Bitcoin Forum

A free bitcoin every day, thanks to the mysterious bitcoin flower!

Check out the bitcoin flower at http://www.bitcoinflower.com/ (http://www.bitcoinflower.com/). It opens once a day for 15 minutes and reveals a shiny bitcoin. Nobody knows when it opens (it's random) but if you're the first to see it you get a whole shiny bitcoin.

I just created this site and welcome your comments and suggestions.
Also, if you win a bitcoin I would be happy to read your comment here.

Have fun!

https://i.imgur.com/2GwfL.png

It seems nice but why?
And you noticed that you paid a fee when you sent 1BTC to the first winner? http://blockexplorer.com/tx/0a95b89dd864b4a954f27b6d8e9a22bb85adeca9cd0d5594a9564d85c9a39b91

Great idea!

Two suggestions:
1) You state that the flower will open once a day. So a visitor seeing that it was already open on a certain day wont come back again on the very same day. But if you technically open the flower once every 24 hours (not related to calender days), that could result in 2 openings on a single calendar day, depending on the timezone. As a result you could state that the flower opens "at least" once a day, and so every visitor will come back, even if the flower was already open on the very same day.
2) And you will have to add some time to the winners list, because depending on the timezone, it could be that the stated day hasn't even started yet for the visitor.

As I wrote before great idea, and nice graphics. Now if you add some web banners, the site will probably pay for itself ;)

Both very good suggestions – thanks for taking the time to share! I sure will implement this.

Cool site...and a great idea to put a banner or something there to help pay for the btc prize!
/me goes back to his keyboard and writes a bot that scrapes the page every 5 seconds to alert him when closed.png changes to open.png

Interesting idea... time to write a bot script to check every 2 minutes with autoclick to beat indicasteve to it... :D

Yeah, someone will obviously come up with a bot but I have some (top secret) counteractive measures up my sleeves ;)
Right now the winner has to solve a captcha so there's no way to automatically claim the bitcoin, this must be done by a human.

That's good. Obviously wasn't serious about botting your site and neither is indicasteve (I think!), just wanted to highlight the possible abuse you might get :D

+1(?)

I'm not that code savvy, indicasteve, but are you saying that a code can be written to open up the flower at will, thus being the first to see it and then be able to claim the Bitcoin? If this is an issue, is there a wraparound that would make this idea work? While waiting for the answer(s), I'm going to pen, then post here, why I feel this is an excellent idea.


http://i43.tower.com/images/mm100967808/free-prize-inside-how-make-purple-cow-seth-godin-paperback-cover-art.jpg

The thought(s) I have will be my own, but I'm pretty sure it'll be in line with what Seth wrote in his book (of which I just found by accident while hunting an image to go with this post). If you don't know who Seth Godin (I'm an avid fan), then here are two excellent videos to get you up to speed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBIVlM435Zg and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQGYr9bnktw&feature=relmfu

Really?  You do realize that will just start an arms race with maxmint; he or she will write code to detect and ban bots, somebody will deploy bots via multiple IP addresses to workaround, maxmint will be forced to add a CAPTCHA, etc...

maxmint: it can be kind of fun to try to scam the scammers.  If you detect them, just never let them win (but don't tell them you're not letting them win).

However, they'll eventually figure out you're doing that.  The only way to win the arms race is to make it more expensive for the scammers to win than the reward.  If I recall correctly, getting around one-per-IP-address and CAPTCHA restrictions costs a scammer a few US pennies.  If you're giving away 1BTC worth $10, then you'll have to make sure the scammers will have to solve several thousand captchas to win.

Totally off-topic: What show is this? :D

When I first read the concern, I envisioned the bot only being able to alert the bot-builder (or open on demand) that the flower has opened, then allowing him/him the opportunity to be the first to claim the prize.

I'm still penning that post, outlining how this is an excellent idea.


Here's hoping noone beats me to the flower patch.


http://valariebudayr.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54ef83753883301348010cc4b970c-500wi

heard that CAPTCHA's are not unbeatable 100%

I don't have a clue what show it is. I Googled (the only verb in the English language that must be capitalized to be properly used in an sentence) for images (since a picture's worth a...) using the phrase "There's always a solution!" to express that there's a solution to every challenge. Believe me! I want to stay on topic with this great idea.

Not a show. It's a movie: Grindouse: Planet Terror.  The other subflick is Death Proof.  Dual feature, if you will.

http://decaptcher.com/ > 2$ for 1000 solved captcha
IP basis is the best bet for this, 5k  private proxies (mostly botnet proxies) cost about 300-400$ weekly so not worthing buying thoses proxies only to get one bitcoin.

For free proxies you can use lists of softblocked proxies, so you don't allow any proxies IP to open the flower.

You can also use custom script to evade most of bot traffic
ex: block non JS / too old browser / softblocked proxy list etc etc

BTW, this is very awesome and generous to give away a free bitcoin like that and all I can say is thanks for this.

