Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

We're launching today a questions and answers site powered with Bitcoins.

All questions posted must have a reward in bitcoins attached, and the reward goes to the person who replies it correctly, according to the asker.

You can access it at http://www.bitquestion.com (http://www.bitquestion.com).

Would love to hear suggestions, comments or questions about the service.

Feel free to start asking your hard questions there :)

Watch our video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oCtjnPOsngg

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EDIT : now the site accepts zero-confirmation deposits! yay! :)
EDIT : active users can now vote up/down on answer proposals
EDIT : our commission changed. Now we charge a flat 0.05 BTC per question.
EDIT : Improved notifications system : now you can follow Tags, and also be notified on every new question.
EDIT : ZERO FEES - now the site won't charge any fee from you, no matter if you are asking or replying questions.
EDIT : New layout, now featuring a video!

A couple questions and comments...

1) Do you take a commission off the amount we send?
2) What if a question never gets answered do you get your funds back or can you transfer to another question you asked or will ask?

3) If you make an account there is no way to enter your bitcoin address so if you answer questions you can just keep using the same address with out keep typing it in.

1) we're taking a 10% commission when you ask a question. (eg. you provide BTC 1 for a question, it will have 0.9 BTC attached.)
2) in the future we plan to make it possible to withdraw a question with no "good" reply proposals. for now the question will just sit there. we do this to protect the people who is answering.
3) nice suggestion! we'll add a feature for remembering the last bitcoin address used to withdraw funds, so you don't have to input it all the times.

i like your idea, but 10% won't last in this environment.

i'm only speculating, but competition will soon drive it down to 1% or less.

haha, yeah, maybe it's a high commission ... but it's a brand new service and we worked really hard on every detail to make it work.

if the password is too short on the reg form, you should re-populate the email and login fields so i don't have to re-type them.

@payb.tc copy. Will fix.

on the account page, it might be nice to show any unconfirmed deposits, if you can see them on the network.


also, there's no ball in balance :)

edit: actually, even after 1 confirmation, my balance isn't showing up... how many confirmations are you waiting for?

in the FAQ it is says 3 confirmations LOL

but also who ever left this, http://www.bitquestion.com/question/1 (http://www.bitquestion.com/question/1) touche js

EDIT: My comment got posted twice :/ just check that out

ah, 2 too many :)

haha, yeah, they said 3 was enough to be safe but I ended up leaving two.

In the future we'll implement zero-confirmation.

will fix the duplicate comment bug, we didn't have that in our tests here.

gweedo, did you see my clarification request ?

I did LOL and I followed that question I can't wait for the answers to that question LOL

It seems like there should be a formula that could calculate the average cost of successfully implement a double spending attack for a given number of confirmations based on how much computing power it would require.

Then it would be possible to determine the optimum number of confirmations for a given transaction size.

AbelsFire,

we can implement zero-confirmations. If we detect a double spending attack, we just cancel the question using the non-existent funds.

@wladston i got a "new comment posted.." email and it has localhost:8000 for the links so check that out

@gweedo whoops, yeah, that wasn't on the plan haha we're fixing this now

not saying this is a bug, just showing it in case it's unintentional.

so you paid the tx fee for me, and then charged it to my account, letting it go into debit.

@bayb.tc yeah, it was intentional, I'm letting the users pay the txs. That's because you can ask a question with even 0.001, and I wanted to prevent spam question attacks.

Basically, Cha CHa or KGB service using bitcoins. Be nice to see some questions to answer.

Putting up your own bitcoin trivia questions with little bounties at random times would be good promotion.

I've been waiting for this kind of product for a long time,  Will take a look.

Get ready for some hard one's.


... Sample of a kind of questions worth a lot http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/u86pi/got_hit_by_a_car_can_somebody_help_me_figure_out/c4t9m2w

For what it's worth:

1. This has been done before (http://bitqna.com/ (http://bitqna.com/)) but BitQnA has almost no traffic. The fatal flaw of BitQnA is that they mix free with paid questions. Free questions drive out paid questions.

2. Your notification options don't include the most useful one: to receive an email whenever a new question is posted for answering.

3. The site seems rather slow.

4. It's bizarre to have a dollar sign in the logo of a BTC-based site.

5. The site is open to the following "social" (i.e. non-technical) exploit: Suppose Fred wants to know an answer to an important question that will require a lot of work to answer. He posts the question with a generous bounty. Lots of people work hard on the answer, and post their answers. Fred creates a second account, and posts some kind of answer similar to what the others posted, then selects his answer as the winner. In that way, he gets a high-priced answer for 10% of the cost. This is a financial attack against honest answerers by dishonest questioners.

