first off: congrats and thanks for the hard work to the devs.
A question:
How does using rpc call "sendtoaddress" work with an encrypted wallet?
From the point of RPC, the wallet is either in "locked" or "unlocked" state. You can use the "walletpassphrase" RPC call to unlock it for a limited time. Sendtoaddress and some other commands will fail if the wallet is locked. Nice, that's a good solution. Thanks for the info, sipa. |
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first off: congrats and thanks for the hard work to the devs.
A question:
How does using rpc call "sendtoaddress" work with an encrypted wallet?
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I am not really worried because my calculations show that I will never get back the value of my investments in the rig  , already put as sunken costs . Of course unless the bitcoin jumps in value tremendously. This will happen, mark my words  |
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We're in a great time now where BTC's about to have "inflation" halved within a few months at a time where productive use of BTC (that is, for commercial and industrial use) is probably at an all-time high.
Mining incentive will halve to 25 BTC at the beginning of 2013, not in a few months. If it would halve in the beginning of 2012, I speculate we'd already see a lot less supply on the currency markets. Commercial and industrial use being at an all time high? That is wild speculation. En contraire, I think "productive use", as you put it, is very low now compared to what we might see next year or 2013. Your point about the best thing to do for a miner being to sell his rig for BTC is true in my mind. |
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Just received a few coins, and they do look great.
For those that might be a little timid about paying 1.2 for 1.0 coins, remember that you may be able to get that premium back if exchanging in person. i.e. I'll send 6 coins to your wallet to mow my lawn, or 5 physical coins.
Where do you live and how big is your lawn? |
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And for interested shareholders, the service has generated total earnings of 4.01679 btc since launch (12 days ago).
This is WAY above my initial growth targets, so we are well on track.
Hey guys. It seems I'm not as "offline" as I thought I'd be during my vacation. So glad I brought this old tiny computer. I'm learning to type on the miniature keyboard, too . Of course I have to add my 2 cents: About the on-site ads: Please don't! It's a service I pay for and there should be no ads whatsoever. Ads just make a site look so much less serious and greedy. After all I pay for this service. This also applies when I don't register. I really like not having to register (although I did, for the referral stuff). Am I not a valued customer if I don't register and have to look at ads? Please give this good thought before you go that route, you wont be able to measure how many people are driven away by this, please don't underestimate the negative effect ads have on people, especially on a pay-site. 4 BTC revenue: wow! I first thought: hell guys, don't get too excited, a large portion came from my wallet, but then I realized I was off by an order of a magnitude. It's really reassuring the service gets used so much. Assuming an average download size of 0.5 GB that'd be about 80 purchases, right? That'd be over 10% of the people going from visit to purchase. Awesome numbers! cheers and keep up the great work. |
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Another use case: Sitting in hostel in Korea and downloading pretty large file from bitcointorrentz. Would not be possible without, because of limited access obviously and also because I use a very old netbook (first asus eee-pc). Nice!
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Nagle, how do you feel about Gold? It doesn’t pay any dividend either, and its industrial and economic use is very limited.
Is this a pyramid scheme as well?
I like your answer. It's funny how Chodpabas answer is very similar to yours, yet yours doesn't get disputet at all, while the thread unwinds to discuss Chodpabas answer at length. It's because, well, who would dispute the value of gold? It's had value for thousands of years, yet is suffers some of the same "problems" bitcoin "suffers" from. I've been pointing out that bitcoin is more like gold than like a currency (or, god beware, bank notes) since I first got in touch with bitcoin in early 2011. That sentiment doesn't resonate much for some reason and people just go on to discuss money, investement, economics,... probably a good thing. |
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I'm glad to have been the one to pop your bitcoin cherry! lmao. This has to go in the books. I think I'll make it a thread: "Who popped your bitcoin cherry?". Nice one. |
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The argument is, that at really low prices (< $1), the difficulty (also part of the roi calculation) should drop significantly. It all depends on wether or not it really would drop at such low prices. I still hope we wont find out.
I know the argument, and the argument is speculation. I don't think it's something to build a business model after. I agree. I also agree on your further arguing that diff 800,000 / price $3 is not low enough. |
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Regarding the fees and IP collection of affiliates, another way to look at it is that it's a 20% fee for the privilege of using the site 100% anonymously, instead of being required to register with an email address and associated IP address. Obviously that's not a good marketing stance to take, but it's the way I think of it and I think it's entirely justified.
Hadn't thought of it this way... Maybe it should be possible to "delete" and affiliate account (data could be kept, except the ip-address). |
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Actually, you know what, I think affiliates are probably ENTITLED to a 20% rebate. Do you think I should just get rid of this and allow affiliates to avail of a permanent rebate?
By the way, if you want to try and screw me over, use your referral key to download a file from an IP address other than that which you used to register as an affiliate. This way you can also test that the affiliate system itself is working, which is what I suspect you were also trying to do.
