Something bothers me far more than any of the factual and spot-on criticisms regarding a total lack of due diligence to financial or construction planning-- why would anyone post this shit on Bitcointalk if they were serious about it?
This probably isn't the best forum on the board for soliciting donations but I doubt it would be seen as a "Bitcoin project" in the projects forum so at least he's got some sound business advice here even if no donations are forthcoming. |
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Are you planning on actually going to inspect the property yourself before you put in an offer (don't pay $175,000 - it was listed for $215,000 earlier this year and they'll probably drop the price further if they're not overwhelmed with potential buyers)? If you buy it, will you be physically present to oversee the renovations or will you have to hire someone to do that?
Yeah I hope the price goes lower, but then again as I've said, i'm in no rush to get it giving pleanty of time to gather funds. As for the second part, I would be physically there to oversee the renovations. If the price drops someone else may buy the building, gut it and use it for a totally different purpose unless there's some zoning regulation which says that it can only be used as a theatre (if there is, it should have been mentioned in the ad). |
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Are you planning on actually going to inspect the property yourself before you put in an offer (don't pay $175,000 - it was listed for $215,000 earlier this year and they'll probably drop the price further if they're not overwhelmed with potential buyers)? If you buy it, will you be physically present to oversee the renovations or will you have to hire someone to do that?
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do not relax, we just started playing.
i will be happy to start real work with you untill i will not tired.
there are so many interesting things waiting for you.
but you can pay me to avoid of all this shit. my price today is 300 bitcoins and this is much less than the quality ddos protection and reputation losing during scam. price will grow.
(...)
I advise you to pay in 3 days.
It's a bluff. That guy is not able to do anything. Ignore. . I'm a bit inclined to agree. If they had something real up their sleeve and wanted to give you an incentive to pay then they should have given you a demonstration of their ability to attack you directly. Instead they set up a fake website to scam people - something which requires very little technical ability. |
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I think your responses have been the best ones and comments weren't aimed at you. In responding to your quesitons, the epson projector will throw a picture at 50 feet(which isn't far) but the christie projector i was looking at casted the same after buying an additional lense. If I had the additional cash, I'd buy christie projectors just for name sake. I got an email back from my friend and she said she's going to go shoot pictures for me so I'll get a better understanding of everything. The ones on that coldwellbanker site were taken by the realtor.
One thing you really, really need to find out from the real estate agent is what type of screens the theatre has. Once you have that information, then you can find out whether the existing screens will be compatible with the Epson projectors. Don't assume that they will be - this is information about which you need to be absolutely certain. And if the real estate agent doesn't have that information then you need to either run very fast, demand that they obtain it, or be willing to pay someone who knows about this stuff to go to the theatre and check out the existing equipment and advise you of any limitations it may impose. |
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Hang me for my past and get it over with.. another thing I distaste is people who hold others for their past(and it's only this forum that does it). I only come here because there's only one main bitcoin forum.
I'm not hanging you for your past. The questions that I asked are relevant to how viable your project will be. Have you even checked whether you can legally solicit donations for this project. In some places you can't do that for a private, for profit venture but a community group which registered as a legal entity would be able to do it. People thinking something is a good idea doesn't necessarily make a project viable and sustainable. People might want a local theatre but would they attend it often enough for operating it to be viable? Have you checked into whether the cost for you to show films will be based on the seating capacity of the theatre, a flat licence fee for a set period of time, a set number of sessions, or some other method? Before you even start raising money for this project, you need to go and have a look at the building. You have no idea at this point what condition it's actually in and trying to gauge that from photos is a bad idea. If you're saving $500 every two weeks, that will only give you about $13,000 in twelve months. That leaves a hell of a lot more money which you need to raise and you're basically asking people to give you money in order for you -personally - to buy and own the theatre. Have you thought about the level of donation for which you're going to give "free movie tickets for life"? You need to because every free ticket is income you're foregoing and you're going to need the majority of your patrons to be paying customers in order to meet your overheads, let alone to provide you and your fiance with any income. If this was my project, these and the various building related issues (you're seriously not going to get any kind of inspection report done on the building before you buy it?) would all be part of my feasibility study. If the previous owners didn't have the money to tart the place up then there's every chance that the building and/or the equipment has been neglected in other ways and if there are safety compliance issues or structural integrity issues you need to know about them before you even consider buying the property. You don't want to scrounge together the money to buy the property only to find that it needs a lot more than just a cosmetic face lift and not have the funds to bring it up to scratch. Are you sure that the $2000 Epson projector is digital cinema quality and that the screen at the theatre is compatible with that format? On the downside, the initial costs for converting theaters to digital are high: $150,000 per screen on average. Theaters have been reluctant to switch without a cost-sharing arrangement with film distributors. A solution is a temporary Virtual Print Fee system, where the distributor (who saves the money of producing and transporting a physical copy) pays a fee per copy to help finance the digital systems of the theaters.[13]
While a theater can purchase a film projector for US$50,000 and expect an average life of 30–40 years, a digital cinema playback system including server/media block/and projector can cost 3–4 times as much, and is at higher risk for component failures and technological obsolescence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinema#CostsThe ad says that the theatre equipment is included in the $175,000 purchase price but it also says that everything is for sale AS-IS. You'd need to establish the condition of the equipment and whether it needs any money spent on it - if there's something wrong with some of the equipment you could be up for serious money to repair or replace it. |
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How long do you think it would take you to raise $350,000? Have you looked into what kind of legal entity you need to set up in order to solicit public donations for this venture? Do you have any project management experience?
