Well maybe you could develop such software, prove it and all that, then try to convince us that we need it as much as bitcoin and open transactions so that you can get away with only working on it ten hours a month instead of forty and still get one share per round for being a developer?

Or even if we don't need it that badly, maybe by the time you have it done our market cap will be high enough that we will again be willing to put people on the shares list who spend forty hours a month working on free open source stuff that the devcoin project itself doesn't particularly need?

-MarkM-

One massive advantage of free open source would be that hundreds or thousands of people will be able to try to make such a site profitable.

I still wonder how many people have managed to make a site built with the commercial scripts profitable, and also how many have even tried.

(Of how many licenses/keys sold, how many are still running profitably how many years later?)

I don't think you realise what a massive undertaking such a site would be, especially if it does take off.

It is a classic "startup".

Who is the dedicates his or her entire life into it he or she believes in it so much founder?

Who are their tight knit team-members who will work full time overtime and weekends on it for shares of it for a year or two or three to get it started?

Given a compelling enough team who has demonstrated such dedication to it maybe buying some equity in their startup by buying them a license to use the script would be a good investment.

But remember the vast majority of startups fail so we really do need totally dedicated totally determined people.

How many words would those people have to write for Devtome in order to earn enough devcoins to buy themselves the script license and the dot com, net, org and maybe some national top level domains of their proposed name?

(Maybe the dot AUCTION too if an auction top level domain is available yet.)

If that is too much work for them, a startup is almost certainly massively too much work for them.

In fact one could probably pretty much guarantee that if writing enough words is more work than they are willing to do they are not the team to do such a project.

So, back to free open source. Supporting free open source is part of devcoin's mandate. Maybe if someone is writing a free open source version of such a site, and they spend forty hours a month doing so freely of their own accord, they might become eligible to get onto the devcoin receivers list.

Then if the thing works and works well, real code out there real team still working on it etc like bitcoin and open transactions, and at that time devcoin finds it good enough to be essential to the devcoin plan like bitcoin and open transactions are, maybe only ten hours a month would suffice to stay on the list maintaining and improving the thing. Heck maybe more than one developer on the team could get on the list, both bitcoin and open transactions have more than one developer each receiving a whole share per round.

Consider that quite likely both open transactions and bitcoin are getting 48 shares a year or so if they each have four developers who each get one share.

That is after they already developed the software, they got nothing from us until they already had good code proven and working for a long time, albeit in Open Transactions case it was not ready for grandma. (Nor is bitcoin yet, arguably.)

-MarkM-

So basically if quibid has any competitors yet the competitor that starts accepting cryptocoins before quibids does should take the crypto world by storm?

Is the crypto world not yet big enough for any of their competitors to bother, do you think?

-MarkM-

Links are nor authoritative.

Put a hash of the entire asset contract. Even then anyone who can manage to fabricate a document that turns out to have that exact hash can pass it off as being the real contract, but that should be hard - computer-science hard, math hard - to do.

It also means here you get hold of a copy of the document is irrelevant, either it is the right document as it hashes to the hash recorded in the blockchain, or it is not.

You can get it by offering a reward on television or by finding it in a garbage bin or by searching for it on google or by making it up yourself by trying all posible documents that can be made for a few billion trillion lifetimes-of-the-universe, who cares how you got it as long as it is correct aka hashes to the right hash.

anyone who cares could pirate a copy and put it on a file-sharing site or DHS or whatever, it just doesn't matter. It could be a deep secret, an asset very few people have found the contract for. Or it could be a full page printed in all major global newspapers. Just hash it to see if it is the one you are looking for.

-MarkM-

Sounds like you maybe didn't use the colon that tells the wiki to look in the main articles section insead of the current (aa user homepage or homepages) section?

-MarkM-

People who take home real products from the sites without paying fiat for the things obtained the things as income in effect.

Possibly if the bitcoins had been held for a year prior to buying something with them then it could be argued the things bought are capital gains rather than income.

Re an auction site, there are probably laws about auctions, a law firm in the jurisdiction it is to be operated in should be consulted, also the laws where each customer lives might also need taking into account.

Basically it would be a full fledged "startup", so probably need a "totally puts his entire life into it" founder and a team of co-founders willing to work overtime and weekends for a few years for shares to get it started up then hopefully be rich enough to retire when the site is sold to quibids or google or who-ever for millions or billions, along of course with all the personal data on its users that its privacy policy pretends will not be given or sold...

-MarkM-

I wonder if Quibids would confirm who they got their software from?

Seems unlikely somehow thus seems easy claim to make...

-MarkM-

At one point some politician did try to say virtual things are like barter and found-treasure, so that if a magic sword sells on e-bay for $5 and your world of warcraft character finds such a sword that is $5 of income to be taxed.

It didn't fly though.