I don't have time to react to all your answers, but the answer is "cool" or "awesome" to most of them anyways I remember reading your explanation regarding IP-address storage now. This is good enough for me. About making all affiliates ENTITLED to 20% discount: well, it's pretty easy to become an affiliate, right? But why not? You'll adjust the price at some point anyhow, this will just be reflected in the price calculation, then, so I see no problem with that. Ok, off to bed and on to plane tomorrow... cu guys. |
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Ok, I have halved the current fee to 0.05 btc / GB. That extra 0 after the decimal point should indeed attract a more significant amount of interest. At this price level, I think there is huge potential for organic growth of the service, at which time a more structured pricing plan would be introduced.
I have also changed around the prose and layout of the main landing page, as this is where the sale is won or lost. I would appreciate any input into the wording of the "sales pitch", or the general layout of the text, on the homepage.
Also, the share price of BitCoinTorrentz on GLBSE has risen by 250% since my IPO!!!
I'm flabbergasted...
First off, let me express my amazement at this project/company and how you handle things (well, quickly and in an open way, that is). I also love that my input as a user and shareholder is taken seriously. It's been some time since I had this much fun and excitement watching and participating in something in the bitcoin world. Very refreshing! Ok, enough of crawling up peoples butts and on to some comments: 1.) I think halving the fee for now is the right decision. Thanks for considering the idea of lowering price and going for it. I hope it'll work out as intended (bigger userbase) 2.) I went through the torrent upload/download/payment process again 2 times. It was really enjoyable and fluent. Payment accept was quick, however, as you clearly state it can sometimes take longer (I'm assuming in case your node misses the transaction for some reason and has to wait for a block with the tx in it), and in that case I'm looking at a squiggly thing and some text saying "waiting for payment", which is allright. What I would love to see here in addition is the payment address, because: should the payment take longer, I might decide to check wether or not I sent the money to the right address, which as of now, I can't. Next up: the download progress page. It's very cool, thanks for implementing that (figuring out how to pull the info from your torrent client or whatever you had to do for that), I've really missed progress info the first time around. A little ugly: the fact that the complete page is reloaded. Some ajax would be cool, but that's not high priority at all, it's totally acceptable as it is. 3.) I read through your sales pitch and one thing that got me thinking: you say the service is 100% anonymous. Now, when I did the last download, I figured I might as well try to screw you over (sorry for that) and try to get the 20% referral bonus for my own download (I didn't do this because I needed 0.006 BTC desperately, but because I was trying to figure out how you would identify me as either "having visited before without referrer" or "being the referrer himself"). So I deleted all www.bittorrentz.com and bittorrentz.com cookies. The downloads did not get credited to my referrer account (which is correct, of course). So, how do you do it then? You can't be using my ip-address, right, since the service is 100% anonymous, so you don't record ip addresses. Note that I'm not really complaining here, but this is something we might get attacked on by users and it's better to clear this up now, right? Maybe it would also be good to be more specific about this issue on the site, saying that you don't keep logs (only if that's the case, of course), that you securely delete the .torrent files, etc... maybe an FAQ entry "What measures are taken to ensure my privacy?" On a personal note: I'll be on vacation starting tomorrow for three weeks. Sadly therefore, I won't be able to participate here, at least not as much as I'd probably like to. So keep up the great work, (not just mjcmurfy, but all of you) and have fun doing it. |
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The shares do come with a vote, as stated in the contract, but since I only released 20% of them so far, I still maintain executive control. I am however 100% open to any and all suggestions, from both shareholders and the community at large. I greatly value any input received, and this thread alone has already helped me make several excellent modifications to the site.
Nice! Are you planning to sell more of your 800 shares any time soon? The demand seems to be high, price already went up to 0.3BTC/share. With regards to your questions. Yes, I do intend to fully publish numbers. But I am not sure where the best place to do this would be. Here in this thread? On the website itself? Through a transparent stats page open to the public or perhaps only open to shareholders? In a group email to shareholders? I am not sure.
The service has been operational for a bit over a week now, and has generated 2.6961 btc in earnings. My prediction for the first 3 weeks was only 2.1 btc, so we are already exceeding the targets outlined in my business plan by almost 400%.
Awesome, I assumed you would be transparent about the business numbers. Nice to see this in writing. It's nice to know there actually are quite a few downloads. When I get the news section up and running, I will most likely use that for earnings reports etc. On my to-do list also is the improvement of the referral control panel, to give you details like conversion rate, earnings per click, etc. And yes, I am completely willing to discuss the pricing. I know what you mean about visitors having to be in the right mood at the right time. I do feel that the price is probably a little high, and bandwidth is easy to come by while bitcoins are not. So to give incentive to use the service, I have a few ideas that I'm juggling around in my head: - Start a promotional offer that gives users 50% off downloads under 1gb. This would run for a couple of weeks until a solid user base has been built up.