I've also been working on a Bitcoin Q&A site, but I don't feel I have a viable business model for it yet. Everything has to be "just right" if people are going to pay for answers in a world where most things on the internet are free.

So I will be watching bitquestion.com with interest.

@FreeMoney: yeah, we are going to post some trivia questions in there. Search Engines technologies make it hard to find a question that is not easily replied...

@Transisto: awesome to hear that :) we look forward to being your dream questions platform.

@ribuck:

1.wow, thanks for the link. We didn't find that site before. We'll see what we can do to differentiate our service.

2. I didn't think that would be interesting, because the users would get ramdom questions they don't relate to. But considering we don't have much questions, we'll add this feature, thanks for the suggestion.

3.About the slowness, it seems bitcoind takes out more memory than we were expecting. We are working to make the site faster, it should be faster in a few minutes.

4. Haha, the problem is that most people don't know the bitcoin sign yet, and the dollar sign is an internationally recognized representation of money. In the future we plan to accept credit cards for buying bitcoin "credits" to ask questions too. That's our "secret" plan to spread bitcoin usage and adoption.

5. We are aware of this problem. To protect agains it, you should check the past questions the user has proposed. When the exploiter accepts his own answer, all other rejected/non-accepted proposals will show up, in the order they were posted. So it will be easy to check if a user performed this exploit. To properly fix this issue, we will work on a reputation/score based system. Users will be able to spot this exploit and "flag" the exploiter's reputation on the site. While this isn't out, we are relying on the good faith of the bitcoin community.

6. We also have doubts about the viability of the site. Maybe we'll need to make fundamental changes on the way it works. Maybe not. we are following the Lean Startup methodology and not trying to get everything right the first time, but instead learn from experience. We already think is a very good way to get your questions answered for bitcoins, so we invite you to try out the service :)

You're right. They will need to increase it to cover the costs associated with administration, spam fighting, advertising, etc.

We'll try hard to keep it at 10% (because we think it's fair) while still providing a great service. With the right algorithms, (almost) everything can be accomplished :)

What's your technology stack and is it possible that I could do some development in exchange for some bitcoin?

I am no django developer, but I am a ruby on rails developer. Should I still apply?

There are four categories: Open, Discussing, Closed, and Recent.

The name of the second category is grammatically incorrect and confusing.

Does it mean: Open questions with more than one comment? (Then, the grammatical thing to call it would be "In Discussion".)

Or: are these "discussion questions," i.e., questions that will have no single, straightforward answer (stackexchange likes to close questions of that kind). If this is the case, it will take some extra work to differentiate the two types of questions. Also, it's not clear to me how a bounty would be distributed for that kind of question.

Finding a gramatically correct and precise name for this category would make the site immensely more user-friendly.

mollison, thanks for the awesome user feedback. We tried to explain how it works in the how_it_works page. When a question receives a reply proposal, it moves from open to the "discussing" category. The question owner has then to decide if he will accept the answer or not. If the question owner rerejects all his proposals, then the question goes back to "open". (Additionally, the question owner can ask clarification on the answer he got, but in doing so the question will still be in discussing mode)

The question owner will only be able to accept one answer proposal.

So, what would be the best name for the orange category ? :) we are not native english speakers!

Thanks!

What about merging the "Open" and "Discussing" categories? If I visit the site, I'm interested in seeing all the currently-active questions. The old closed-off questions are not so interesting.

there is a "recent" category showing all questions js

yup, that's why we created the "recent". And we assumed most askers would be interested in seeing open questions, to avoid competing with other's people answers. Isn't that fair ?

People should be rewarded with partial answer somehow. One guy might not have all the parts of an answer, but several people will.

Kiba, that sounds like a great idea, I haven't thought about that before. I will include this in our TODO list, thanks for the suggestion!

We've made some progress on accepting zero-confirmation deposits. You can check out the status of our research here : http://bitquestion.com/static/files/paper_accounts.pdf (http://bitquestion.com/static/files/paper_accounts.pdf). If you find anything that looks wrong on that paper, please email/pm us.

