Bitcoin Forum

You may have noticed that there are lots of new posts from Chinese on the forum, especially the market section. Most of these are adverts for goods or services offered in bitcoin, some are cries for help(all but a few are barely readable).

These are my English students, who have been separated into groups forming "companies". For them to pass  my class they must, as a company earn a specified amount of bitcoins.

The point of this is for them to get experience "running" a business with all the problems associated with it, but specifically to interact with westerners (the majority of bitcoin holders) over the internet, and where possible transact some commerce. It also shows that they have done work(penalising group freeloaders).

For all of these students, this is the first time they have interacted with westerners over the internet, nearly all of these have no computer skills, out of more than 300 of them only about 10 actually have computers(with often heavily restricted internet access). For them this feels like they are dealing with aliens, many if not most cannot grasp that except for the language, doing business with westerners is pretty much the same as with chinese.

Please be kind to them, forgiving of their English( all their English education has been focused on passing tests, not using the language), give them some friendly ( plainly worded) advice where you see fit, give them ideas for what they can do. If they are not making sense please tell them, and please dont make fun of them.


What this does for bitcoin and the community is it brings in some fresh goods and services ( mostly cheaper ones), and it increases exposure of bitcoin in general, but especially in China where it is sorely needed. As I have said in one of my articles, there are no Chinese miners, all they have to offer are goods and services, if this is a success it should be an overall boon to the bitcoin economy.

Thank you for you patience.

Thanks for the infopost! Was wondering what was going on, but figured you were behind it.


I'll try and help out where I can, being civil, etc but unfortunately I don't think I need anything they're offering.

I am very grateful and think it is a great contribution to the bitcoin community. Bridging cultures with a sustainable currency;

I got new music, translating services at unbeatable prices and with time, will have more ideas I am sure. I am looking forward to the positive ramifications this will have that are yet unknown at this time.

Thats fine, if you dont need anything then you dont need anything. Dont do charity with these though, make them work for their btc. The closer we grt to end of term the more desperate the lazy students will become, and I am sure many of them will resort to begging. Rewarding begging will do nothing to help them learn.

Of course not, ;D

I made an offer for a bitcoin for a few pages of Chinese opinion on their government and internet censorship, always have been interested in what other people think.

Nefario,

Would have been nice  if you'd warn us before.

How many students did you send to here btw? Are they all Chinese medicine students, or are some that have other qualities (coding, art)?

To be fair, Nefario did warn us (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3765.msg53363#msg53363).

Ah, missed that (never look in off-topic).

some of them should take their 2 BTC seed and pay someone to translate their market pitch into proper English.  could be a good investment!

No worries, I only remembered from a bored weekend a while back skimming through off-topic!

Back on topic (for Project Development) couldn't we use this situation for an additional bit of bitcoin promotion in China (and Chinese-speaking communities)? Do we know how well-known bitcoin is in China? A few things I can think of for Nefario's students to do are:

a) Translate a good English (or other non-Chinese) introduction to bitcoin into Chinese.
b) Develop a plan to promote bitcoin, using the text from step a.
c) Implement the plan from step b.

Elsewhere people have promised bounties to Nefario's students for funny pictures, some involving bitcoin. These could be used as well. Anyway, I'd be prepared to pay a 5 BTC bounty for each step above - though I'd need help with step a, as my non-English language skills are non-existent...

Edit: translation provided by larry (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=6961), bounty paid (http://blockexplorer.com/tx/8db7656de8e99dcf5a2b26b22d55bee5055053e5a21f91f1f7e1135ed56af468).

use google translate

I'd certainly be OK with the students using Google translate initially, though I'd hope that they'd at least check the results and edit where necessary. I'd also give the results a quick pass through it, though I wouldn't trust it (or me!) enough to pass judgement - I think that should fall to a native speaker (Nefario? Any other takers?)

They should all go get loans from a bank, buy lots and lots of 5970 based systems and start mining. The system will pay itself off after a couple months of 24/7 mining and after that the only outgoing is electricity and conversion fees.

