My experience has been smooth so far:

1. Sent some BTC in
2. Placed some bets
3. Decided not to start my own bet statements and bet on them, since it isn't free (hint hint)
4. Withdrew the remaining BTC rather than letting them sit on the site

I put a big bet against a government acknowledgement of extraterrestrials, which seems like a safe bet in terms of the bet statement itself, but could be considered risky considering the expiration at the end of 2012 and the "here today gone tomorrow" nature of bitcoin sites . . .

Thanks for making an awesome site!

Hey slush,

I haven't seen any changes in the hall of fame for several weeks now, and I haven't seen any blocks found on my personal stats for a long, long time. At first I assumed I was just having an unlucky streak, but now I'm wondering if maybe the "blocks found" feature broke?

By the way, I'd love to see the top 20 listed by hashing power rather than blocks found, since so many blocks were found early on.

Thanks for your good communication during the recent problems!

Two different currencies with the same name seems needlessly confusing to me. You already have an exchange on the site, so why not consolidate into one currency: make 1 mooncoin = 1 USD? Then anyone betting on your site is not ALSO betting on the value of an e-currency rising.

Best of luck to you . . .

Very good points. I wouldn't personally put together a site like this because of the possibility that intrade will start accepting bitcoin deposits and withdrawals, killing any reason for people to use a bitcoin-only site.

I also prefer to be able to get into a position when the odds are attractive, and get out once the odds have approached what I think is fair, but I can live with this for now . . .

50% is fine for now, but hopefully you will keep as few coins on the server as possible as you get bigger.

I put a bunch of feature requests on your suggestions page - everybody go vote for them!

Suggestion: Let the statement creator determine what % of the payout is weighted by time. At least some (if not most) bets make sense to be 100% weighted. A few do make sense to be more unweighted, for instance if the outcome of the bet is completely random like a lottery drawing.

I deposited some btc. Come on confirmations!

I think I will include a link to a post on the bitcoin forum for any bets I create, unless you object . . .

Another suggestion: I'd really like to see the bet history for any open bet (the size and time of any bets that were placed, and optionally who placed the bets if they don't request to be anonymous)

Another question: I don't see any list of prohibited bets. For instance, I am doubtful you would allow me to bet 10,000 BTC that a political figure will not be assassinated (might as well send an invitation to the secret service to raid your house). I wonder if I could bet that a particular stock will crash (potential you would get in trouble for insider trading).

It will be interesting to see if your site gets big enough to where people start doing arbitrage between similar bets on your site and intrade.

Another suggestion: For some easy marketing, do a quick search on this forum for "intrade" and "prediction market", and send PMs to a few people likely to be interested in your site (for instance, http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Abitcointalk.org+"intrade.com"). You would have found me this way, and I would have appreciated the notification!

Sweet . . .

Would you mind disclosing what % of coins are stored offline?

Also, I edited my earlier post a few times and added more minor suggestions

I can't believe I missed the announcement for this. Beautiful site!

The idea of paying 5% to the person who came up with the bet is fantastic. I also like that you aren't running your own different internal currency. For instance, I'm not sure what 100 mc = 1 BTC/NMC means on the moonco.in site, since bitcoins don't have the same value as namecoins, and the ratio of them isn't a meaningful store of value . . .

I really want to use your site, but as I understand the rules, there is a big problem (please correct me if I'm not understanding right): As I understand things, a 100 BTC bet is the same as a 0.01 BTC bet made at exactly the same time for the weighted bet payout, and a 1 BTC bet made on the day the bet is created is the same as a 1 BTC bet made 1 minute before the bet is finished for the non-weighted payout.

Therefore, people can game the system by placing a whole bunch of tiny bets on each side when the bet is created, then a giant bet on the obvious winner right before the bet closes. In this way, they get most of the weighted bet payout, and most of the unweighted payout, without providing predictive value.

If I am wrong, please correct my misunderstanding. If I am right, I suggest that you pay out the whole 90% weighted by "bet size multiplied by the number of minutes in advance the bet was submitted". Therefore a 1 BTC bet submitted 1000 minutes in advance would be equivalent to a 10 BTC bet submitted 100 minutes in advance.

Second suggestion: bets should not be accepted once the outcome is clear. For instance, if the U.S. government announces that they have been having coffee with E.T., any bets placed on that topic after the announcement is made should be voided.

Third, I too would like to hear some comforting words about how you are storing the bitcoins. For instance, are most of the coins stored offline?

Address those three major issues (or fix my brain), and I am all over this.

Other minor suggestions:

• It would be sweet to be able to comment on the bets. One way to do this might be to have topics on THIS forum like "[BOB] Will the U.S. govt admit ET visit before 2013?" - post them in off-topic, and each thread will serve as an advertisement for your site, and your site could link to the threads from each bet.
• Collect 2% of ALL bets for yourself rather than 5% of losing bets. This will discourage obscenely huge bets if someone thinks they have a way to game the system, and you will probably make more money since winning bets will typically be larger. Also it makes your fees appear smaller and it helps prevent you from being accused of bias since the current system gives you more money in fees if a particular side wins.
• Rather than a submission fee, require that the submitter place a minimum bet on at least one side of their their new topic.
• You need standings! I want to be able to see the top predictors by accuracy, earnings, and (most importantly) % increase in portfolio value, broken down by "last 7 days", "last 30 days", "all time", etc. I used to play PPX (the popular science predictions exchange), and the competition for top spots was very addicting!

Anybody looking for possible topics to submit should check out:

http://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/
http://tippie.uiowa.edu/iem/markets/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Predictions_Exchange

Thanks!

