Privately created credit is imploding faster than publicly created currency is being printed.  The money supply is shrinking.

Plus, the Europeans have possibly botched things up worse than the Americans.  You don't have to be good for your currency to appreciate, you just have to be less incompetent.

This discussion has got me all shook up about getting involuntarily relieved of my bitcoins.

I've got my wallet.dat backed up and stored away.  What else should I do?  Do I need to remove the client and wallet files from my (XP) machine?  Is that even possible without a full wipe of the HD?

Well the first thing I learned from that article is that electricity is much cheaper in Ontario than the US.  I just checked my bill and I paid $0.065/kWh last month.  At least there is something that is cheaper in this country.

Other than that, I was left with some questions.

He says "we have a currency that will devalue itself almost as easily as the Zimbabwean dollar", right after noting that the ultimate quantity of BTC is fixed.  Not sure how he arrived at that conclusion.

The author also says the 'artificial' creation of bitcoins is 'madness'.  As if boring a hole 3 miles underground at the risk of losing your life to haul out some yellow metal is not madness.  He seems to simply want bitcoins created and then disbursed arbitrarily by the creator somehow.

Sounds a lot like the fiat money system we have now.

Well it's not the 'killer app', but I think this is an idea that might fly on kickerstarter:

A microstock photo exchange site where users pay in bitcoin.  Let's call it BitPics for short.

Currently, stock photo sites charge between 40% and 80% (!) of selling price for photographers to list their photos for sale.  I don't know why the commissions are so large, but it sure seems like a market niche ripe for some efficiencies.  I would speculate that their two largest costs are bandwidth (shuffling 3 Mb photos up and down the pipe all day) and transaction fees to PayPal.

BitPics would reduce these costs in two ways: use bitcoin for transactions, and instead of hosting the photos locally, the exchange would only serve to display the photos.  The photographer would have to find his own host (ex: OpenDrive).

Assuming my speculations are reasonable, these reduced costs might allow BitPics to charge only 5% exchange fees.  Any profits could be returned to the participants as if they were part of a co-operative.

Such a site shouldn't need $200,000 for the technical requirements.  I'm going to take a wild guess and throw out $10,000 for that, if it's based on open source stuff already on the market.  Add another $30,000 for promotion and marketing to spread the word in the right communities and maybe it would fly.

No interest here or over at vbulletin.org

What am I doing wrong?  Not enough money?  Bad idea?
 

PM sent...

Yes please, when can I sign up?


Exactly.  And the sooner the better.  The teacher's unions will go ballastic of course, but probably not that many voters care what the educrats think anymore.

There is a discussion on that idea here Bruce:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1065.msg13159#msg13159


I think the most interesting part of that article is where it says they raised $200,000 at kickstarter.com

Wow, the various bitcoin promotion ideas floating around on this forum could sure benefit from a cash infusion.  Has anyone here ever used kickstarter.com to raise money for a venture?

Yes, I wondered about OSQA, but really I think it is more important to get something built that can plug into a very popular system (vBulletin) than just to have a running example of a bitcoin-funded Q&A site.

But if anyone has a proposal along those lines I am listening...

bitcoinmarket.com + PayPal.  General registration is closed but he is letting in established forum members.

Okay here it is:

Customization of vBCredits II Deluxe mod for vBulletin

This needs to be compatible with vBulletin 3.8 and vBulletin 4

I need a credits system that can do the following:

-enhance vBulletin to work like a pay-per-answer site. User posts a question, other users post answers and indicate what price the questioner (or any other user) must pay to see the answer.
-similarly, a user can post an article, which can only be revealed by paying price set by the poster
-users can subscribe to access a thread by paying on an ad hoc basis, or by automatic weekly/monthly/annual subscription charge
-users can donate/tip a poster
-users can donate to the site
-users can display how much they've earned/spent if they wish
-all transactions must be accounted for in some kind of log
-admin can charge to have users post in a particular thread
-users must be able to pay for their in-forum currencies in bitcoin from their bitcoin client or online bitcoin account
-users must be able to cash out their earnings into their bitcoin client or online bitcoin account
-admin should be able to have a commission, optionally set by flat fee or percentage, diverted to a second bitcoin account.  The commission rate can be set differently for each of the payment actions above

After a quick review of some of the mods currently available for vBulletin it seems that modifying vBCredits II Deluxe would be the easiest way to achieve the above, as it comes with an API. I really don't know though, as I'm no developer.  As well, vBCredits includes a lot of useful functionality that could benefit from bitcoinization.