It's not clear that mining as we know it today is going to continue to be profitable. They might never see their initial investment repaid. Never mind that they're not going to find a bank that would offer such a loan, especially with a good interest rate, especially in China.

I just read the whole thread in the off-topic section. This is so SO cool.

Dozens if not hundreds of Chinese students ready to do anything I want for a few dollars (or less) of BTC.

ANYTHING.

I'm thinking of offering a bounty for some kind of huge publicity stunt that makes the news in every major Chinese news source.

I think the rules will be that they can do it in absolutely any way they can dream up. The only requirement is that it gets coverage in all the major Chinese news sources. I would offer 12 BTC, which would allow two companies to work together to come up with something sufficiently insane and large-scale.

My only concern is that I might get Nefario arrested. That would suck. What do you guys think?

I think I'd add 5 or even 10 BTC (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4562.msg66992#msg66992)! (I don't have dacoinminster's coverage requirement, but I'd throw in an additional 10 BTC if it made most major Chinese news sources).

Oh, and I strongly agree with dacoinminster's sentiment - we'd be foolish as a community not to see this as a golden opportunity to promote bitcoin in China.

Promote smart - not loud. If you do something crazy big like that before anyone has any idea of bitcoins, then it will just confuse or scare the government/people.

And probably get Nefario arrested.

I sent Nefario a PM asking about the possibility that she might get arrested over a big publicity stunt. I don't think we should proceed without her ok.

I propose that the bounty would be paid to the group which gets the word "bitcoin" at least a passing mention in xinhua, chinadaily, and worldjournal due to their stunt, whatever it may be.

I chose these three sites because they are the top three results for a search of "Chinese News" in google, and they all have English versions.

Edit: Nefario's profile used to say "female", but now gender has been blanked out. Students have referred to Nefario as a man, so I assume that was a mistake in his profile.

Arrested, I don't think so, but I would certainly get fired. You don't need to break a law for that to happen. Think of the headline "college teacher forces students to promote western technology & ideology", I would be BBQ'd.

According to wikipedia.org and Satoshi's paper, the original idea of cryptocurrency came from Dr. Wei Dai, a Chinese native I believe, so they can not accuse you of promoting "western technology"

He's probably a western with Chinese origin.

I think that the goal of the course is to learn the students to interact with "western" people, not to do something with Bitcoin (although they should be able to find out for themselves that there are possibilities for that also and they would be better able to judge what is possible in China and what is not).

@Nefario, some feedback for next time:
Have them make a business plan in advance, so that they know what they will be selling/doing to make money. Now, they are mostly asking the market to come up with ideas of  what their business should be. In the big "western" world this would look stupid and they would fail. Second, because the market/people are different in their mind set, let them do some background research about "western" people. Even people from the US, Canada and Europe have differences in the way how they do business. Part of their business plan would be to make a website and have it hosted (and let them know that they could use some of their initial capital to rent web space).
Having ~18 people per company (which imho is a lot for a starting company) they should be able to do a lot more than what I see now happening (even having each student spending 1 hour a week, should generate 18 man hours of work).

Nefario:

Is john / v1l1r [ johannes.desiakk@gmx.at ] one of your students by any chance ?

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4205.0

He has the behavior of typical spammer + poor english.
However what is weird, he keeps repeating that he is not a scammer.

No, not one of mine.

Maybe we could get an interview with wei dai himself asking what he thinks about bitcoin ?

http://weidai.com/ (http://weidai.com/)

This would be something interesting to bitcoin users.

I have a sneaking suspicion he himself is satoshi......

 :)


Is anyone interested in this ?

Actually, a company that lets the customer come up with what they want to pay for doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. Eventually they would specialize untill growing again adding more people to other things, but from the start they would already have a market without even having to experiment with selling different things to see what people would pay for.

