get your pecking order straight. Who are the movers and shakers? Whose word is worth 10k Bitcoins no questions asked and from whom? Why? You get the history straight. Who were the scammers, historically? How did they do it ? What are the patterns? How did the people who matter react, and why? What does that say about them, how does that color their relationships among each other?

If you don't have the list and don't comprehend how the interactions work, if you look at DeathandTaxes and have no fucking idea who he is, if you think we're buddies cause I mention him by name and so forth you're not done with this. Must lurk moar.

2.4. You ask questions. Only on step 2.4 do you ask questions, by the time you're here you have already done a lot of work! You have sunk into this upwards of a hundred hours of your spare time, whether you like it or not, you've filled half a notebook with dumbass scribblings, you have fucking hand-drawn maps hanging from your bedroom wall. This level of intensity is not an upper bound to aspire to, but a minimum requirement.

Your questions will get a lot of stupid answers but also a complete set of correct answers. Pick the set, disregard the rest, you're on your way.

3. Announce your business plan. If you think your business plan has to be kept secret because otherwise others will steal it you are probably too stupid to be in business (not just BTC, but in general).

Let me explain to you how business "stealing" works: at the time MPEx was created (Feb 2012) there existed GLBSE already, which sucked at that time. Nobody flailing around in a cloud of stupidity almost mould-like in consistency seemed to be aware of it, but GLBSE sucked. And so Mr. P decided to make a securities exchange that worked right and was run correctly.

So, pro tip #1: there's so much to do and so few people capable of doing it in Bitcoin that if your plan makes sense and you seem even remotely competent everyone else who is competent will breathe a sigh of relief. They aren't going to "steal" your idea of doing the absolutely fucking obviously banal, cause so much is needed I couldn't begin to tell you.

Pro tip #2: if you are incompetent, the people who are competent aren't going to steal your business early. They are going to steal it late, just like MPEx demolished GLBSE. They don't need early mover advantage, they will come to your market six months or a year late, break off your arms and beat you over the head with them until you are reduced to a bloody mess.

So, forget about anyone "Stealing" your business. When S.DICE was announced, a bunch of forum muppets rambled on about how it's not worth its valuation because "everyone could do it". And I laughed at them then (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=101902.msg1115483#msg1115483) and so to prove my point that they're laughable idiots they declared that they shall do it! It's been months, who has managed to steal the business? You can't steal any business from the competent, and if you're competent yourself you don't even try to, cause it makes no business sense.

Thus, at the very least, step 3 gives you this measure of protection, whereby other competent people know you're doing X and so don't start doing X too. It saves our time and effort, rather than doing something twice do two of the fifty billion things that still need doing.

Obviously your announcement will gather a bunch of crap from a bunch of nobodies. But lucky for you, you've been doing this by the numbers, and you have the list. You know why you don't care what Joel Katz says about anything: what people who don't run businesses say is irrelevant. You know why you care what piuk says about anything to do with the blockchain (do you?).

4. Almost there.

4.1. If you actually got no objections, just pats on the back you're golden. Go do your thing, try your best not to fuck up, when in doubt ask people you trust and that's that.

4.2. If you actually had some objections, do not proceed until the people who raised them declared themselves satisfied. The odds that they don't have a point are dismal, and more importantly, the odds that they wouldn't withdraw objections along the lines of the most favorable construction for you are nil. If someone's pointing things out to you that won't work with your model they're right. If nobody is that still is not proof your model can work.

Stick to this and I might be hearing your name in a year or two. Don't, you just fade into the background noise, yet another of the many who keep paying ten or fifty dollars a month to be part of a new and exciting MMORPG, sorta like the glassy eyed FB credits buyers.

Good luck in any event.