Let us know how it goes.

I'm no expert, but have you tried this?

http://sdb.open-xchange.com/node/57

It's just a web application. I could have used a survey site, I suppose, but I figured it would be fun to make it myself.

For most of them, I'll give radio buttons (maybe multiple checkboxes) and try to outline most of what I would suppose are the common answers, and then give an "Other" choice with a open text box, just in case.


You mean like the MBTI or Big 5? I suppose that could be interesting, but I don't know how useful it would really be for the time it would take.

Ok, so I think my app is almost ready, so what kind of questions would be good initially?

I'm thinking about keeping this first survey not too long (5 minutes or so). So, I think I'd start with a few basic demo questions:

Location
Age
Gender
Education
Work
Political leaning
Etc. (Let me know if I'm missing something)

And then ask a few bitcoin related questions:

How and when did you first hear about Bitcoins?
How do you use Bitcoins, and how often?
Why do you use Bitcoins?
Are you optimistic about Bitcoin adoption, stability, etc?
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing Bitcoin and the Bitcoin community?

What do you all think? Does that seem like a good start?

Glad to help. 

You're using what PHP assumes are constant variable names rather than strings as keys to access the hash returned by $bitcoin.

So, for example, you need to change:
to

The notices are just letting you know that because the code didn't work the way it's written (since the variable time is undefined), it assumed that you really meant to put strings there.

I tend to get a little carried away with things, so I am trying to be too irrationally exuberant about Bitcoin. It may never really be the global currency we dream of, but I guess what I'm saying is that if we can take something like Bitcoin this far, then who knows what potentially lies in store. You know?

Well, the more I think about it, there probably isn't any easy way to get nice statistically sound data when on the Internet, and especially in the Bitcoin community as a whole. But I guess that's okay, depending on our goals.

On one hand, I'd like to study outside the community, with focus groups and the like, to learn more about the general perception of Bitcoin and potential obstacles to adoption. In that case, statistical bias probably isn't that big of a deal as long as we cast a wide net for our groups.

On the other hand, I'd like to look within as well, to learn about what brought us to Bitcoin in the first place. It'd be useful if we could use it to learn more about the future of Bitcoin, but I guess we can only predict so much. I think I'm more interested in the less useful, but perhaps more inspiring, qualitative aspects of the community, and especially the active, out-going people we see on the forums.

I don't really know how to put this, but I guess I just feel so drawn to Bitcoin, not because of Bitcoin itself, but because it is an alternative, and I think the world is sorely lacking in alternatives. But with technology, you can take a brilliant idea and it can take a life of its own, and it can become that alternative. And those alternatives could maybe grow and perhaps finally overcome our dismal status quo. I think the seeds are within us here. I mostly just want to know that I'm not alone with these feelings. Sorry for the rant. I'm pretty tired.

I guess that was a bit off topic. So, anyway, I suppose as a first step I might start by throwing together a quick survey app, maybe start off by asking some basic demographic questions.

One quick question, if I required Google account authentication to deter spam or abuse (like the Bitcoin Faucet), would that turn a lot of you away? I understand if you would rather not give out your email and risk spam for yourself.

I hope not. Whatever your opinion, I think it's clear that if adoption is going to increase, we will have to try to keep Bitcoin from being directly associated in people's minds with Anon and that whole cyber-prankster ethos.

I'm just doing this for fun, interest and out of the goodwill of my heart.

Oh, I think I found what you're talking about.

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/why-the-p2p-foundation-is-paying-its-salaries-in-bitcoin/2012/03/28

I suppose forming some kind of online focus group would be the most cost-effective solution. Though, I'm not quite sure what sort of demographics we'd want to aim for (if any particular ones), or how we could recruit people for the group in a cost-effective yet relatively unbiased way.

Does anyone happen to know of an existing non-profit group or organization, hopefully with a little more experience in this sort of thing, that we might be interested in helping out if we were to raise the funds? I know that many organizations accept Bitcoin for donations, but are there any that endorse increased Bitcoin adoption?

I like this idea. Maybe something along the lines of a focus group would help for this?

Perhaps you could not only introduce a focus group to Bitcoin and get their initial feedback, but even walk them through the process of setting up a wallet (preferably through some kind of simpler client or online wallet) and give them a few Bitcoin as compensation for their time.

I've been interested in Bitcoin for a while now, partly for technical reasons and partly for political ones, but lately I've become more interested in learning more about the Bitcoin community itself. Who is using Bitcoin and why? How are we using it? What are our backgrounds, our interests, our plans, our goals? I suppose all that might seem rather boring to some, and I'm not quite sure why I find it fascinating to be honest. I suppose I just feel that whatever is behind the allure of Bitcoin has the potential to really be a game-changer in the future.

I've read a lot of the informal polls here on the forum, but I was curious about whether there have been any larger scale studies on the subject (I haven't found anything with my feeble google-fu). If not, would anybody be interested in helping with, participating in, or at least reading the results of a informal study? I'm not a sociologist, but I'd love to put my web skills to work on a project that could potentially benefit the community as a whole.

Anyway, thank you for reading. Please let me know what you think.

Ok, so I think I figured out what the data is supposed to represent. By looking at the Javascript on the page, (in http://p2pool.info/scripts/p2pool.js, starting at line 422), you can see that it's calling /stats, and then using those results to set-up the chart on the front page. Basically, it's just a historical list of hash rates.

So, for each one of the entries (say [1338722700000,196]), the first value is a UNIX timestamp including milliseconds (so 1338722700000 translates to today), and the second is the hash rate in GH/s.

I did some Googling, and I came across this stackExchange post that seemed similar

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2562/help-locating-bottleneck-on-new-mining-rig


It might be worth a shot.

I'm having trouble figuring out how to translate the polygon data into geographic coordinates. Do you happen to know how it works?

I would call him Mettie the Majestic.

Mettie because it's short for Metaco.in, and Majestic because that word captures the awesome essence of whales to me.