Not every person can do everything. If they would try it would be very inefficient and it would only cost the company money. It is far better to decide a direction that the company follows (a core business stated in the business plan) and hires qualified people needed to do the work properly. Second, in most markets people look for companies that can fill their wishes and needs. If a company says they do everything, I would not trust them being able to fill the needs. I expect a bakery to have more knowledge about bread than the local bike shop.

Nefario, please don't take it wrong, but what about you teach them english as you are supposed to do, instead of forcing them to sell themselves on the web for bitcoins?

If you can get him on, definitely.

shut up.

Hahahaha, you make me sound like a digital pimp.

The point of the exercise is to use their English to complete a task, it's called task orientated learning, learning by doing. You can see how poor their English is, this is because they focus on passing tests. So they are good at passing tests, but can't use their English to communicate even basic things.

This forces them to USE English, which as you can see most of them have never done.

Alright, so I have sent messages to most of the students who have been posting on the forum the last couple of days(just using the forum, I will send a general email tomorrow) thelling them to stop for the moment.

I apologise for the anoyance, but a lot of that is due to their poor English and pure lazyness. One thing for certain is that we can expect a lot of begging like activity such as this to happen once there is a significant takeup of bitcoin.

I'm going to have the students learn from what has happened here over the last couple of days. Get them to move away from begging and actually offer something.

Some good ideas that have come up is:
Chinese cook book
Chinese music selection(something decent and not just a few songs)
Chinese lessons.
I will have them go away and work on those for one or two weeks and come back with an actual decent product.

Other obvious ones are the translation services(although I would be careful with these, anything translated into Chinese should have the original English put through Google translate and compare the two, reject if both are the same, i.e. they used google translate, this is lazy and they should not be paid)

A clever one I think was offering photoshop services. OK most people on the bitcoin forums are quite technical but not evervyone can have PS skills. Its not one I had thought of.

And the jokes, This is something that had not crossed my mind, I'll have them put together a joke book with Chinese style jokes.

Thank you everyone for your patience, the next round (in a couple of weeks) with the improved products or services I think will actually make the forum a more vibrant place.

And finally, once this has all finished I will make as much information about the whole project available for anyone interested to have a look at. Its certainly something I will try next academic year in more formalised manner.

Nefario,

I think it would be wise to guide them a bit more before unleashing them onto the forum. I think that is where this lacked. Also have them focus on one thing and have them do that properly. I still hope to get my time-lapse video of a germinating seed. I had some other good ideas for them, but nobody offered anything related close enough to ask for it (the time lapse was because someone offered a stop-motion video, which is quite related in the way to make it).

I guess not only the students learned a lot from this (you should reflect with them in class, what went right, what went wrong), but also you as a teacher should have learned a lot from this.

A temporary subforum with Nefario as a local moderator would be nice. You should ask Sirius about it.

They are offering real goods and services! They should not be treated differently because they're Nefario's students. When you're trying to learn how to operate business, you want to be exposed to the real world economy with real competition as much as possible.

They shouldn't be forced into a subforum, but it would give Nefario more control over their posts.

In the future, I may delete posts that are almost impossible to understand, especially if the title of the topic is misleading.

Maybe nefario could be temporary moderator and can clean up the marketplace after the students trashed it  :P

Kiba is correct also. Its better if they are exposed to real competition and market signals.If the market is telling them that they are spamming  they need to react to that quickly and improve.

Btw, if they've trained to do good on English tests even when their English sucks, don't you think it's time to redesign the tests?

Isnt that the problem with tests in general? that students can study specifically to pass them?

And besides, Chinese students are such cheaters, even when they're not being graded they cheat. So it's hard to cheat with bitcoins.

I suppose you could make me a temporary mod, and I'll go through market getting all the posts and putting them into Chinese market. In the future though, when the students come back(1-2 weeks) they should be much less....spammy.

Just a tip: if they consistently apply proper spacing and capitalisation, then their perceived language skills would sky-rocket. It's a small thing that takes 20 mins to learn.

