No no.. it's a user defined ticker right?   I'm up front about about that.. it's defined as a curve to start at 0.0000001 of a % of actual value and ramp up in a strictly defined manner over time to the ultimate target of 100% of the Mona Lisa's value.

All of my family and friends completely random investors/art appreciators are cool with this.. and as the current ticker target price is still 'only' around 1% of the ultimate value - What a bargain! you too can get in now for massive upside!

Seriously though - what is to stop someone using a ticker curve that favours early adopters? Only the 'intelligence' of the marketplace seeing through that play?  Ha!

I hereby create a user currency 'MonaCoins' with the following properties ...

- Target value - The assessed value of the Mona Lisa, adjusted for inflation  (currently about $750 Million USD)
- 'Only' 1000 of these coins will ever exist... I already own a few hundred.. so get in fast!


Of course, this *fabulous* offer is not without risk, because if the Mona Lisa is ever destroyed - MonaCoins will be worthless.
Don't worry though.. as the holder of several hundred  billion dollars worth of monacoins, you can rest assured that I will be spending a small fortune on a private army to guard the real thing.


Coming soon.. my next coin: 'BattlestarGalacticaCoin' -  tied to the theoretical cost of constructing a fully functional Battlestar Class Military spaceship (yes - with FTL drive!) - as assessed by a team of the best scientists,futurists and sci-fi geeks!



If you see no problem with driving the price of a few thousand competing mysterious internet entity's "OilCoin" or "GoldCoin" offerings to their target price despite them not even being in the oil or gold industry - you should have no qualms at all with my innovative Art-Backed and Future-Technology-Backed coins.
What could possibly go wrong!? These are sure to hit face-value faster than the 2011 bitcoin took to hit $100! Up Up Up baby!

Have you tried to get paypal to reverse a person to person payment ?

decent paper. I dont agree with problems 2 and 3.

2 - If that is your argument the average person is just as likely to have money stolen from there PP account as there bitcoin wallet.
3 - it is "hard" to get bitcoins but there are legitimate sites to go through which you dont need to worry about scamming.

I've been wondering when someone would write this. Is there now a general consensus of where Bitcoin is going?

I have spent the last few months writing and editing a document which I am ambitiously calling "The Second Bitcoin Whitepaper".

Currently it is 12 pages long, and it is being reviewed by a couple trusted associates. My birthday is this Friday, so I am taking the day off work to do some final polishing before publishing it for public comment.

As a teaser, here is the summary at the beginning of the document:


Once I am reasonably happy with it on Friday, I will publish it and link to it from this thread. I will probably also create a new thread for discussion and feedback. I plan to spend most of Friday recruiting various bitcoin luminaries to take a look, and various bitcoin news sources to link to it.

Sorry, I'm not available to discuss the paper or answer questions until then, so please don't be offended if I don't answer questions posted to this thread before Friday. Thanks!

would you do it yourself if I just provide you with a proxy server account?
ofc .20 $/ad would be enough if you you do the work, I'd focus on the counting ; )
what turned me off is the software thing and difficult captcha

Rosenthal's Measurements: Negative Result Reports

Engineers Reporting Negative Results: Rosenthal and Cole ~  Ian Bryce
Report by Sterling D. Allan   (March 8, 2003)

Engineers, Walt Rosenthal and Parke Cole were invited to measure the Lutec1000 in January 2001.  Their measurements showed results showed 28% efficiency.  The exchange was amendable, despite the negative test results.  Rosenthal stated, "I walked them through the calculations carefully so they would understand, but they didn't want to believe the results."  Test entailed a dynamometer measuring output the motor, powering with power supply from wall producing DC volts, optical shaft encoder on end of shaft to measure rpm.  Results showed 50 Watts power going in and 14 Watts equivalent of mechanical power coming out.

After receiving the above synopsis, Walt Rosenthal added the following:

Report by Walt Rosenthal (March 8, 2003) ~

The inventors would start with fully charged batteries for the demonstration. They assumed that the battery terminal voltage would decrease linearly as the battery was used. So, after using the battery for, say, 30 minutes, they would again measure the battery terminal voltage, and subtract this value from the start voltage, then multiply that difference voltage times the known amp-hour capacity of the battery bank, to come up with their assumption of the total energy consumed from the battery bank. Unfortunately, battery terminal voltage is almost flat for perhaps 90 percent of the battery capacity, before it drops off rather steeply for the last 10 percent of it's capacity. Parke Cole and I tried to explain this to the inventors. I am not sure we succeeded. We were about the 15th group of people to show up on their door step after they went public. We were the first people to bring our own test equipment. The inventors said that the first people to show up were the Russian Mafia. Our bottom line was 50 watts of DC power input, which resulted in 14 watts of rotary mechanical power output. I hope the inventors have improved their device from where we tested it so that it now matches their statements of it's performance.

Welcome evoorhees! We like the word "predicting" over "gambling"

Who do you consider "big players"?