If this project interests you please PM me or post here.

I'll start by saying $350 but if I'm underpricing this feel free to let me know.

What I've done is gone and posted it over here, in case it's not appropriate to start this type of discussion on this forum:

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?p=2122230#post2122230

Is it appropriate to solicit for a developer for a bitcoin-related project on the forum?
If it is, is this the category to do it in?

Are bank transfers quicker/cheaper/easier if they are within the same country?

For example, if MTGox had a trusted contact in several different countries through whom users could flow bank transfers would that be a satisfactory solution?

Here's an idea to get some exposure:
Matt Drudge has a form on drudgereport.com where you can submit news tips.  I submitted that I wished he accepted bitcoin donations so that I could thank him for the work he does.

I think a nice Donate Bitcoin gif on drudgereport would be a nice attention getter!

Drop Drudge a note as well if you agree.

70% of something is still more than 100% of nothing.

Zynga is a $5 billion company, all because of 3 years on Facebook.

Remember "My Aquarium" way back in 2007?  The developer of that was making $3,000/day selling virtual fish.  It's fine not to like Facebook, but it is where the micropayment action is.

You are correct, I have this wrong.  At least for Kachingle, the payout calculation includes the number of times I visit that site in a month.  However it does work in perpetuity.  So if I don't visit the site next month, but visit the month thereafter, they will receive a payment unless I turn off the Kachingle.

Yes, you have to setup a monthly withdrawl from your PayPal, whether or not you use it.  This would be a bit of an obstacle for some people I think.

The "transaction cost" includes the human burden of remembering and typing a password. That seems to be enough to stop micropayments being used by most people.[/quote]
I think we're talking about developing a system that would have a central website storing some of your bitcoins, which you would then dispense to content providers.  Presumably this wouldn't require any greater login credentials than Flattr and Kachingle.

It only works well if you want to allocate your donations based on a metric setup by Flattr or Kachingle.  If you feel one content provider deserves more than another, I'm not sure if they can accomodate that.

Actually I thought that was the big DISadvantage of Flattr/Kachingle et. al.

Let's say I'm at a blogger site and happen to really like his most recent blog entry.  I might want to tip him 0.05 BTC.  That doesn't mean I want to tip him 0.05 every month.  Maybe I'll never come back to that website again.  I don't want to make a lifetime commitment, just say 'thanks' once.

A bitcoin-based system could also be used to unlock content.  Maybe I'm trying to find a solution to a problem I'm having with my car.  The answer is in some automotive forum where general discussion is free, but specific solutions are in a locked topic that can only be opened by a one-time 'donation' of 0.10 BTC.

The big advantage of a bitcoin-based system would be the ability to do ad hoc donations with minimal transaction cost.  That is a significant competitve advantage for bitcoin.  As far as I can tell, nobody is doing that currently.

I had the same problem with a phpBB forum I run, until I added a custom field to the registration form.  That appears to have completely solved the problem.

If you want some more forum help just PM me.

That's funny because I would have used the same analogy, but in reverse.  (You must find it confusing that most creationists in North America are free enterprisers, while all communists are evolutionists by definition ).

It's easy to complain about 'the people' not understanding economics.  But what is really appalling is that most of the economic and political establishment also don't understand economics.  Hence our current situation, and hence the reason a mere 20 years after the reunification of Germany - a 40 year side by side experiment of communism versus partial free enterprise- we still see political leaders that actually think they can plan our way to prosperity.