Serge, you're right. Most of the CAPTCHAs (including the very common reCAPTCHA) nowadays can be solved by machines or manually by people sitting in some low wage country. But it still is a significant obstacle.

cool idea!

No, that is not accurate, and a critical mind would be totally right considering this dubious.

If you introduce a random time T between two openings, where T is on average 24 hours, you will have ON AVERAGE 1 opening per day, and ON AVERAGE 365 openings per year etc. BUT: You can (and will!) very well have time periods of more than 24 hours, too, i.e. you will have calendar days (and sometimes even two or more successive calendar days) with no opening at all.

So it is simply not correct to claim "that the flower opens "at least" once a day".

Here is a quick example, when implementing the time T as a random value following a Rayleigh distribution, with an average of T=1.0 days:

Matlab code:

Result:
* In 47.1% / 17.8% / 4.8% of all cases, the time duration T between two openings is shorter than 0.90 / 0.50 / 0.25 days
But also:
* In 45.6% / 17.1% / 4.3% of all cases, the time duration T between two openings is longer than 1.0 / 1.5 / 2.0 days

http://i52.tinypic.com/2qjvkt4.png

How do you people know this stuff (in reference to knowing the movie title, of which I was unaware)?

Captcha issue solved? (feedback welcome)

If it was my site, I wouldn't use a Captcha. Here's how:

To view the flower, you must first be logged in, therefore a member (so to speak). If you are the first to click the flower when the Bitcoin appears, a message pops up stating such, then directs you to check you email for instructions on how to claim your free Bitcoin.

Wow, you even included a fancy graph, very cool!

Right now the system creates a random open time (between 0 86400 seconds) for every calendar day. So the interval between 2 openings is anywhere between 0 and 48 hours.
But the flowers still opens every calendar day, so I think it's safe to say that it opens up at least once a day. If the interval between 2 openings happens to be only 3 hours (one just before midnight, the other right after) it looks like as if the flower openend 2 times a day, at least for someone sitting in the right timezone.

Sure, to have it semantical correct you would have to define the exact meaning of the word day – is it 24 hours? a calendar day? in which timezone? etc.

But hey, I created this for the fun of it and I wanna keep it real simple without any lengthy explanations.
Thanks for your scientific thoughts though!

Just make that ever 86399 (86400-1) seconds, so that it on average opens more than once per day, as 1.00001 is more than 1.0. And the best part is you can do that without additional costs - well not really, but 1.00001 isn't that much more than 1.0 in the end :)

Actually if you also count leap seconds (happens every few years) and you have the service running a few years, every 86400 second (unix time) would still be more than once per day, because UTC time (calendar time) has on average longer days than unix time "days" (no leap seconds).

It's a nice concept, but the way it works now with a random number being generated for each day between 1 and 86400 is not the way to do it.

The way it should be done is to give every second a 1 in 86400 chance of causing the event. The way it works now is that every second on the same day has a 0 chance of opening the flower again once it's already happened.

For instance you'd just have a script that runs once per second and that script has a 0.0000115741 (to make it just slightly more probable than once every 24 hours) probability of opening the flower.

You could even pre-calculate each day if you like to save the script being run constantly and could do an interval smaller than one second.

Although I'm intrigued by the direction that this thread has progressed so far, I wish to get back on track with what the OP has introduced, before it forks to a discussion on the how and why the African swallows are non-migratory. Granted, all the posts are enlightening and on-topic, but I like to see how this idea can be taken to the nth degree in regards to strengthening Bitcoin's position.

With that said, I offer up the following:

Let's put bots and any security concerns to the side for the moment, because if, at the onset of Bitcoin, the founders spent all their time discussing nefarious schemes upon brainstorming the next-great-idea, Bitcoin wouldn't be where it is today--they'll still be hashing out the what ifs. I offered up a way to not use captcha in post #21 which is, BTW, a good way to increase your mailing list. The money is in the list!

Every now and then, a Remarkable idea blossoms from the Bitcoin community. I feel that this is one such Remarkable idea. See: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/01/how_to_be_remar.html

Imagine, if you will companies, of any size (not 1 or 2 or 9.5, but 100's/1,000's), incorporating this Mysterious Bitcoin innovation in their websites. These companies don't even need to embrace, nor believe in, Bitcoin to gain value by incorporating this gimmick, for lack of a better word. As an example, Moen.com could have a page showing an image of a facet (which reminds me of another idea) in the off position (not flowing). But randomly, once a day (or whatever the time frame), it start flowing--bitcoin(s). As another example, a seller of upper-end toasters has a dedicated page showing an image of a toaster with one of its levers in the down position (visualize toast being made). Again, randomly once a day that side pops up, revealing a Bitcoin. Afterwards, the lever on the other side goes down once the Bitcoin is claimed.