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In a way of the biggest bitcoin exchange "mtgox requires physical identification"...while one of the main points of Bitcoin is total privacy :-/
You guys need to get over this. Seriously. If you want to transact with real world cash, you are going to have to follow real world rules. And one of the main points of Bitcoin is not total privacy, it is pseudo-anonymity. There is a difference, and it's fairly big. Mt.Gox may have been far from perfect in handling this situation, but it is a growing pain of a totally new economy. It will become easier to convert BTC/USD/other in the future if Bitcoin increases in popularity. You gotta roll with the punches for now and allow Mt.Gox to work better at streamlining this process so other people in the future can benefit from those growing pains. People also need to understand that the exchanges are not Bitcoin itself. In a peer-to-peer situation Bitcoin can offer pseudo-anonymity - that doesn't mean the exchanges can legally offer that (and I'm quite sure that none of them want to get shut down for offering it illegally). The exchanges should certainly be offering privacy, which means only disclosing user information when required to do so by law - AML laws require them to collect that information and privacy laws prevent them from disclosing it without legal cause. |
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Look, I can tell she is physically attracted to me but I want more than that. Frankly, I don't like it at all. I'd prefer if I had to work for her admiration. I would hate to have a relationship with her just based on that... That's all I am really afraid of.
She wants to hang out with you. That's how people get to know whether more than just a physical attraction exists between them. Maybe you'll just gain a new friend. Maybe you'll develop a romantic relationship. Maybe you'll discover that you don't really have much in common and don't really enjoy each other's company that much. You have a measure of control here. A relationship based purely on physical attraction can't happen without you letting it happen. She's interested in getting to know you. Maybe she'll come to admire you, maybe she won't. Stop getting ahead of yourself and go hang out with her. Suggest an alternative venue if you feel extremely uncomfortable about hanging out at her house. Take some risks. Feel the fear and do it anyway. |
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You'd really have to look into the legal requirements wherever you set this up. In a lot of places the issuing of shares, securities and bonds to the public is highly regulated and requires authorisation by a specific government department and organisations which issue them have to pit out a prospectus and or product disclosure statement as well as submit audited account to the regulator. There's bound to be somewhere where it's not so tightly regulated, but you'd need to find that place.
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It basically means that it was unintentional and didn't involve a negligent or criminal act on the part of another. It's a bit of a relic from the days when suicide was illegal and insurance companies wouldn't pay out for deaths resulting from suicide, so at one time it was a useful legal distinction. Even now, it's a ruling which probably gives some measure of comfort to families as it explicitly excludes suicide.
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Why a foundation? Why risk getting your funds blocked like Wikileaks? I don't see the link between your questions. How bitcoin funds can be blocked by blocking/dissolving/outlawing a bitcoin-related foundation? WTF? Do you even understand what is being proposed? |
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If this is the case then you need to be aware that the EU takes the lead on interpreting the PSD and it may come up with a different approach. This is especially important as it means that an individual member country's interpretation can be trumped by an EU ruling. |
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- The Bitcoin Foundation Committee should accept petitions to discuss / vote on governance issues. 1 BTC one vote, like one share one vote.
