Bitcoin Forum

It seems to me we should try to focus on promoting bitcoin to teenagers.

First, young people are more open-minded than old established people.  They also don't have any savings so they are not personnaly invested in any national currency.

Second, young people are the future of the world.  Success of bitcoin will depend on them.

Finally, teenagers like video games.  Thus they own graphic cards, and I'm sure they'd be happy to use them to mine if we can convince them that they will be able to buy video games with the bitcoins they will produce.  Whether we show them the plateform exchanges, or we provide them a bitcoin video game shop (we should work on that).  I guess there is also amazon gateway that could allow them to buy video games with bitcoins.

I don't know any young people, nor do I contribute to any video-game forum/website.  But if you do, please spread the message that bitcoin exists and might be a way for them to buy video games easily.

Hey! You know me. I am 15 years old(16 this Saturday :D) and had been promoting Bitcoin to my buddies.(Already signed up like 7 guys) I also contribute with a 5870. 8)

BTW, if we could get a good comedy animated movie of Bitcoins it would be great! :D

Good.  I hope your friends generate with their graphic card as you do.

Well, most of my friends are console newby gamers. xD Here in Mexico there aren't much Computer Gamers and few even know how to build their rig. Some even don't have CUDA or OpenCL capable GPUs so afaik they are mining in slush's pool. :)

I am also right now doing the BitcoinMe spanish translations though, I don't have much time to do it with my hw. >_<

They also don't pay the electric bill, lol.

Nor rent...and they probably got their GPU from Santa.  :) 

Maybe we should try to get The Humble Indie Bundle (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Humble_Indie_Bundle) to accept bitcoin payment.  They seem to have bi-annual releases of a package of games, where they let you choose your own price and how much you want to donate to your favorite charity.  I was going to buy one for myself over the holidays, but didn't want to use paypal...

teenagers also like porn,. and are not allowed to purchase it.

Just sayin.

... why would anyone buy porn? internet has too much of it everywhere for free

Convienence.

Already very convenience to acquired 30 minutes long hardcore pornography. They might be willing to pay for live sex, though.

No I am not, I prefer comedies. Seriously, if we can get The American Dream Film guys to make a Bitcoin movie it would be great!

and strip shows.....

I want to know that the girls are receiving my bitcoins.  I don't want to be exploiting anyone.

Let's come back from all the porn non-sense.

I quite like the idea of teenagers becoming our target audience, since they are likely to adopt Bitcoins should we be able to create virtual goods they can buy (think FarmVille). Young people are easier to convince to join a movement like Bitcoin.

I'm thinking "Farmville".  Yes.  Let's exploit weak humans by preying on their obsessive-compulisve behavior for profit (http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-09-08/news/farmvillains/).   No.  I do not think so.  I would rather pay a (legal) girl honest money (bitcoin) to see her naked.

Although you make a fair point, shock value included, someone is going to do the prey-on-OC-behaviour thing.  The differences between a heroin dealer and a pharmacist is a matter of degree.  If we can agree to a set of volutary rules for ethical behaviour, we stand to have much greater success at compliance.  If we simply declare such activities as prohibited because of a moral viewpoint, then such activities will simply occur out of our view and therefore beyond our capacity to affect in either a positive or negative manner.

If it's good enough for dollars it's good enough for bitcoin.

Digital currency (such as facebook app points) is likely to be a boom area for Bitcoin, simply because these are almost bitcoinesque already (users are used to "value" being numbers in a database, for example, which the general e-commerce visitor might not be)


All games work on a "reward the user" basis: it's all basic psychology. But there are far better ones than Zynga games like Farmville/Mafia Wars.

Fair enough.  I suppose there is nothing inherently immoral about the whole prey-on-OC-behavior thing, and someone is going to do it anyway...


Excellent point.  That's why I suggest we focus our targeted lobbying efforts to try to get the "Humble Indie Bundle" (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Humble_Indie_Bundle) (http://www.humblebundle.com/ (http://www.humblebundle.com/)) to accept bitcoin.  There is a great deal of cultural overlap between the bitcoin community and the DRM-free gaming community:  "Free" as in freedom, not "free beer".  I almost  bought from them this December, but I didn't want to use the evil paypal, google checkout, or another proprietary payment options.