- Spaces after ALL punctuation.
- No spaces before.
- Initial capitals after .?!
- No more than one space.
- Don't mix ...,.,., and only ever use a single .
- Don't use Chinese idioms in English.
- Titles should follow the Wikipedia style guide: Initial capital with Names capitalised. (it's the easiest to remember and use IMO)
- 1 idea per paragraph. Paragraphs should be around 3-6 sentences.

Overall pretty cool experiment. Can't wait to see round 2.

I can't agree more. Also about the tests. A good test tests if the student understood the theory, not remembering specifics (split grammar and vocabulary and test them separate). E.g. gives them some simple sentences and let them modify them to the different tenses (past, present, future and with continuous and non-continuous). There is no way a student can specifically study for that, because they don't know what sentences they will get during the exam.

     Bitcoin是点对点(peer-to-peer)基于网络的匿名数字货币。点对点(peer-to-peer)的意思是指没有中央权威控制货币 的汇款通道。相反，这些货币转帐的任务是由网络节点进行的集体管理。匿名就意味着交易各方可以隐藏自己的真实身份。优势： 　　无需信托中间人，能够方便的进行互联网上的汇款。第三方不能够控制或者阻止您的交易。Bitcoin 交易几乎免费, 而信用卡的网上在线支付系统通常收取 1-5% 的交易费用，加上其他各种费用高达数百美元。避免了中央储备银行的不良政策和不稳定性所造成的安全隐患. Bitcoin系统的有限货币通胀是均匀分布(由CPU决定)于整个网络, 而不是由银行垄断. Bitcoin 是一个由Satoshi Nakamoto 制作的开源项目, 目前处于开发测试阶段. Bitcoin 研发网址位于SourceForge.
　　使用 Bitcoin: 　　在 选项(Options)->生成(Generate) 货币(Coins) 获得帮助网络运行的几个货币. Bitcoin 在计算机的后台运行，因此不会影响其他程序的运行. 它可能需要数天时间产生一个货币, 请耐性等待. 随着时间的长短而不同, 你的贡献决定于CPU的空闲挂载时间. 　　最终的Bitcoins总量将达到21,000,000货币单位，这是货币量的上限. 在支持网络的节点上, 以CPU的负载时间决定他们的贡献量, 这套货币将以稳定的步伐在数年间逐渐进入流通渠道.
This is bitcoin. ::)

address:1L1Kh8zYBFnKRYog6LeDjRcB4wZex8oWBv

cool, am interested to see round 2 :)

     Bitcoin是点对点(peer-to-peer)基于网络的匿名数字货币。点对点(peer-to-peer)的意思是指没有中央权威控制货币 的汇款通道。相反，这些货币转帐的任务是由网络节点进行的集体管理。匿名就意味着交易各方可以隐藏自己的真实身份。优势： 　　无需信托中间人，能够方便的进行互联网上的汇款。第三方不能够控制或者阻止您的交易。Bitcoin 交易几乎免费, 而信用卡的网上在线支付系统通常收取 1-5% 的交易费用，加上其他各种费用高达数百美元。避免了中央储备银行的不良政策和不稳定性所造成的安全隐患. Bitcoin系统的有限货币通胀是均匀分布(由CPU决定)于整个网络, 而不是由银行垄断. Bitcoin 是一个由Satoshi Nakamoto 制作的开源项目, 目前处于开发测试阶段. Bitcoin 研发网址位于SourceForge.
　　使用 Bitcoin: 　　在 选项(Options)->生成(Generate) 货币(Coins) 获得帮助网络运行的几个货币. Bitcoin 在计算机的后台运行，因此不会影响其他程序的运行. 它可能需要数天时间产生一个货币, 请耐性等待. 随着时间的长短而不同, 你的贡献决定于CPU的空闲挂载时间. 　　最终的Bitcoins总量将达到21,000,000货币单位，这是货币量的上限. 在支持网络的节点上, 以CPU的负载时间决定他们的贡献量, 这套货币将以稳定的步伐在数年间逐渐进入流通渠道.
This is bitcoin. ::)

address:1L1Kh8zYBFnKRYog6LeDjRcB4wZex8oWBv