I was thinking more along the lines of a group of people with a similar goal but they need to see how much money they will have before going ahead with that goal.

This allows a lot of people with a similar interest to get involved and participate in the decision process and then have that final vote on one of the final choices that is presented.


You may have a hunting club and you may all want to rent a cabin during the prime hunting season, everyone decides they will put in 100 BTC each for the week. They are not sure how many people they will be able to get to go or what everyone may want to do. So they do this crowdfunding and they may go through several different options until enough people agree on a single choice. The beauty of it is that all of the people who pay, agree with the choice. Those who do not agree do not pay.


Imagine a system of government where everything spent by the government was funded this way. You may have a city with property taxes that need to be paid each year. Each person pays in their amount and votes with their dollars where they want their tax dollars to go. The same situation happens if you do not pay toward anything as would happen if you do not pay your taxes. But this way you get to choose what gets done in your city and where your money goes.

Also, for those things funded where the people who funded get benefits, you can use the wallet as your identification. Like with the hunting club idea. You show up and pay .0001 BTC from the wallet you used to verify your admission. It allows for anonymity.

Bitcoin is not democratic because the minority is not forced to do anything.

Answered in separate thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=82350.0

Here is the idea:

Set up a way with Bitcoin for a large amount of people to fund something and "vote" on it in a unanimous way where those who do not agree with the vote do not have to contribute.


Here is the summary:
You get a group together with a common goal. They all pledge so much money until enough people have joined and put their money toward it. Then the final distribution of the money is determined and if enough of the group agrees, then their money is put toward the final goal.

Example:
A group of people want to purchase a TV commercial. The organizer of the idea says "We will need around $10,000 to produce and run this commercial", we are asking for 100 people to contribute $100 each. People start putting $100 in their wallet pledged toward the commercial project. Once the number is reached the organizer says "We were able to find a production company to make the commercial for $2,500 and negotiated a slot on the Sunday business show for $5,500 totaling $8,000. Please vote if you support this plan by the end of the week. Supporters all move their $100 into the pot. If they do not reach $8,000 in the given time, the money is refunded to each person and they work toward another solution. If the goal is reached, the money is transferred to the production company and the TV station and the commercial is produced.

How Bitcoin can help:
Same thing, a common goal. The guidelines are outlined. The organizer gives a Bitcoin address for the project with a goal in BTC. People pledge by transferring BTC to a dedicated wallet. They then send .0001 BTC to the Bitcoin address (other numbers can be used to signal different options. ex. .0002 BTC indicates preference 'B'). The .0001 BTC is refunded and that pledge is added to the tally. That wallet address is monitored to see if the money is removed. If the money is removed, the tally goes down indicating the pledger is no longer interested. Once the pledges reach the goal, the organizer puts forth the solution and the needed BTC. Pledgers indicate their approval by sending the full amount of the pledge. If the goal is not met, the BTC is refunded to those wallets and work continues. Otherwise, the organizer executes the solution and the goal is satisfied.

Example with BTC:
A group of people want to purchase a TV commercial. The organizer of the idea says "We will need around $10,000 to purchase and run this commercial. Here is the BTC address to pledge to: xxxx, indicate your preference: send .0001 for Sunday news program, send .0002 for Monday evening talk show, send .0003 for Saturday morning weekly roundup program.", we are asking for 100 people to pledge 20 BTC each. People start putting 20 BTC into a wallet. They send .0001, 2 or 3 to the address and keep the rest of the funds in their wallet. Once the number gets close to 200 BTC the organizer says "We were able to find a production company to make the commercial for $2,500 and negotiated a slot on the Sunday business show for $5,500 totalling $8,000, at today's rate that would be 160 BTC. Please vote if you support this plan by the end of the week by sending your full amount to address xxxx. Supporters start transferring 20 BTC into the pot each. If they do not reach 160 BTC in the given time, the money is transferred back to the originating addresses and they continue to try to find another solution. If the goal is reached, the BTC is either converted to $$$ to pay the companies, or the originator talks the companies into accepting BTC and transfers the funds for payment and the commercial is produced.


Possible use cases:
A bunch of Bitcoin users buy an island (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=82060.0). Each person who contributed will be able to prove their membership on the island by showing up on the island and paying with BTC from their pledge wallet.
Club membership (dues require X amount spent on pledged programs per year).
Funding for BTC project
Charitable contributions
Startup company
Fund a movie/commercial
disaster relief
political contributions
Fund a piece of art
much more...similar to projects on http://www.kickstarter.com

A web page could be set up for this with the tally and pledges all monitored by monitoring the chain. You could also have the option of allowing people to pledge their set aside BTC to several projects and whichever the pledger supports first will get the BTC and the tally for the other projects will reflect the decrease in their own pledge.

The main point of trust is in the final transfer, trusting the organizer to use the money to fund the project as opposed to taking the money and splitting. The web site could keep track of past projects for each organizer and show how well they were handled. But for most of the project, the money sits in your own wallet.

Any thoughts? Tweaks, downfalls?

Yes, I thought of that. But the 20% that do not agree would be forced to have their money spent on something they do not want. I suppose it could work if you set up a way to send the money back to those who do not want what the final decision is. Perhaps the 80% threshold gets hit and then the BTC gets transferred toward the purchase and the other 20% goes to those addresses that did not agree on the final decision.

I have considered something like this for a long time.

Crowd funding something.

The idea would be to have a type of club where you purchase membership by contributing Bitcoins.

The Bitcoin wallet where all of the Bitcoins sit would require a key from each member in order for it to be spent.