Every single product and service can incorporate this idea. If you doubt that statement, name an example--any example--and I'll tell you how it could be achieved provided, of course, the website owner wants it.

Another quick example: dictionary.com could have a special search box so one could type in a word (the use of cookies allows you to do this only once a day) and if it matches the magic word-of-the-day, voilà--Bitcoin(s)!

Now, further imagine a site dedicated to listing every site that has incorporated this gimmick (sorry for incorporating the word incorporated numerous times in this post, as well as the several uses of parentheses I incorporated to explain myself, but I can't help it because Bitcoin excites me--excites me so much that you may have noticed I incorporated the use of this parenthesized statement after the wrong word--but I digress). This possible site would not only list the above mentioned sites in categories, but also list the exact times (clock, as well as maybe the number of) the Bitcoin was last revealed at each site. Furthermore, it would show a "hot list" of sites fast approaching the deadline of when the Bitcoin is suppose to be revealed--colored coded red/orange/yellow. It could even list who the winners are.

As you can clearly see, more traffic is generated to each website that employs the use of the Mysterious Bitcoin (name change may be in order here--ideas?). More traffic=more sales (unless the product or service completely sucks--but Bitcoin doesn't hurt their endeavor). It'll be up to each site owner on how to implement this program to get maximum return on their $0 investment.

Although the OP has set the proverbial bar high with his Bitcoin producing flower, I'm sure other artists will soon be champing at the bit to showcase their talents, as well, to better the latest new graphic.

Remember, this is the time of year shop owners are jockeying for position to get their sites ready for the Christmas season. Here's one idea on the table they'll be hard-pressed to pass up.

Speaking of Christmas, pictured three socks hanging on the fireplace mantel...

I don't see any ads on your site. How do you monetize this service?

no kidding!

I watched it before... I guess?

Something as unique as that sticks in my head.  Guess it does help that I am a fan of rodriguez/tarantino films also.

i gotta say, i think the grindhouse double feature was some of tarantinos and rodriguezs worst work...i wasnt a fan of either movie.

 i thought death proof was the marginally better of the two....but definiately not on par with pulp fiction or reservoir dogs...

I just gotta say this thread is awesome.  Where else can you get a discussion of a cool new and artistic bitcoin site, website monetization, bot arms races, and Tarantino films all in one shot (and for the record, I really liked Death Proof...the other one not so much).  

I was so excited upon reading the original post and webpage for the first, I skimmed right over the part that doesn't mention it's animated. It was the animation aspect that inspired me to write post #25, which is entirely based on that falsehood. I guess I could now stop refreshing the page waiting to watch the Bitcoin materialize in real time. This is worst than last week when I kept refreshing the page waiting for little Jimmy to untie his left sneaker--Oops! Wrong board.

Seriously, post #25 outlines how this can be monetized (but not with a static flower or other--though possible) if this was an animated flower, toaster, wallet, purse, facet, traffic light, or politician telling the truth (of course there'll only be one a fraction of a Bitcoin produced from theirs ass lips once a month, on average), to name a few--the list is truly endless.

This idea has great potential but, once again, only if it is animated. You could even have an embedded video to get around the bots.


Discuss?


http://www.webdesign.org/img_articles/9521/magician_26.gif

Actually I wanted to make the whole thing animated (using jquery, leaves flying around etc). But in order to keep it simple I decided not do go this way in the beginning. I might add this late on. And your idead of using a video could really be a big step in preventing bots from scraping the site.

Post #25 really started a lot of things in my head rolling, some great ideas there! Have to go back to my thinking box and …

another great movie!!! tarantino was on top of his game on that one....amazing dialogue broken up with scenes of brutal violence.... gotta love it!  :D

"gots a german here 'at wants to die for country....oblige him"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIja0yValiE&feature=related


really cool interview with eli roth about inglorious basterds (he played donnie aka "the bear jew"  ...for those that dont know, he also directed hostel, cabin fever, and few other movies)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwMoq9ZHxpw&feature=relmfu

This reminds of this picture that had me laughing my drink out of my nose when I first saw it.
http://www.twilightseries.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/inglourious-basterds-twilight.jpg

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!

about the bot thing.. cannot the OP simply move the closed.jpg to closed.jpg.bak when he is ready to release the coin...

and then move open.jpg.bak to closed.jpg for 15 minutes...

make sure the file sizes are the same and any other relevant info inside the jpg description (whatever that is called).

and thus the bot really cannot screen scrape the html/jpg for anything interesting...

but then one has to be careful they do not learn the link url for claiming the coin.. but there is a catchpa.. which is nice..
but a quick text message to the bot runner would alert then in about 15-20 seconds to hop on the PC and finish the task...
not totally reliable but i am sure they could claim the coin a few times a week...

in summary.. the real solution in my view to defeat the bot is to not allow them to scrape anything useful and randomize
the winning link name so it cannot be used twice.