This is a great site, but right now, it's not too easily usable. It should be 100% obvious what it does and how it works to someone within 10 seconds; otherwise, you lose their attention. You should not make anyone "do work" to figure out the site. You should make it as simple as possible while retaining functionality.

In line with this, I have several suggestions.

(1) Get rid of the spash page where you choose "Ask a question now" or "View open quesitons." It's easy to see those options from the "main" interface and having the splash screen just creates an extra annoying step and places a wall of text between the user and the site.

(2) Just have "Open" and "Closed" categories.

(3) Whichever category a person is looking at, they should have a "sort" control bar that allows them to sort by value of the question or date of the question.

In general, this is an awesome site, so I hope you don't mind the feedback :D

Yes, I fully agree.

I agree the splash page could get anoying after a while. But for people that *never* went into the site, if could be a good idea, don't you think ? It's a quick way to understand what the site is about within 10 seconds. I'll carry out a change that only displays the splash for fresh users. Do you think that would fully address this problem ?

For most people (not the question owner and not the question first replier), the only way to know if someone is trying to answer the question at this right moment is seeing if the question in "Open" or "Discussing". This was made to avoid double replies and it has some other hidden functionality considering the question expiration time. Do you think that was not a good design idea ? Why ?

Yup, this is high on our todo list. We'll try to release this feature as soon as possible.

We love the feedback! And we hope to hear more from you soon!

It's called data, my friend. Let data decides, not what you conjecture.

Do A/B testing or soemthing.

Indeed, we would like to experiment more with A/B tests. They are not that easy to implement but they are on our todo list.

Just released a new feature to the site -- accepting zero confirmations!

Now you can see funds posted on your account almost immediately after you send your transaction. And you can use then to ask questions!

A question created with zero confirmation funds will be on the pending state, and will not receive any answers proposals. The question will show only on the "Recent" list. After funds used to create the question have one or more confirmation, the question will automatically move to the open state as usual.

And you can only withdraw funds that have 6 or more confirmations, now.

So now it's even safer for Bitquestion, and blazing fast for all of you to ask your question!

just released answer proposal voting. Hope you guys enjoy.

Since the service hasn't received that much traffic these days, for the past weeks we were out interviewing people to find out what we could improve on. And we have a few changes:

* Now you can follow a tag, and get a special notification each time someone asks a question with that specific tag.
* You can also be notified for EVERY new question that is posted.
* We now charge a flat fee for our service.

So if your question is worth BTC 100 or BTC 0.1, the fee will be the same - just BTC 0.05.

If you have any other suggestion, please share it with us.

Great idea, thanks. I'm gonna think of a good question to ask.

Just dropped our fee entirely to ZERO. We are not going to charge anything from our users!

We just added a video to our front page : http://bitquestion.com/landing/

Also deployed several layout changes, the site should be cleaner and more organized now.

What do you guys think ?

Congrat. The new design is great. The video is nice too. Who made that video? It based on a payed template?

Thanks Lip. A friend of mine made the video, from the scratch, I believe.

i doan liek the accounting of your service - where is the problem doing all of that with signed messages or just the bitcoinaddresses.

especially the answers do not need to be by registered persons, the can deliver the answer and an address which can be paid to if the answer is regarded as good enough.

another thing is: when answers are valid but the questioner does reject them all, noone is paid but the question was answered - what about that?

Just signed messages ? Who would receive such signed messages, and where would they be stored ? How would they be published? I think *just* signed messages and addresses would not be enough, because there must be a carrier for such messages. I might be wrong of course. Could you explain how would such system work ?


I agree partially with you, that's why I only ask for a username/email/password. The problem is that people just might just start sending random strings to the service, and the asker will have to deal with that influx of weird data, with is bad. We're currently facing this problem, and we are thinking on how that could be solved. Possibly we might need to better identify our repliers.


That's why we take control of the bounty before publishing the question. Since we have control of the bounty, it will just sit at the question forever. In that situation, the asker would receive negative review on his actions, and still would not get the money back. Game theory makes me believe a sane asker would not do that.

Probably I am bad in describing..

starting point was:
I just saw the topic and thought, OK gonna answer some questions for BTC.. klicked on answer, and ... oh, have to register - for what?! just want to answer and type in the address to be paid for that. You want my email-address - why, I doan need any spam!?