Once the right opportunity comes along and enough BTC is accumulated, then the members of the club all enter their keys and the BTC gets transferred.

The main thing I cannot figure out is if one person wants to sabotage the project they can get their key and hold it over everyone else to either destroy the club or to use it as a bargaining chip to get the money released. The only solutions to this would be situations where not everyone who contributed gets what they want.

I would think that a bill pay service would be fairly easy to set up and do pretty well making a few % per transaction.

You just set up a web page that accepts BTC, get a form they fill out of the amount, name, address and account number of where they want the check to go. Then just print out the checks and mail them out every day.

Sounds like something bit-pay could do fairly easily if they wanted the extra load.

Reminds me of an excerpt from the book "Jonathan Gullible (http://www.jonathangullible.com/translations/UK_Comnt040222.pdf)":

"Jonathan looked up and
saw two men dragging a young woman, kicking and yelling, down
the trail. By the time he caught his breath, the trio had disappeared.
Certain that he couldn’t free the woman alone, Jonathan ran back up
the trail looking for help.
A clearing opened and he saw a group of people gathered around
a big tree – beating it with sticks. Jonathan ran up and grabbed the
arm of a man who was obviously the supervisor. “Please sir, help!”
gasped Jonathan. “Two men have captured a woman and she needs
help!”
“Don’t be alarmed,” the man said gruffly. “She’s under arrest.
Forget her and move along, we’ve got work to do.”
“Arrest?” said Jonathan, still huffing. “She didn’t look like, uh,
like a criminal.” Jonathan wondered, if she was guilty, why did
she cry so desperately for help? “Pardon me, sir, but what was her
crime?”
“Huh?” snorted the man with irritation. “Well, if you must know,
she threatened the jobs of everyone working here.”
“She threatened people’s jobs? How did she do that?” asked
Jonathan.
Glaring down at his ignorant questioner, the supervisor motioned
for Jonathan to come over to a tree where workers busily pounded
away at the trunk. Proudly, he said, “We are tree workers. We knock
down trees for wood by beating them with these sticks. Sometimes
a hundred people, working round-the-clock, can knock down a
good-sized tree in less than a month.” The man pursed his lips and
carefully brushed a speck of dirt from the sleeve of his handsomely
cut coat.
He continued, “That Drawbaugh woman came to work this
morning with a sharp piece of metal attached to the end of her stick.
She cut down a tree in less than an hour – all by herself! Think of
it! Such an outrageous threat to our traditional employment had to
be stopped.”
Jonathan’s eyes widened, aghast to hear that this woman was
punished for her creativity. Back home, everyone used axes and
saws for cutting trees. That’s how he got the wood for his own
boat. “But her invention,” exclaimed Jonathan, “allows people of all
sizes and strengths to cut down trees. Won’t that make it faster and
cheaper to get wood and make things?”
“What do you mean?” the man said angrily. “How could anyone
encourage an idea like that? This noble work can’t be done by any
weakling who comes along with some new idea.”
“But sir,” said Jonathan, trying not to offend, “these good tree
workers have talented hands and brains. They could use the time
saved from knocking down trees to do other things. They could
make tables, cabinets, boats, or even houses!”

The idea of creating a single company to do this sort of defeats the purpose of using Bitcoins.

A single company could just collect money in dollars, keep the money in people's accounts, then set up an API for companies to connect to your server where merchants can connect their APIs.


The first step, which would have many more uses than this, would be to integrate a browser plugin with Bitcoin wallets and allow people to just click on a "pay 2 refundable bitcents" button followed by a confirmation by the plugin.

With online degree programs, the bot could start graduating from various universities.

For no other reason than to be referred to as Dr. Skynet.

Quite cool.

I see the most difficult part of Bitcoin acceptance being the difficulty in obtaining them.

How will they be priced at checkout?

Quick change on price kicks all of those leveraged people going long out. Then Bitcoinica can buy back what they just sold and be sitting pretty.

Wash rinse, repeat....profit.

In space you can use replicators. That will have a huge effect on the market.

And....poof.

Bitcoinica delivers as expected.

So basically, if you could set it up so you have to send 25 cents worth of BTC to an address, then after a certain amount of time (a month?) you get it back...that would be no big deal to regular people. You spend a few bucks a month on captchas and get it back.

But for spammers...doing 1000 at a time, you have to spend $250. Then wait to get that back. That cuts into the monthly budget, $250 for every 1000 captchas used.

When enough people are going long, expect the price to drop quickly and just enough for those people to get Zhouted. All for no real market reason other than the fact that Bitcoinica benefits from the quick drop. Then the price slowly goes back to where it was due to market forces. And all of those people who had money in, are now out.

On a side note...there is big money in faking users in social media.


See - our government:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/client/229219056

Fake people to push propaganda.

umm...wtf?

You pay some virtual girl to have a virtual relationship with you...then you boast about it in front of your friends?!?

umm...wtf???

 

I am quite perplexed.

wtf?

I am afraid so. He was known for his evil ways. He was so powerful that we could not start a new year without his approval.

But you know enough about him to know that nerds would not know him...what if Dick Clark discovered Clark's method of inverse relations?


To answer your question and to those who do not understand the correlation, I will summarize:


Dick Clark is the manipulator. He has been holding Bitcoins back this whole time.

He got in early and drove it down when it got to $32. He has been manipulating ever since.


A recent interview after New Year's quotes he was asked what his new year's resolution was. It was to destroy Bitcoin, as was last year's.