sure it can, a quick md5 hash check will reveal that the jpg has changed, regardless of the filename

even if you did it all in flash or java or something invisible to a script fetching the page, I can load it in the background with a bot and take a screenshot of the rendered flower and take a checksum of this screenshot and wait for it to change.

some kind of randomized animated thing with changing colors and patterns and such would make it more difficult, but as long as the "open" flower looks significantly different than the "closed" flower to a human, it might be possible for a bot's algorithms to determine the same thing

I've written many casino bots, and have defeated all the anti-bot tech put out by all the casino software I've encountered and needed to write a bot for.  The hardest was a video poker game which each time a card was shown in a particular spot, it was slightly (randomly) different in card location (by a few pixels) and in the font edge details like angle and anti-aliasing.  I had to resort to custom training OCR software instead of my tried and true screenshot checksum hash lookup method

crap. good point.

i like the idea of randomizing the picture in some way also each time you need to change it.. use ?imagemagick? or whatever
to change it ever so slightly to screw the checksum up each time.

but lets be honest.. if you can code up a bot quickly to analyze pictures that well.. maybe that person should be submitting a resume to
several companies to make a bit more then 1 btc a day ;-)

to the OP.. i like your webpage. very cool. you should put up a banner though to offset costs. no one would care i think.

I'd love to but I don't know any companies that want an ex-blackhat script kiddie.  They are probably out there though but who's hiring these days...

This is why good will doesn't work, except in the form of small faucets.
Unknown people will instantly come up with ways to monetize your 'charity' or even plain out steal from it, or make it their regular income through proxies and decaptchas.

It's a generous idea but all it does is attract scumbags. People who genuinely visit the site every now and then will never get anything.

this is pretty much true.  by the way I'm not actually doing what I said was possible, I'm just disclosing what is possible.  I don't care to write a bot for this, I'm above this sort of thing.  I wrote bots for people who wanted to auto-play perfect strategy at casino games, not to rip off 1BTC gifts

:)  Sorry to start trouble here with the bot thing...I wouldn't write a bot for this myself either, but I did want to bring it to the OP's attention that sooner rather than later, someone world.

I think the only way to defeat bot scraping here would be to have to type in the captcha before you can see if the flower is open or not.

I do like her idea and admire her for her generosity and hope she has fun with it.

If it was me though, I would have 10 x .1 BTC prizes a day...or even 20 x.05 BTC....probably get more frequent visitors like that...idk.

But anyway, keep up the good work!

My competing project has this protection, also CAPTCHA, IP blacklist and even statistical analyzer. Regardless this bots still trying to cheat me. I give away big number of relative small prizes, so <10% cheat level is tolerable, but you pay only one big bounty per day, which gives big incentive to the bot makers and they can easily destroy your business even with few successful cheat attempts.

Another problem is that you give away only one prize per day and all people except one lucky will get nothing, although they have spent much time on your website catching bounty. This fact can disappoint and many of them could lose hope to win and never return again. I would suggest to pay some "booby prize".

If the likelihood for a flower opening is the same every minute, and such that the average time interval between two successive openings is equal to one day, then we get the following statistical distribution for the time interval between two successive openings:

http://i55.tinypic.com/v2uvco.png

Probability that time interval is < 0.9 days/0.5 days/0.25 days/1 hour =  59.6/39.7/22.4/4.1 %
Probability that time interval is > 1.0 days/1.5 days/2.0 days/3.0 days = 36.6/22.3/ 13.5/5.0 %

This makes more sense than my previous post with the Rayleigh distribution.

Matlab/Octave code:

Great analysis :). This is definitely the way to do it and is what I suggested back in post 24. It's similar to how these things are handled in nature (radioactive decay).

I'd like if you could also show a small animated clock with the current CDT date & time or just have time left to end of day & if the flower had opened as yet in that 24 hr period

Also a different favicon than the forum's, say of your flower opened (or not):
http://www.favicon.cc/

Nice concept, I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves

If I understood correctly then one doesn't need to refresh the page (multiple times) to see the blooming flower, it will show up when it changes if the page is just left open?

If so good to say this on the page perhaps...

I failed to see any JS that would make it bloom without refresh, sorry.

I, too, see it evolving, Otoh. The idea will diffidently evolve, now that evolve has commented on this thread.


http://www.gifbin.com/bin/1236606809_slow_motion_flower.gif


http://i676.photobucket.com/albums/vv122/thomaslee014/Animated%20flower/Keefers_AnimatedRoses.gif

Wonderful idea. I like the fun aspect of it.