I'm not sure what 100 mc = 1 BTC/NMC means, since bitcoins are different from namecoins, and the ratio of them isn't a meaningful store of value . . .

Distributed currency isn't a company, it is a technological breakthrough. Talking about "the future of bitcoin" now is like talking about "the future of the internet" in 1995. The impact of bitcoin will be of a similar scale over the next 20 years, and we only have hints of what that will look like now. I was too young to buy a "piece of the internet" in 1995, and it wasn't clear which companies were going to last even if I had wanted to.

There's a similar situation now, and anybody who can see it coming would be foolish not to act on that knowledge to the best of their ability.

Getting bitcoin.com is an epic win. It shows you guys are committed to the future of bitcoin! That domain is going to be absurdly valuable in a few years.

With all this awesome stuff coming out I feel justified in being a TradeHill booster all this time. Now it's time to go live with some improved US Dollar deposit options!

Jered - I sent you a big long email

I think the OP picture is right if you look at the next 10-20 years, but short-term, I think the TradeHill logo is a better picture for what is coming up.

I've argued continually on this forum that bitcoins are massively undervalued for what they can potentially do in the future. Once that potential starts to be realized, I will an annoying braggart and pretty much intolerable to be around (even more so than now).

Seriously. Bitcoin price increases are just getting started: http://bitcointalk.org/?topic=7985.0

You guys rock. Thanks for your help.

OK. Found my first problem building bitcoin. I missed this comment earlier in the thread:


Renaming the directory fixed the missing openssl includes.

Next compile error:


Turns out this is because Windows unzipped miniupnpc into a subdirectory "miniupnpc-1.5.20110215". I had found and fixed most of these Windows-generated extra subdirectories, but missed this one. Anyone building bitcoin under windows needs to watch out for Windows unzipping zip files into a new folder you did not ask it to create. Once I moved the files up a directory, compilation continued.

To my surprise and delight, compilation finished, and I had a shiny new bitcoin.exe, which after running "strip bitcoin.exe" shrunk from 96MB to 8.6MB.

I ran it, and it found my real-life wallet. I tried sending a tip to Matt at 1JBMattRztKDF2KRS3vhjJXA7h47NEsn2c, and the UI froze up. Oh well! At least I can compile SOMETHING now . . .

Thanks!

Edit: Killed it with task manager, ran it again, tried the send again, and it worked! Also tipped Vector76 at 1N6kvsgWHSHfnScG31rBozNznrZnUBG1td, an address I had from an earlier tip I sent him

Thanks for the comments, guys.

So lets say I want to try running linux in a virtual machine just for compiling bitcoin. What flavor of linux should I install? I've had passing exposure to Ubuntu . . .

Can anyone recommend which virtual machine software would be best for running a linux image? I would probably try VMWare first unless someone knows better.

Can anybody post the super-easy steps to downloading/installing/compiling everything to build bitcoin on such a linux virtual machine?

Should I be thinking about cygwin instead of a virtual machine? I've had passing exposure to that too.

I haven't tried running all these steps on a brand new XP-mode virtual machine inside Win7. If anybody has time to try that, I would be interested in whether that works.

Thanks everyone. This of course is not just for me - if we can get more people hacking on bitcoin, a lot of neat stuff will get made.

In my experience, modifying code to try to get it to compile just leads to a cascade of further problems.


Yes, but I mean no disrespect to the Linux guys. They have to live with these tools just like I do, and I need one of them to help me out here!

Sadly, this is not a joke. The antivirus cannot be disabled on this PC.

I'd appreciate any help I can get with the problems I am having compiling. Read about it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5851.msg458581#msg458581

My notes from TRYING to do this:

 - If you have never used command-line compile tools before, prepare to be baffled and befuddled. This is not a nice clean GUI where you hit the compile button, wait a few seconds, and go try your executable. Thankfully, I've used gcc before, so I wasn't completely out of my element
 - Expect the whole process from learning to downloading to compiling to troubleshooting, to take HOURS. I'm not kidding. These makefiles build THOUSANDS of object files, of which bitcoin probably uses a tiny percentage. Boost is the worst of them all. Just start the make and let it run overnight.
 - Before running the steps outlined in the earlier post, I recommend you get yourself a github account, and follow their instructions to download and install "git" and set up your own sandbox (fork) of the bitcoin source. This will involve yet even more baffling command lines that need to be copied and run exactly as written on the github guide to getting started
 - Do not watch the scroll of status messages going by during the eternity it takes to compile everything. You will see countless frightening-sounding warnings which will only confuse you
 - Do not expect a nice little "all done, everything went ok!" message at the end of a long compilation. The nice ones just stop printing status messages, and you are supposed to know from the acres of text above that nothing bad happened. The others are less nice . . .
 - Boost finally finished compiling with this very comforting message: Great.
 - At the end of the make for openssl, the linker returned a very fatal-sounding I wasted some time trying to "make clean" and try "make" again, but eventually I went on to the next step, and I still got the expected libeay32.dll without any complaints.
 - Finally, I tried compiling bitcoin (ha!) - as you might expect, it wasn't happy. The error message was:
I found buffer.h in the includes directory for openssl, so I copied that directory out and renamed it "openssl" which I then put everywhere I could think of. No luck.

Linux compile tools let you stand on the shoulders of giants, but the giants all have Asperger's.

Any help would be appreciated.

My antivirus software thinks this batch file is making a trojan downloader

Gonna have to do it the slow way: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=5851.msg86700#msg86700