I have just made a post about this, but yes, some of these are more a cry for help than calls for business.

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.

What? That doesnt even make sense.

youtube is not available in China, if you could put the video on youku then that would work.

Well I was very lucky, I went to highschool and college in the west, this and the fact that I lived there so long would be the reason for my English ability.

Well I am Doctor Nefario.

It is funny though how lacking a little in languages skills on the internet makes whatever you do look so shady.

Oh by the way, they're offering (or trying to offer) medical advice using Traditional Chinese Medicine (think herbs, massage,acupuncture. They're from the University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Jiangxi China.

Can we get a free song to listen to first and see what it's like?

Please guys, as fun as it is to make fun of their elementary English could you please stop. They are Chinese students and this is the first time they have interacted with the Western world.

You're not making a great impression by endlessly making ripping on them. Their English is not great, they are new to bitcoin, and are trying to offer a good or service for bitcoin. Cut them some slack.

Besides, I'm making them do this so you're making me feel guilty when you're mean.

On a related note, I just tried gobby, and I think it would be perfect for this task. It's great to have what feels like a multi-user version of gedit on a windows box. And actually looking into this, it includes a chat window so you don't even need to keep irc open.

http://gobby.0x539.de/

Certainly works.

Yeah, I was the other party with genjix, very effective.

I think there is a lot of talk in this thread about master/apprentice coders, I think this would work well but thats not the only use cases(I don't think it was in our case, genjix correct me if I'm wrong).

My problem is I'm a slow developer, I think that I'm quite good at getting the overall picture, while at the same time able to get down into the details of code with no problems, I'm just slow when writing(genjix opinions on this, how would you describe our working roles in this exercise?).

I think more so than being master/apprentice style relationship, it allowed the both of us to get onto the same page very quickly. The communication, the feedback was instant, which made taking action on them really easy and fast. This turns into a kind of feedback loop of fast feedback->fast changes ->fast feedback..... until it's done.

We made a lot of progress on the command line client for the stock market, genjix was pretty much brought completely up to speed on 2-3 frameworks for the server and the server itself, he got me up to speed on bitcoind's json-rpc.

I think that one of the things that sped things up was that genjix was  pre-occupied with the implementation, the very small details, getting lines of code to work. While I was thinking about what needs to be done, whats better etc.

Genjix never had to take time out to stop and think "whats the best way to do this?" because I had already done that. Once he'd done one thing, I was ready to give him what we were to move onto next. He had nothing to interupt his flow.

I think pair programming over the net works, as long as both parties are capable, not nessisarily master/apprentice.

We used ssh+gnu screen+vim and irc which worked fine. I think gobby, ssh+gnu screen & irc would work great. If both parties have a good enough connection and a headset then skype would probably be able to replace irc for the better.

genjix, a more in depth analysis of your experience would be great.

Yes same one. Most Chinese online don't use email. So QQ provides a kind of email gateway, where sending to their QQ number@qq.com will send the user a message they can view using their IM client.

Thats my fault. Just a note, this is not to ACTUALLY travel to China, although I'm not sure exactly what it is.

I'm back.

Onto the topic, we should offer goods and services that are uniquely advantagous when using bitcoin. To a certain extent this means offering goods or services that are illegal or banned in many if not most countries.

Begin to offer these and bitcoin will flourish. But even though it's a slow news (and chat) month as long as it is that way because people are busy building bitcoin stuff then great, thats fine. There will be a splurge of interest when we get a lot of new services.

WellcI think it's fair to say you know where they are.

Can't there be open minded objectivists? Just because they're right doesn't mean they can't get along with you 

Instead of trying to get work or freelance, why don't you build something and then try to sell it for btc?

There are loads of ideas, because bitcoin is sooooooo young, it's economy doesn't even have the basic infrastructure. The builders of this infrastructure are going to make it big once bitcoin becomes more mainstream.

I wasan't talkng about existing business accepting bitcoin, but a business created in the bitcoin economy, and operating primarily in bitcoins.

Like I said, I didn't read the link, but simply from wikileaks alone I dont think thats cypherpunk, about his pre-wikileaks past I know nothing so cant comment on it.

But nmap, hmmm thats interesting.

Actually the reason we're on a downward trend with the USD bitcon price is the balance of trade. For all intents and purposes you can think of bitcoin as the currency of a very tiny country (the official currency of cypherspace?), and as such represents everyting that this cypherspace economy produces and exports.

A falling currency means that we are importing more than we are exporting. Many people including myself have been spending their bitcoins. The recipients have been exchanging these to pay for the products or services they provide.

We need to change this balance of trade, we need to export more than we import( at least for a time). Otherwise the trend will be continually downward.

Long story short we need more bitcoin based businesses. But for the time being we could see bitcoin drop back quite a bit from it's current low.

I hardly think Assange is anything of a cypherpunk. He could easily have set up wikileaks as a .onion or .i2p rvice and done things that way. Hardly anything cryptography related. His big thing has mostly been about publicity, that is brining publicity to the leaks.

Nothing to do with cypherpunk here. By the way I havn't read the link.