Maybe we should ask an admin to edit the title of this thread and add a WARNING note.

Good.  Looking forward to that.

That's an other reason why reputation is so important.  You have to make people believe in you when you tell them something.

Of course it will be easier if you abandon the idea of owning 50% of the company, and let investors share say about 90%.  You would receive 10% of the profits, plus a salary.

Edit.  By the way,  proving that you own some money is easy with bitcoins.  You just have to use keys which are known in the bitcoin network to worth a certain amount.  Since those keys support signing, it is easy.

Not exactly.  Capitalism is the ownership of means of production.  What you are talking about is liberalism.

Of course if someone wants to pay labour with a share of profits, he can.  But practical experience shows that it is not interesting.  Profits are the fruits of ownership, not labour.  I know I would not buy a share of a company which distributes a proportion of profit to workers.  Or at least I would diminish my price in accordance.

Ok, but investors will be more interested in bringing the second half if you can show them that you already own the first.


To put it simply,  your project exists already :  right now you own 100% of the shares.  But those shares worth nothing, until you convince people to buy some.

If you convince investors that you own 625$, and tell them that you intend to buy a 1250$ worh machine, then you might convince them to buy 50% of your shares at 12.5$ a share.

Your company will then have the necessary amount, and you will have a the right to keep 50% of the profits.

I understand.  It's perfectly normal from you to want to make money with your idea, without giving half of it to investors.

To do so, you need to raise half of the price of the device.

But you can also accept the idea that investors will gain more money than you, at least at the beginning.  Then, with the money you'll earn, you will buy their shares back, until you eventually own more than 50% of the company.

That is not how things work.  What you are talking about is a labour.  It requires a salary.  This can be negociated.  A director can perfectly be a simple employee.  Same for any technician.

But this is different from the way profits are distributed.

This is basic capitalism.

Indeed.  But that's not possible if you already get 50% of the profit without owning 50% of the shares.

It seems that what you really want to do is to open only half of the capital.  In that case, the amount you want to raise is not 1250$, but 625$.  You will provide the second half of it.

This is just not acceptable.  You should receive in porportion to the part of the capital that you own.

If your machine costs 1250$, you'll get 50% of the profit if and only if you bring 625$.

Mobile phone application won't have to be a full bitcoin client nor server.  It wouldn't make much sense.

It would be much simpler for mobile phones to use a service such as mybitcoin, or to connect via ssl to a Personnal Desktop.

I don't think the size of the block chain is an issue.  At all.  I don't care if it bothers some users.  Some people will always be unhappy about something.

Please don't touch the protocol.  It is fine as it is right now.

Gosh I can't believe this happened.  Even a hero member such as noagendamarket got screwed.  A good lesson indeed.

I'd like to add that such a service is not new (I think it's called "rapid prototyping"), but this one would be the first one to charge in bitcoins.

Wouldn't it be much simpler to be able to run several instances of bitcoin, each of them running on a specific "wallet.dat" file ?

I mean, we would just add a --wallet long option to the client/server app.  The name of your account would be the name of your wallet file.

Good.  I'm glad you are willing to do things in the proper way.

I very much think your project is possible.  1,225$ is not that much money, anyway

We don't need a lawyer, but a few precautions.

First, you should publish your GnuPG key.  Your reputation worths nothing if it is not associated to a secure way to identify yourself.

Second, if I send some bitcoins to your address, you have to send me a signed document proving that I actually contributed to your fundraising.

Also, you have to publish somewhere about how much exactly has been raised so far.  Such publicaction should be as regular as possible.

Moreover, if I buy shares of your microcompany, I expect a bit more than a right to receive a share of your future profits.  There should be the possibility to attend to an assembly and to vote for decisions.  You can't claim "all business decisions" once you're not the only one who brought the capital.

You're going a bit fast, imo.

What about writing a clear and exhaustive company status document ?


If you want to raise say 2,000$, you must sell say 100 shares at 20$ each.  I.e about 200 BTC / share.

I'd be ok to buy one share, but you have to formalize all this much better.

As discussed on freenode, would you consider raising the necessary capital by selling shares of your future business ?

If you do, I'm in.

I didn't know.

Well, I've put this bid on my page, using a link to this message as a reference to contact you in case someone is willing to sell 1g of gold for 8 BTC.

I didn't know about mailvault.  I don't get it :  what's the point of using GPG if you don't own your private key ?  Well, I guess some people just don't like the idea of installing software on their computer...

Anyway, on their "about" page, they mention their distributed offshore servers :  http://www.metropipe.net/

This website accepts an impressive number of methods for paiements, including pecunix for instance.   I guess they might accept bitcoins.