We  want (I'd really like ;) prolly as optional feature ) valid addresses and proof of ownership for not needing accounts on your site. To verify ownership of an address (which could be used to login without anything like a password, email or any other id) you might crypt a message (or hash of the answer) with the privkey.
Of couse not sole messages but with the pubkey (btcaddress) to enable verification to anyone. That way the answerer can proofe the address he attached to the questioner and that it is owned by him, and he can also proofe for other answers afterwards. Also the function to sign messages is included in bitcoin.org-client.
And noone shall post and sign with an invalid address for reasons of spam because he wants to receive the coins.

an example of account-avoiding is implemented in pyramining. you login with the pubkey of the "online-wallet" and for spam reasons there is a captcha. This also could solve the same for questioners, answerers wont need such a "online-wallet"-pubkey but their own (possibly offline) one.

My point simply is: passwords, email etc. are vulnerable. I doan see why making your service less secure if you like to have trust by users. E.g. bitcoin.de only has a username/password/withdrawallimit to save you from account-stealings, bitmarket.eu was getting better but shows the reset password as debug-info to anyone who asks. Mt.Gox asks for more personal information of users (utilities bills etc.) due to financial restrictions regardless of juristiction or absent problems.
Such flaws can be avoided and save you very much time and bad user-experience. Also I think that would make the service much more popular if you can solve the other problems :) (e.g. by voting).

you should announce your website in the newbe section to get more traffic.

Thanks knight22, just refreshed my older post at the newbies section: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=84142.0

vv01f, I wanted the email address because that's the easiest way for most people to notify someone, if the answer was rejected, accepted, or if more clarification was asked. One can still disable all email notifications in the notification settings.

I could indeed implement authentication via bitcoin address private key, but for most people, that would make the site harder to use. It's very hard to convince any of my friends to use the site, because first of all the person must at least have some Bitcoin. The site has almost no users now. Most people I know haven't even heard of Bitcoin. If I were to ask them to cryptographically sign messages with their bitcoin's address private key... they would probably run in despair :D 

It would be indeed brilliant if I could remove the authentication layer on my end with signing. Maybe if Bitcoin becomes more popular, or if Bitquestion grows enough to justify the coding hours I would need to make that feature. At the current pace, I would try to implement SSL and a two-step authentication, if I were to increase the site's security. That would be cheaper to implement, and would not make the site harder to use for people that don't know Bitcoin.

Now, my focus is to understand how people get information from others, and how I could help this process using Bitcoin. The site is still a beta, and I work on it in my spare time (I got a main job that actually pays the bils). So I'm tackling the most basic stuff now (like voting).

Oh, and if you want to buy the domain bitquestion.com or the site logo, or even the whole codebase, I'm selling for cheap! :)

I guess if you make it an auction (just set up your rules and starting price, be sure to offer escrow for more bids and announce it early enough) this could at least sell.
but as the site is not exactly popular, you cannot expect it to sell quite well.

my original point was: if you want good answers, you will find them with people that like privacy. email etc. should still be possible as an option.

vv01f, thanks :)

Well, I don't think there are going to be any bids, since the site generates zero revenue, so that's why I'm not going to make an auction.

My largest mistake was indeed to architecture the website without any regard for the needs and preferentes of the early bitcoin users.

Sure!

There are about 35 visits per day, see http://postimg.org/image/mcmiwsv65/

There are many registered users (403), but only 65 ever either made a comment, or tried to answer a question, or created a question.

Oh, and all the code is based on python/django, and djangobitcoin. I coded all of it myself.

Can you explain what you mean by that? It seems to me that you didn't do enough promotion.

@ribuck, thanks :) I even made the layout myself (HTML/CSS). Security was my greatest concern. Checking the logs, many tried to hack the site, fortunately no one managed to. The only problem was the lack of SSL.

I think the problem was the way that I presented the system. Had I planned it to be a platform where you can offer your consulting, maybe it would have taken off. I can imagine a version of the site, that would make much more success, focusing on offering a lot of value, both for experts and for people doing research or in need for help. Maybe one day I'll rebuild the site from ground zero considering that, in the future.

Using Bitcoin was indeed one of my biggest mistakes. I could not invite a single friend to use it (and still can't, I don't know anyone in person that have got any bitcoin). Most people would find it very interesting, but they just weren't able to ask a question because they didn't even know what bitcoin is. So most people subscribed there to answer questions. If you post a question there, you'll see it answered really fast.

Another problem was letting everyone reply. I should have picked a few select people and maybe made the right to answer questions invite-only...

Anyways...