I thought of something similar a while back. Might take a fair bit of coding though. It might be called The Mandelpot. It's like a treasure hunt for pots of gold (acctualy bitcoin prizes), randomly distibuted through an online rendering of the mandelbrot set. You would have to zoom in a bit to find the smaller bitcoin 'pots of gold' and explore the set even more carefully to find biger prizes. The colective prize money would replaced regularly as it is won, but randomly split so that the smaller chunks appear closer to 1:1 scale (say at a minimum of 100:1 for 100 satoshis), while a larger chunk would be calculated to be hiden deeper (say 1,000,000:1 for a 0.1 bitcoin prize). You can explore the set for as long as you please, but when you login you agree to have your GPU/CPU harvested for some machine cycles to generate bitcoin. So it's actualy a casual bitcoin mining farm also. While you are exploring you might notice various sponsorship ads swimming into view amidst the sweeping tendrills of the mandelbrot set. Also some of the pots might have a generous vouchers of genuine discount/gifts/introductory offers from the sponsors, rather than straight out bitcoin prizes.

I think this could be made so that bots have no better chance of finding the pots than the humans, but as long as they are there, they too have to contribute machine cycles to play, so they would contribute to the prize pool as much as (or more than) they are harvesting from it. The more hashing power you have the more quickly you can zoom, scroll, render and such, so it should possible to ballance the odds if done properly.

If somebody wants to code this up, I'd likely to be quite willing to put a reasonable sum of bitcoin in to help launch it. What would the coding for something like that be worth?

Someone got the today's coin, but the tx on blockexplorer says that no such transactions exists.

EDIT:Ok, showed up.

I got the open flower.

Too bad I was using Opera Mobile, which meant the site didn't respond to my presses. :(

So far I've only read the first two sentences of this post and already figured out you're trying to fracture this idea with your fractals.

I'm not sure what it would of costed, because I think I just increased it: Make it all 3D ~ Picture swimming in a Mandelbrot Set where you're able to go left, right, up, down, back and forth.

Here's an idea that just came to mind: A fractal Bitcoin (tree-as in money) image.

Yeah! That's what I had in mind Phinnaeus. It would be just like using a mandlebrot rendering engine (I used to play with fractint), only online, and yeah, 3D rendering, that's why I say you would have to be able zoom scroll and move through the set just as you can with the desktop applications.


Er... Not sure what you are getting at here. ???

You have a wicked mind Mat. :P

At least you didn't sugest a bitcoinpenis.com with a... wait for it... 'here cums the money shot', daily prize.  :o Oops did I say that? :-X

My competing service Dailybitcoins.org works exactly as you suggested.

P.S. When your lottery would become popular, you must implement serious anti-bot measures. Currently my free lottery has about 700 unique visitors per day and I spend a lot of time to defend my site from cheaters and block bots. Today I have experienced massive attack from China, CAPTCHA probably had solved manually by poor kids and about 300 fake bounty requests was made. If I would't manually review all payments, my site would go out of business. So think more seriously about security. If you will not do this, your flower will wither very soon!

Cool site.

It wasn't anything negative directed towards you. It was meant to be humorous by employing word play--fracture/fractals. (I) FAILED

LOL. No I didn't think you were casting nasturtiums Phinnaeus, I just didn't get it as I'm a bit thick at that time of day. ;)

There sure is, and that's why I like this idea so much.


Allow me to address your concern by using my toaster example again:


http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/images2/toaster.JPG


Someone already mention to make it too expensive for the thieves that make bots to game the system. With my idea, I would welcome those thieves with open arms. Of course they won't come, but they'll be welcome nonetheless.

Example: I have a site that sells toasters. Upper-end toasters at competitive prices. I have a large enough mark-up on some of these toasters that I'm willing to offer another 10% discount to the first person who sees the Bitcoin pop up from the toaster. Therefore if a bot builder games the system, he's more than welcome to use the 10% coupon he just won to buy the toaster where I still may make a 5-10 percent profit. My toaster site is listed on the Magic Bitcoin listing site, so I know I'm getting organic traffic=buyers from there.

I'm able to list my site for free on Magic Bitcoin.

Magic Bitcoin makes its profit from the referral programs that some, not all, of the sites have in place. They'll be no need to clutter this site up with Google adsense, banner ads, etc. The site owner would have a couple/few micro sites himself, that he'll be able to direct traffic to.

Magic Bitcoin will even get more traffic from every site that's listed on it. How? Well, underneath my animated toaster is a line that reads: Visit Magic Bitcoin to view when the last time the 10% Off Bitcoin materialize. Someone who came to my toaster site from outside the system I just described, clicks it, wondering what this could be all about and maybe convert another person over to using Bitcoin, if nothing else.

I already stated this about Magic Bitcoin, although not called that at the time:

And where do you get off calling me a nasturtium? I thought we were bonding, but now I see someone twisting their nose up at me. (please don't have me pen another FAILED post)

A proctologist trying to scoop up some more organic biz would welcome this idea with both hands, unless he's too anal to see the beauty in this.


http://www.tinygif.com/data/media/1/cartman-pooping.gif


Now, would anyone care to offer up a "Cliff Notes" version of this thread? 1,726 1,750 viewers can't be wrong!