What about when you barter an apple share for an IBM share on an exchange site via the intermediary of the dollars or whatever that are used to measure both stocks, that is, sell an apple share and buy an IBM one?

Or you barter a magic sword for a magic shield? Again possibly with the mediation of a MUD-currency so you sell the sword in the shop for MUD gold and buy a shield with that MUD gold?

-MarkM-

Are any facts available re those commercial auction-scripts regarding actual websites using them, the Alexa ratings, visitors, earnings per visitor average, percentage of conversion of visitors to paying customers, retention rate and/or lifetime profits per customer, cost of aquisition per customer, actual sites we can go watch and see how well they are thriving, or anything at all along those lines?

Or are they just some unknown person selling a script with no sign anywhere that the scripts even work let alone are earning profits for those who have deployed them?

-MarkM-

I think the way that crypto coins currently work getting them is like playing World of Warcraft or whatever, it is all just theoretical points that might or might not actually end up being sold for something real.

So your earnings as a Devtome author aren't really earnings at all, they are just like Dragon Kill Points in an RPG, the Devtome uses them to measure the relative contributions of the team.

Your earnings however as a seller of devcoins for fiat on an exchange are earnings, as are your barter earnings if you barter devcoins for something real of real value such as a cup of coffee or a meal or rent or whatever.

I am not licensed to practice law on this planet though so check with your own local licensed practitioners.

-MarkM-

You missed the (*) I added regarding my usage of the word "you".

Maybe Devcoin Venture Capital would be a more-great initial venture/project?

I will take a look at Devcorp and General Financial Corp to see if maybe either of those could actually serve in that role.

-MarkM-

That is exactly why I never started such a site myself, totally regardless of crypto vs fiat.

I figured what would happen would be people would keep it secret because they like the fact we keep trying to drum up business by in effect giving away stuff cheaper than what we paid for the stuff.

There is no incentive for them to tell anyone about it unless maybe someone they care about really likes something we offer that they don't want themselves and also don't want to pick up dirt cheap to give to that other someone as a present next present-giving-occassion.

(Heck they could buy all our stuff dirt cheap then go sell it on ebay at a profit!)

Frankly you (*) strike me as being all about getting a bounty rather than about you running a profitable business which one way or another happens to benefit Devcoin.

If it is not a great enough idea that someone will do it anyway without a bounty maybe it is not a great enough idea to bother doing at all.

Devcoin was originally about rewarding them for great free open source they already did, not bribing people who aren't going to do it or aren't going to do it as free open source into doing something.

Seems like too many people are about creating bounties, preferably for things they themselves can do, instead of about just doing something that needs doing.

This auction site idea seems less and less like something that needs doing.

* Not sure exactly who, its a general impression garnered across the whole thread.

-MarkM-

Why would any motivation other than a cut of (or all of) the profits be needed?

If it is not going to be profitable we don't want to finance it, surely?

If the person who will do it does not think it will be profitable ought we not know that about them instead of getting sucked in by some glib talker who offers to do it even though they themselves think it will not be profitable?

Maybe we should go about this a different way entirely:

Tell people that if they incorporate a corporation to startup such a venture, then Devcoin Venture Capital project or corporation will seriously consider investing in it when it reaches its proof of concept / first call for venture capital stage?

Maybe we would be better off setting up a Devcoin Venture Capital corporation than any particular type of project that might be worth venturing Devcoin capital on?

Devcoin Angels maybe could help with the startup, in an angel round, before the big venture capital firms such as Devcoin Venture Capital Incorporated are invited to participate in an 'A' round?

That seems to be the way Bitcoin is going.

-MarkM-

Did you not follow this thread?

I gave samples of things to auction and already had one person say they wanted to bid on at least one of the bundles I mentioned.

Each day you specify what will be auctioned next and how many bids need to be sold before it gets auctioned, along with news about any cool new additional things the previous day's sales of bids have provided us enough capital to also offer for auction.

So people always know some things that will be auctioned, they just might not know how long it will take for us to sell enough bids to make it feasible for us to actually start the auction aka to actually afford the thing we plan to auction.

So like we could say the first auction will be a 2015 Ford Taurus. Once we have sold X bids that auction will start. If you want it to start soon, buy bids fast.
Once we have sold enough bids to buy the car, we start the auction.

It is very similar to a charity raffle, actually. Instead of buying raffle tickets they are buying bids.

Very soon we should have profits out of which to buy more things over and above these scheduled in advance things.

Like "wow well done folks, you bought so many bids we will not only auction the Taurus, we will also auction a Mini Cooper!"

-MarkM-

They let you give out the source to anyone?

I thought they sold you a license to use the source, which brings up the question of what legal entity is to serve as that "you".

That is, who exactly, among all the billions of people on the planet or among all the domains on the web or however they structure it, is licensed to run the code? For how many users? On how many domains or URLs or physical servers?

