Not to be overly pessimistic, but the audience for Xtube here is *not* accustomed to paying for anything. My entire generation (born in the 1990s) has the mindset of "why pay for pr0n when you can find it for free elsewhere?" Of course that mindset can be extended beyond the adult market, but that's not really the point.
True enough. I've never paid for my pr0n either. Point is, while members of this forum are probably willing to donate towards something they feel is a worthy cause, the Internet as a whole does not share this same optimism. A bitcoin-fueled site of this nature could only succeed if one is first to market (like MadHatter). After that, well, you've already exhausted your already-small market of consumers.
Well, according to Forbes, the porn industry grosses as much as $3.9 billion: http://www.forbes.com/2001/05/25/0524porn.htmlHardly what I would call a small market. Apparently there are still plenty of folks paying for their porn. |
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But there is nothing philosophically contradictory (in my opinion) or logistically preventable about the formation of a dominant "Bitcoin Organization".
Absolutely correct. In fact, I think that the emergence of a dominant "Bitcoin Organization" is inevitable, given enough time. There's always a Google or an IBM or a Microsoft waiting to be made. |
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Problem is that here, we do not need any professional design, we need something that takes between 10 mins and 1 hours. What would you charge for something that takes 1 hour MAX, and you have full freedom as long as nothing is copied (obviously), in vectors.
Yeah. Right now we're so small that most of the central businesses are run by individual coders hacking away in their spare time, from what I can tell. Not exactly big corporations with deep pockets.  |
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Aaand apparently I already have Portal on my Steam account... never mind. Sorry about that.  |
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I am saying that as a Bitcoin noob, maybe design can help to make things clever and more accessible.
You're absolutely right. The guys over at weusecoins.com have started off in the right direction. The need for a "killer app" has been discussed at length here, with terms like "kitten activism" and "Jessica Simpson stupid" often getting trotted out. It all boils down to making well-designed services built on the Bitcoin Network. I "falcon punched" you on a technicality, which wasn't very nice of me, but I did it to make a point: the bitcoin ecosystem is not monolithic. It's not designed to be. Bitcoins are meant to be the topsoil on which the seeds of our geniuses are nourished, no more than that. The foliage is up to us. If you want to change something, go make it happen. :-) |
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You guys are talking about a detail in the whole (and messy) Bitcoin graphic identity. This detail must be chosen by following a real design process, I don't mean by a single designer, but certainly not on a forum post.
In my opinion, Bitcoin has a real identity problem and it must be solved quickly by professionals.
Bitcoin is not an organization. Bitcoin is a technology. Saying Bitcoin has a real identity problem is akin to saying the Internet has a real identity problem. |
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Actually I think the governments now have enough resources to disrupt bitcoin if they want, even without crypto breakthroughs.
What? You mean some government has enough resources to screw around with our juggernaut of a $4,155,026 economy?  |
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mewantsbitcoins, it's too expensive =) Whenever I run bots, someone find this and start slowly grab coins from them. Having no income from this project, spending hundreds on supporting bots is way too expensive at current exchange rate.
Sounds like you need better bots! As far as getting people playing, perhaps it wouldn't hurt to have a lobby, where a person can see all the users who are online, or a list of users with online users at the top, and allow the users to "challenge" each other. It'd take some of the effort out of making matches. After all, even if there were thousands of users floating around on your website all at once, you'd never know it unless some of them sat down at a table to play. And the tendency, it seems, is not to sit down when one sees an empty table, but to simply leave. |
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Observation: The failure of BitCoin was obvious when the master of ceremonies of Gavin's presentation commented that he himself had "bought some BitCoins and they had already trippled in value". The media in a properly managed medium of exchange never changes value.
Your failure was obvious when didn't ask "tripled in value in relation to what?" It's nonsensical to say "never changes value," unless you mean "in relation to itself," in which case you're spouting inane tautologies. The value of things are always changing in relation to the medium used to measure value, and in relation to past values as well due to supply and demand. If the dollar falls, for example, everything else rises in value when measured by the dollar; if supply and demand for everything but dollars remains constant for decades and demand for dollars rises, then everything else will fall in value against the dollar. And allow me to echo everyone else here by saying that the lack of a central manager is one of the great allures of bitcoins for me. The Bitcoin Project aims only to make a readily tradable digital analogue to a commodity. You can build anything on top of that layer if you like, but to build those layers is outside the scope of the Bitcoin Project's vision. Those layers are left as an exercise for the user, so to speak. The utter wrongness and pomposity of your comment is appalling. I do hope I've misunderstood you. Edit:Sorry for stomping on the newbie. Certain things make my brain hurt. I can't be held liable for what I type when my brain hurts, can I? |
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Hey, here's some code that calculates the total number of bitcoins generated at a certain height: def t(h):
return sum([21e4*int(50e8/2**k) for k in xrange(int((h+1)/21e4))])+int(50e8/2**(int((h+1)/21e4)))*((h+1)-(int((h+1)/21e4))*21e4)/1e8
Very clever... |
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Alright, she finally got her demo to me: http://ryepdx.com/sonata.mp3Let me know if anyone's interested in hiring her and I'll pass the word along. |
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Okay, so she had a busy day and didn't get back to me until tonight. She says she'll send me the demo at 9:30AM PST, so it should be up here shortly thereafter.
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It's still something to consider, as this is one attack avenue I don't think that I've seen discussed on this forum before.
Remember the Mystery Miner? Are you implying that the 'Mystery Miner' was such an exploit? Not at all. I just thought I remembered seeing this exploit being kicked around a bit during that period, that's all. The Mystery Miner does, however, show that it is possible (however unlikely) for a single, determined user to manipulate the network's difficulty. How might this harm the network. or introduce another fraud vector?
Well, there's that double-spend vector that keeps getting kicked about. Also... Okay, so how would this attack vector aid in a double spend fraud? It would shake out small miners...
...which could lead to a person eventually taking control of over 50% of the network with computing power equal to a value less than 50% of the network's power at the time of the attack's commencement. How? Those last two are kinda two sides to the same coin. If a person were to procure enough computing power to single-handedly alter the difficulty level, they can essentially control how profitable mining is for everyone else, at least to a degree. If they managed to up the difficulty such that mining ceased to be profitable for anyone else, other miners would start dropping out. The network's total computing power would wane as a result, with an ever greater percentage of it being composed of the attacker's machines. If the attacker had made up less than half the network when they began upping the difficulty, it's possible that with other miners dropping out they would eventually come to own a majority share (so to speak.) |
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It's still something to consider, as this is one attack avenue I don't think that I've seen discussed on this forum before.
Remember the Mystery Miner? How might this harm the network. or introduce another fraud vector?
Well, there's that double-spend vector that keeps getting kicked about. Also... It would shake out small miners...
...which could lead to a person eventually taking control of over 50% of the network with computing power equal to a value less than 50% of the network's power at the time of the attack's commencement. |
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In the UK at least there are apprenticeships schemes where you can pay staff something like $2.50 per hour, which is way under minimum wage.
Oh yeah. That totally reminds of the unpaid and stipended internships this side of the ocean. I'd forgotten about those. So I guess there is precedent for this after all. |
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