Please correct me if I don't have this figured out in post #66: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=36868.msg456667#msg456667

Getting a 10% discount is not a prize.  That's so lame and just screams of CHEAP and SCAM.

Prizes should be freebies with no obligation to 'buy' something to actually get a lame discount on something that was originally overpriced.  Most people would know the difference between 'prize' and 'scam' and never return.

Your point is well taken, indicasteve.

With my toaster example, the toaster model would not be overpriced, although it would be an expensive model, nonetheless.

Very valid point on a discount not being a prize. But a free toaster cover would be a great prize for these upper-end toasters.

Further thoughts?

Totally agree. In Eastern Europe common business practice is to drastically increase price, than advertise big discount, e.g. 90%. It is very disgusting.

I guess I need to clarify my example. In no way have I suggested that you mark up the price of an item, just to turn around and sell it at a discount or offer a free gift because of the inflated profit margin.

This table sells for $1,500 but only cost $200 to produce. The $1,500 price tag is the going rate for these tables without a mark-up, and can easily be sold for less and still enjoy a handsome profit margin. I can easily give away a set of six place mats via the Magic Bitcoin program, and it would barely cut into my profits, but I would have enjoyed more traffic and possible another sale I won't have had otherwise.

http://www.countryliving.com/cm/countryliving/images/oT/farm-table-3-0809-de.jpg

Therefore, I'm not wanting to see this idea used on sites that sell inflated priced wares. I envision it on sites that have unique items that just so happen have a nice profit margin built in, but the site owners desire more traffic.

Further thoughts?

Again, a great idea.
Hopefully more users will try to use this site and win 1BTC.

You could implement a Captcha to stop things like this happening, or possibly some sort of bot check.


P.S - I hope this idea catches on!  :)

Chinese kids decaptches it for few cents per thousand.

...and without using a Captcha.

Example:

I'm registered on the site to view the flower.
I'm the first to see it.
I click it.
A script is generated stating: Congratulations Bruno! You Won the Bitcoin -- Check your email for instructions on how to redeem your Bitcoin.
I go to my email and claim my Bitcoin.


http://uploads.askapache.com/2008/04/bad_robot.png

Bot watches flower and make request if bounty available, entering your email. You receive letter and redeem Bitcoin.

Same flash image of unopened flower refreshes every 5 minutes(?) until the time to show Bitcoin producing flower. Code stays the same(?)

Thank you all for commenting, throwing in your ideas and sharing your grindhouse passion at this thread ;)

Here's a quick update:
- Automated scripts could be the site's achilles' heel. I'm currently evaluating your suggestions and some other ideas to come up with something in the next couple of days. I know it's not possible to find the perfect solution, but I think there's a way to at least limit this problem.
- As suggested by some of you, I decided to put up a banner space to somehow refinance the site. I tried to avoid cluttering up the site by putting only one small banner at the right sidebar.

By the time all the bitcoinerz are done their lame loz hax on your site, you will become a security expert here.

I most certainly know that if you can pass the bit-tard stamp of approval you will be qualified to work for any e-commerce company in your country.

Live long and prosper!

Add some noise to the image to make impossible comparing hashes.

Send the coin to yourself, then open the flower for 15 minutes so that all the bot owners think they just missed it.

Or a rotating banner. Each day somebody from the Bitcoin community who has a website is that day's sponsor. For about $10, he gets 24 hour exposure (midnight to midnight, CST?).


                          Today's Bitcoin Flower is Sponsored by BitAccordion.com


http://c.editingmyspace.com/files/en/flowers/flower_012.gif

I think someone is using a bot. I was just there when the flower opened, and I missed it!

i missed it also. it was like there was nothing to click on so i quickly opened IE instead of opera
thinking my fav web browser was not working but alas.. i was too slow.

i am still unsure where to click next time if i am lucky enough to see it... on the coin it says.. but it is
frustrating clicking on the coin to see nothing happen. i would prefer it to say.. sorry, too slow! heh.

I just wanted to say that I like your idea every much and like the way #25 is going with it. It could really be something useful to all parties involved if you can overcome the bot problem without making it an annoying thing to do.

Godspeed.

Best of luck with the website

Thank you Eli. And for those that don't have the time to hunt it, I quoted #25 for your reading pleasure.

Some sites, like Godaddy, have a timeout code built into their website. If you'll been on the page for over a certain period of time without any activity, the page has to be refreshed or you must relog in.

Comments?

My site also has 2 minute prize expiration time, I think it is good to implement the same in your flower.

maxmint, as I said in another post thanks for this site. I just saw the advertiser banner to advertise, 1 complete BTC for 24 hours good!

May I know how much UV (Unique Visitors) are you getting per those 24 hours ?