There is no "Devcoin project" as a legal entity. Would we form such an entity? Or form a "Devbids Incorporated" entity? Or both since even given we form an auctioneer entity we might still find it useful to have a Devcoin Incorporated entity that can seed projects before spawning them off into separate new corps of their own...

With free open source we could even form the project, have music dev-auctions site, sculture dev-auctions site, paintings dev-auctions site etc, or even just two different teams or ten different teams each of which wants to evolve the code in a different direction...

-MarkM-

I think the business model is indeed in question.

What will it take to convince people to use our actions instead of famous ones, ones that have lots more items up for sale at all times, ones that do not require muscking about with cryptocoins even maybe. Already people with bitcoins can supposedly use a widget in their browser that lets them buy anything at any normal (or major?) website, with the website only seeing the fiat it wants and the bitcoin user actually paying the magic card people (who make the browser plugin) in bitcoins. Cannot such services work on auction sites as well as retailing sites? If so, why not just use such a service and go to the real quibids or whatever and use your cryptocoins there?

Etc.

-MarkM-

There would not be any bounty.

Someone would get a share a round to be our initial market-research auctioneer, run an auction. Or maybe it'd need four one share a round people so we get forty hours out of it at minimum. (Remember the hours per week or month to get shares is a minimum, you don't get more by doing more hours.)

The whole idea of using a bounty for this is massively premature. We don't even know yet for sure what needs doing so are not in any position to start enumerating all the little things needed let alone assign to each step or component a reasonable bounty.

We could for example start with a normal auction site and auction off our "bids". Or plan sell them for a fixed buy now price.

Then, using that same normal type of auction, auction off, for bids, the price a thing will be sold for. Basically the total number of bids placed will, at close of that auction, tell us how many pennies or devcoins or whatever the item is to be sold for.

Then we sell the item for that price to the winner of that auction.

For this initial market research we could even just let the auctioneer auction something themselves and keep the profit themselves.

If the model is in fact profitable presumably the auctioneer's pay can easily come out of what they manage to auction stuff for.

If not maybe they are not a qualified auctioneer and we need one who is better able to excite people into bidding.

-MarkM-

Not sure if non free open source off the shelf is the way to go. Who would be the legal entitity owning the license-to-use-it?

As to using shares to buy products, I say no. I say sell the damn bids first, then buy products to put up for auction using the money the bids were sold for, since until people have bids they cannot bid anyway so there is no point auctioning anything anyway. Let the sale of the bids finance buying the things to auction. Shares will be eaten as it is just for simple one share per round admins and auctioneers and site-maintainers and maybe even for creating of new features or for modifying any features the admins cannot themselves for some reason modify.

-MarkM-

Well bear in mind that we need to do market research anyway, so that we would only be starting out with one auction at a time.

So maybe we can start with just manually holding such auctions, to see if there is even enough interest to make it seem worthwhile to even just make a few shell scripts or python scripts or whatever to ease the manual work the auctioneer actually turns out to need to do?

The usual free open source route in other words: you have someone who does a certain thing (in this case holding auctions) and gradually over time he or she hacks up some little scripts or figures out some database fields and records to use in mysqladmin or maybe more likely simply using a command-line mysql client, and once that has evolved into a useful final set of fields and records and scripts and so on they gradually tie all the parts together more until eventually they have a full collection of database tables and scripts showing what to do to those tables when various events happen, at which point anyone who feels there is need or demand for a GUI or a CGI or whatever has all the specifications, in working code, for all the moving parts other than the user-interface, which initially is the command-line or maybe the commandline for the scripts and mysqladmin for editing the database if for some reason mysqladmin is found to be more convenient for some reason than the commandline mysql client...

Another idea, totally a change the shape or orientation of the box kind of idea, is fix the price of the things to be "auctioned" and auction off the points they are priced in.

Like hey this car costs 1000 points, how much am I bid for one point today?

A let it evolve approach could start with little things like "the auctioneer needs to scan the auction's thread for bids, so how about having a website scraper that scrapes bids from forum threads? Each auctioneer could thus scrape from his or her own auction's thread any bids, saving them the need to actually read the thread..."

-MarkM-

As I just edited into my previous post, maybe first an admin can click install on each of the auction systems that are available from the website hosting panel of their hoster, so we can all look at what is available off the shelf and start discussing whether it would even be possible to modify such a thing to do anything that we actually want.

In the process what we do actually want might become clearer.

Also maybe people could research all free open source auction packages to see if maybe the ones hosters offer on their panels aren't actually the closest existing ones to what we want.

Adding mods can wait until first we see what already is in whatever code we choose to start out from.

Such things can be part of site-admin.  It is maintenance, if we even can initially get anything even close to what we want.

If we cannot, then we might have to first determine whether trying to modify something that wasn't even designed to do what we want would be worthwhile compared to starting totally from scratch.

-MarkM-