I've been playing World of the Living Dead (http://www.worldofthelivingdead) lately (it's currently in beta.) It's a free to play browser based MMOTBSG. The developers sell credits to players which can be used to buy items (using paypal) in the game. Imagine if such a game accepted bitcoins! Actually, I seem to remember a thread about such a game in development

I'm thinking of a bitcoin chess plateform.   There are numerous electronic chess tournament system, for both humans and machines.   It wouldn't be very hard to modify it so that players and computers could play for bitcoins.

That sounds good. Where would the BTC come from?

I like the idea of building a loop into your game. You can earn bitcoins by playing, and spend them in the game as well. A version of an incomplete loop where the users (players) make money is Picture This (http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/01/the-open-source-venture-project-picture-this.html) which is being developed by John Robb over at Global Guerrillas. It's not actually a game, and is instead aimed at gathering photos of businesses and neighborhoods and rewarding people who contribute.

A similar idea in the context of World of the Living Dead (WotLD, mentioned in my earlier post) would be a user create player's guide. A crucial part of the game is knowing where safe areas are with fewer zombies, but the fog of war restricts your view on the map. A 3rd party player's guide could pay players with BTC for providing intel on where hot zones and safe zones are. Then micro bounties can be used to reveal this intel on a map on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. So if I were planning on moving my characters through an area, I could chip in a few BTC on a 20BTC bounty to reveal the intel for that area.

Well, from players obviously.  Basically players agree to a certain amount before playing.  Could be a different amount for each of them, depending on their relative strengh.

For instance, a 2000 ELO player could engage 100 BTC for a game against a 2500 ELO who would engage only 10 BTC.  The winner takes the engagement of the loser.

The system could work with a clearing process, or be based only on reputation of players (which would require that each player use a key pair cryptography).

I've just checked into my debian repo and I've seen a program called "cutechess".  It might do the job after modification.


PS.  Actually when I think about it, the ELO rating system would be useless if we can play for bitcoins.  Because you're very unlikely a weak player if you are willing to play only small amounts for each games.   Strong players would be recognized by their self-confidence, and therefore by the amount of bitcoins they are willing to engage.

I have this idea in my "Kibabase" virtual world conception that players can earn bases(currency of my virtual world) in mini games that help other players. They can then exchange bases to bitcoin for a fee..which is how I will make my money.

One such game is the taxi. A player can either buy a taxi or rent a taxi and then take part in the transportation market. They determine their own rate and so on.

This seems backwards. The stronger player should bet more money than the weaker one as he is more likely to win (hence, losing should cost him more). This is what happens with the ranking systems: if you're 2000 ELO and you lose against a 1500 ELO, your rank drops more than if you lose against a 2500 ELO.

I know from experience that strong players usually don't accept to play against weak players.   You need some incentive to convince them.

Wait, in the chess thing, what happens if an AI plays? I mean, I could simulate easily all possible moves and do a treemap choice maker which only highlights the suggested move for winning and then just act if I was the best of all. :/

Yes you can.  When playing chess on internet, you can never assume your opponent is a human being.

At least you don't have that problem with the game of Go (for now anyway) :)

I don't think teenagers like chess very much.

Yes.  We have disgressed a bit.   And you don't need a graphic card to play chess anyway.

We just need to develop a resource intensive checkers game.... wait. WTF were we talking about?

I've fantasized about how games could be designed that have well defined rules that humans would have an advantage over computers for the farthest into the future. Go is the right sort of thing. How can we make a game more Go-like than Go?

OMG yes we could create a "chesscoin" :  it would be a cryptocurrency where the proof of work would be the victory in a quick chess tournament between all nodes of the network.

In order to have the tournament last only ten minutes, the speed of each games could be adjusted to the number of players.

This would be so cool.

A game of GO would be better.

Have a look at Arimaa (http://arimaa.com), it's just that.

games with hidden information that involve reading facial cues and such (poker for instance) are going to be dominated by humans for a very long time.  That doesn't translate to the internet mind you, as the cues get simplified to raises and such.

Even playing live facial cues are not going to matter when playing against a computer.

If you have 3 humans and one computer they will.

That's a good point.

The humans could unintentionally (or intentionally I guess) collude by having more info about each others likely holdings and future actions than the computer could.

But once the computer gets an eye they're screwed because the reading will be going one way only. But, like you said, that's probably far off yet.