The same question, show more stats. Or there are so few visitors that you don't want to reveal data?

P.S. Giving away only ONE bounty per day is not enough to motivate significant number of users to regularly visit site, IMHO.

CDT?  Is that Australian, Cuban or North American?

UTC is so much more internet friendly... I don't understand why so many people persist in using these parochial abbreviations on global websites (especially when it's not obvious what country the site is in or aimed at)

Very good point. I'm the one who made that faux pas (opted for the French word/phrase here since this is a global site). I first typed EST? but thought that didn't look right, deciding to go with the US timezone I live in--CDT (boy, I really screwed this up--I meant CST). The whole time I was writing/editing that sentence, I was thinking about using a Coordinated Universal Time, but didn't think that would CUT the mustard. I almost went with GMT, but didn't want to take the time to see if I spelled it correctly like I should of done with CDT. Either (or is it either) way, I felt the gist of the idea would come through. I believe it has, for I think I already read one comment on my idea.

Now, let's recap what we have so far: (remind me what I missed so that I can add it to the list)

• A Rotating Banner Ad
• Open More Than Once a Day
• Script to Fool the Bots
• Make it Animated

As an aside, maxmint, I just saw your music video. I like your voice but, moreover, I like your look (not in a gay way--not that the word gay is bad [got to cover all bases on this board]). Do you build any homemade musical instruments? I'm forming a group of musicians that build and play their own musical instruments--not the cheap plastic types, but good sounding instruments. I have an IN over at AGT that could get the group to the top 10, provided the sound is spot on. I already have the name of the group (secret) and the gimmick that will spring it to the Top 10. I'm hunting members now (in my spare time--haha, thanks to Bitcoin).

To give you an idea of what I have in the works, I'll show you these two images:


THEY

http://beartrapsummerfestival.com/files/2011/04/hqdefault6.jpg?w=250&h=200&zc=1&s=0&a=t&q=89


MEET


http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01247/blue-man-group_1247903c.jpg

Since the site is only 3 days old I can't give really meaningful stats yet. But this is what Google Analytics tracked for the 24 hours of yesterday:
Unique visits: 1647
Pageviews: 9692
Average time on site: 10 minutes 44 seconds

I can't tell how many of these visitors are bots, but I think a great deal of them are real people as the current ad gets a nice click through rate (I don't think bots are clicking ads).
For those of you how would like to sponsor the flower, I just set up a simple banner booking system:
http://www.bitcoinflower.com/ads/

Absolutely right, thanks for pointing this out. I'll change that.


No, I don't build instruments myself but your concept sound kind of cool – let's discuss this via PM :)
Also, I'm still having the animated flower you suggested on my list but did not find the time yet to implement.

maxmint, I believe that the CDT comment by julz was directed toward me, which I've already address. It was my bad!

Wow it's growing fast lol, thanks for making the stats page, at least we'll know how CPM it cost to advertise on the site.

THanks a lot for this service again

I will definitely buy at least 1 one day banner ad at http://www.bitcoinflower.com/ once I get Bitcoin Leather's website up and running, because...


This is My Favorite Thread


http://cache2.artprintimages.com/p/LRG/6/666/19YC000Z/art-print/dog-with-cat-and-yarn.jpg

2 BTC per day is very expensive. According to you stats, your flower generates about 10k impressions per day, i.e. you charge 0.2 BTC ($2) per 1000 impressions. First time you may get enough advertisers, but soon you would need to reduce the price.

You are right and I know that 2 BTC is much for 10K impressions. I wanted to go with 1 BTC, but here's the reason I had to raise the price:
I implemented an anti-bot method which is using lots of processing power from my cloud server hence generating real cost for me.

However, my ultimate goal is to bring down ad price to 1 BTC per day or increase traffic so that 2 BTC is a reasonable price.

WOW! ---> http://chartbeat.com/dashboard2/?url=bitcoinflower.com&k=45d4156495a40de15a8d84966ccbb28b#

does the page auto refresh to show the open flower, Or do i have to keep tapping F5

Right now you have to refresh manually.

This ---> http://www.myrefresher.com/  I didn't check on the price, but wanted to show such an animal exist.

firefox probably has an extension.
in opera just right click, select reload every, and choose custom time to auto refresh.
IE.. i just don't care.. and firefox i am just guessing. opera for the win.

Wonderful idea. I like the fun aspect of it.