- Change the price structure from a static 0.1btc/gb to a sliding scale, reducing the cost for larger torrents.
- Link the price to a weighted average of btc:usd value, as described above.
- Give affiliates the ability to issue promotional codes that entitle the user to 1 free download, or else randomly issue them to visitors of the site, which would encourage return traffic
What do you think? I'm not sure about wether I would like to see the business numbers and investor info stuff on the site itself. I really like the idea of a google spreadsheet. There's also editgrid and others if google scares you. A shareholder mailinglist also seems a good idea. I'm not sure wether or not I would try to keep things secret from non-shareholders. Probably not worth the hassle, why not let users/interested people see the numbers, too. I also like your promotional ideas. I think it's important to build a solid userbase, which is a no-brainer, actually. A "sliding scale" might be a good idea, but why not make it simpler to understand for users by making it a fixed fee per download plus a (lower than now) fee per GByte? |
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My current list of to-do items:
1. Create a unique wallet address based payment system
2. Improve the banners and the referral control panel.
3. Implement support for magnet links (as suggested by HostFat)
4. Add a news/blog page (also suggested by HostFat)
5. Link the pricing structure of the service to a moving average of the btc:usd rate
Any other suggestions?
I'm a happy shareholder. I know the shares come with no vote and everything is up to you (and I trust you, otherwise I wouldn't have bought the shares) Let me ask some questions, however, that might trigger some discussion: - Are you going to publish some numbers, like number of downloads, revenue from downloads, hits through referrall program, hits without referrer, conversion rate, etc...? If so, will you do so regularly and when?
- Are you open to discuss the pricing? I would opt for a lower price, at least at the beginning. My referral stats page says I brought 38 hits that converted to 0 downloads... maybe the price is too high, maybe it'll just need time to "incubate", but back when I was "only" a user, I thought the price was a bit high, and I really had to be in the situation to "be looking for exactly that service" in order to use it. Maybe this is a situation where more money can be earned at a lower price-point, at least until the server capacity is reached?
You seem really motivated and productive, keep it up |
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Just to let people know, because I made the assumption one could withdraw Bitcoins from bitcoinica using Mt. Gox redeemable codes. YOU CANNOT! Only USD withdrawals are possible. In an email I was referred to their FAQ for details. I looked at the FAQ before I trusted my Bitcoins to bitcoinica, of course. It lacks details and is unclear on the subject. I hope this is not intentional: Can I deposit or withdraw in Bitcoins?
Unfortunately, no. We don't deliver actual Bitcoins. But you can always deposit or withdraw instantly using Mt. Gox redeemable codes."
(emphasis mine) "We do not deliver actual bitcoins". Well, it's fair to assume then, that you deliver bitcoins via Mt. Gox redeemable codes, right? You even state this in the sentence that follows. If this was intentionally misleading, I consider this a ripoff. I was forced to trade my precious BTC for USD to get my funds out, then trade them back on mtgox at a loss. Thoughts? |
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Cant you just copy the banner to your computer and upload it?
I could do that but I didn't create it so I thought it was best to ask. I don't think that's a good idea. The banners should be used by linking to whereever site auhtor puts them, imho, so they can be changed by him later. No? |
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I'm not a graphics designer either. I like the banners, but let me make suggestions: Yeah, I'm working on the banner thing, but I'm not a graphic designer. So for, I've got:  I suggest scaling "TORRENTZ.COM" to the left until the "T" touches the imaginary line of the left side of the "b" above it. and   They need a bit of work... I'm not sure I would use the bitcoin logo as letter "B". Would leave the logo right there, but prepend "B" to "itcointorrentz.com". I know it's used like that on the site (which I like the style of, btw) "Remote Torrent Download Service": maybe you can use one of the 2 fonts already used? 3 fonts in one banner is quite a lot. Also maybe italicize it, so it doesn't "fight" the "bitcointorrentz.com" above it? Just my 2 cents, because I'm invested in the company ---- On another note: Isn't this awesome, we have a working stock exchange. And bitcoin makes everything so liquid. One day bitcointorrenz service goes online, next day the company goes public, issuing shares. Less than a day later the public stock is all bought, 40 BTC capital raised. Couple hours later stock is actively being traded. Isn't this just amazing? How long does such a process take in the "old world"? |
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She told me too that is a well known beaver chart behavior (or was it bearish behavior and the other one was the beaver!).
So you two talk about rubbery bouncing kittens while you play with her beaver, while secretely what you're really doing is trying to get unbiased info on wether or not bitcoin is dead. Awesome. Let me coin the term beaver-reading for this. |
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does anyone think he didn't know the answer before he created the thread?
exactly my thoughts. |
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