You almost certainly couldn't do this legally under a not-for-profit structure, and I don't think it's desirable anyway. It would mean that the biggest donor/s could effectively control the foundation in the same way that shareholders in a company do. |
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Mastercard and Visa will fund the development of this technology, with zero net gain of either upon the other.
Then Bitcoin will slide right in. Google won't care either way... USD and BTC will flow through their systems.
thats exactly what i was thinking. Bitcoin's zero to insignif tx fees will not be denied. A lot of people already have bank accounts with zero or low fees on normal transactions. There are also a lot of low cost remittance services. The appeal of Bitcoin is going to be different in different locations, depending on what's already offered by conventional banking and money transmission services and the extent to which financial transactions are regulated in those jurisdictions. People are more likely to use Bitcoin services where the cost of using licensed financial service providers is high or where regulations restrict how they can transfer their money through conventional means. Where licensed - and therefore insured - providers already offer low-cost, efficient services, people have less reason to deal with unregulated services. It makes more sense to target the gaps in existing services than to try to compete in areas where Bitcoin can only offer an equal or marginally better service than existing services but at considerably higher risk to the user. |
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My bank has just introduced this - something similar to what people have been proposing as a possible killer app for Bitcoin. http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/its-the-end-of-the-credit-card-era/story-e6freuy9-1226175942248Visa has licensed its Paywave technology to Google, which means that people will be able to add their Visa credit or debit card to their Google wallet as well as their Mastercard credit or debit card. Visa has also partnered with Samsung to provide NFC payment facilities at next year's London Olympic Games. It will be interesting to see who wins this particular battle - they're both likely to be extremely aggressive about trying to dominate the NFC payments market. |
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Thanks for posting that. It is indeed an interesting read. And kudos to the person who wrote such a comprehensive and informative response (even if it does essentially amount to "maybe, ask your lawyers").
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Why are they F-ing with France. Mt Gox should open a account in Andora and be done with it!
For SEPA deposits/withdrawals. This issue is not about their operations in general. Andorra is in Europe. In fact they are located between France and Spain. I don't see the problem. Andorra isn't part of the SEPA zone. These are the SEPA zone countries. 1. Austria 2. Belgium 3. Bulgaria 4. Cyprus 5. Czech Republic 6. Denmark 7. Estonia 8. Finland 9. France 10. Germany 11. Greece 12. Hungary 13. Ireland 14. Italy 15. Latvia 16. Lithuania 17. Luxembourg 18. Malta 19. Monaco 20. Netherlands 21. Poland 22. Portugal 23. Romania 24. Slovak Republic 25. Slovenia 26. Spain 27. Sweden 28. Switzerland 29. United Kingdom 30. Iceland 31. Liechtenstein 32. Norway |
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if an organization like this pays the developers what kind of trouble could we get into?
That was my first thought. It seems to me that in order to avoid attack or attempts at control, the rules need to explicitly enforce that the foundation has no influence over developer decisions or which developers get paid for which features etc. There would surely need to be some transparent external voting mechanism donators use, so that the foundation is more or less just a conduit/pool for the funds. (simply managing the operational aspects of the voting and distribution) If a not for profit is going to pay salaries to people or even pay them as contractors, it has to exert influence over their work, otherwise it's essentially giving people gifts to use as they please and the auditors will go apeshit. |
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I have some office space in San Francisco (SOMA) that I would be willing to donate for an office / meeting place. If it grows in to something larger and is used like a co-working space for Bitcoin I could help out there as well.
We all feel the same about the decentralized benefits of Bitcoin. At the same time I've been throwing a lot of money at lawyers, I'd assume Mark is and probably a few others. The regulation around Bitcoin will have the biggest impact on the exchanges initially but everyone is concerned. There are plenty of other reasons to form this foundation as well
We would have to make very clear that this is not a decision making body for the Bitcoin community as a whole.
Jered
To be honest, I've been wondering whether the exchanges have considered joining together to fight these legal battles. It's not an uncommon thing to do when there's a specific legal problem in an industry and it not only reduces the costs per organisation but it also helps develop a cohesive legal strategy. genjix has also mentioned having spent thousands on legal issues with the banks, so putting together a joint legal fighting fund might be an idea worth considering if you can all agree on which battles need to be fought first, which jurisdictions should be your first priority, and who to use as people representatives. |
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