I thought of something similar a while back. Might take a fair bit of coding though. It might be called The Mandelpot. It's like a treasure hunt for pots of gold (acctualy bitcoin prizes), randomly distibuted through an online rendering of the mandelbrot set. You would have to zoom in a bit to find the smaller bitcoin 'pots of gold' and explore the set even more carefully to find biger prizes. The colective prize money would replaced regularly as it is won, but randomly split so that the smaller chunks appear closer to 1:1 scale (say at a minimum of 100:1 for 100 satoshis), while a larger chunk would be calculated to be hiden deeper (say 1,000,000:1 for a 0.1 bitcoin prize). You can explore the set for as long as you please, but when you login you agree to have your GPU/CPU harvested for some machine cycles to generate bitcoin. So it's actualy a casual bitcoin mining farm also. While you are exploring you might notice various sponsorship ads swimming into view amidst the sweeping tendrills of the mandelbrot set. Also some of the pots might have a generous vouchers of genuine discount/gifts/introductory offers from the sponsors, rather than straight out bitcoin prizes.

I think this could be made so that bots have no better chance of finding the pots than the humans, but as long as they are there, they too have to contribute machine cycles to play, so they would contribute to the prize pool as much as (or more than) they are harvesting from it. The more hashing power you have the more quickly you can zoom, scroll, render and such, so it should possible to ballance the odds if done properly.

If somebody wants to code this up, I'd likely to be quite willing to put a reasonable sum of bitcoin in to help launch it. What would the coding for something like that be worth?

-DiamondPlus

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Mandelbrot_sequence_new.gif

Dude...don't make me look up what the hell a mandelbrot set is when I'm stoned...They should put some kind of epileptic warning message on this stuff..

Perhaps you care for a hit of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jGaio87u3A

Today I notice the bitcoinflower sponsor is ibfx  'a provider of online forex trading services'

I'm curious.. did this advertiser specifically choose to advertise on the bitcoinflower.com site, or are you just using some ad system so that this mob just happened to land a spot here?   

I noticed referral ID in this ad, so possible that flower's admin haven't found advertiser and posted reflink.

Another concern is Google Ads. When I opened my service Dailybitcoins.org I have asked at Google Ads forum about suitability of my site for this program. They answered that accepted are only websites with original text content and Dailybitcoins.org does not qualify. Although virtually I can place Google Ads, they could suspend my account and forfeit funds at any time. Bitcoinflower.com is very similar to my site (identical idea, just different design) so probably its admin will have big trouble with receiving funds from Google.

Yes, I placed Google Adsense and will leave it running for another 2 days. This is to get a rough feeling on how much revenue could be made with non-bitcoin ads.
Ad placement will get back to bitcoin-related ads on 24th of August and price will be i bitcoin for 24 hours as intended in the beginning.

.... thiers some seriously bots stopping people from getting the coin.... i sat there F5ing for about 20mins or so, and OMFG A BITCOIN, CLICK CLICK CLICK, "sorry nothing to see here"
Are you fucking serious? at the time of the event the slowest my f5ing was, was once every 3secs, And somehow SOMEONE got it before me? How In The Fuck.

Don't forget that on average there are around 50 different people on the site – all watching the bitcoin. And it does not take more than a couple of seconds to enter your bitcoin address and solve the captcha if you're fast.

Although I think that I got a quite good solutions for preventing bot traffic I will have a look at this topic again.

In my service prize get locked for 2 minutes and user who see bounty will guaranteed get it.

it is a neat idea but i will definitely not use it anymore. the reward versus the time spent just
does not make sense to me personally. i also went through, "hey there is a bitcoin" CLICK CLICK CLICK...
hm.. someone beat me. That is not something that seems fun to repeat over and over again.

Isnt that flawed in the sense that once a bot clicks it the "reward" is locked down for 2mins until the bot operater comes back and solves the captcha?

Oh and a UTC clock on the site wouldbe nice, SO that we know were not wasting our time sitting looking at a disabled flower

Currently prize size is being displayed as picture, so bots aren't more our concern.

Won the price recently  ;D . I am curious though as I saw another transaction with mine was their someone before me. I won 1 btc just a fyi.

Great! Just what Bitcoin needs--More Drama. Oh, wait! This is the Bitcoin Flower thread. That's great, mute20. If you've read my posts on this thread, you'll know this is my favorite thread. I love this idea.

How's this going?

So far, I have no reason to not trust maxmint. I like this guy. I found this old thread while reading his old posts, now realizing it was he who created it. Once found, I was thinking about bumping it myself if warranted, but see that task was already done for me.

Maxmint sure the hell thinks outside the proverbial box, and I like that.

This.

That's why I bump'ed it.

oh wow... I love max min's music,  and I liked the flower - but the bitcoingem just seemed icky.
Interesting to see he refunded the last 2 buyers though... quite a loss for him then I guess! :/

At the moment it appears to be the 403 Forbidden Flower.

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Dude, it's wintertime, and the flower is hibernating, or doing whatever flowers do this time of year. Then again, maybe it's not a perennial.

ROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's summer in this side of the world, shoudn't it be blooming? Phineas, great #25! Thanks!

This is a great idea! Except its awfully boring staring at a flower all day :0

True!. Sometimes we forget the southern hemisphere guys ;)

http://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/photo/375803_700b_v1.jpg