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Dear Valued Readers (all 67K+ of you)


Thank you for putting up with our "Drudge Report" style (font) for so long...

Hey, we are bootstrapping.... but almost for a year now, between taking consulting gigs with other Bitcoin companies, finishing our degrees, rally car racing and taking our kids to cricket practice we have been working on our new platform.

We've changed (hopefully for the better) and we tried to incorporate all of your feedback as much as we could. Yes, yes we know.. the Courier New font was hated equally.

And now, BOOM!  It's finally launched. And we are really excited to share it with you.

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I Have Bitcoins ("IHB") is excited to announce the release of our new platform featuring the Global Bitcoin Index™, Global Bitcoin Widget™ and Block Chain API.  

We believe these tools will strengthen the Bitcoin ecosystem while also innovating block chain technology in order to achieve ultimate user acceptance by all types of industries, people and countries.

We analyzed our articles, looked at page views, bounce rates, exits etc. and came up with a pretty solid reader profile that helped guide us in our redesign. Aside from continuing with our news coverage, we added some new tools and data.

We are still independent (not a Bitcoin Foundation Member) and never have or will do Quid quo pro monetary arrangements with any Bitcoin company. Our only advertising revenue comes from the one box on our homepage on the top right. You may notice it's empty right now, cause we are actually do some beta testing to see if we can sell that space using the Mastercoin protocol. After all the online advertising market is a multi billion dollar piece of the pie with too many middlemen. A perfect industry for Block Chain technology to disrupt.


Just like all the the other Bitcoin APIs out there, we can do anything with the blockchain, create, send, receive, webhooks etc..  but rather than throw out our documentation so quickly and get apps using it, we wanted to work with a few developers, institutions or startups to get some really cool tools and new functionality out there. We are committing our time, coding bandwidth and server resources to work with you on your ideas. We will design that custom solution for you and it will not be open source if you don't want it to be.

Block Chain technology is more than just a decentralized bank, We wholeheartedly believe it can be a decentralized anything (Facebook, Uber, AirBnb, Twitter, UPS, etc..) This is more true as organizations realize that data storage needs to be pushed to the end devices on the cloud. Server farms just don't make sense anymore. BTW, we are big fans of Maidsafe.

We already started to play around with the NYC OpenData datasets and CitiBike's data from New York City. Take a look at our presentation (towards the bottom of the page) and you will get the idea of what we are trying to do. We are definitely looking for partners on this one, so please inquire to learn more.


Our Global Bitcoin Index™ has established a new standard in the community for determining bitcoins' price. We looked at Bitcoin Average, Winkdex and CoinDesk's BPI to come up with our "simple" version.

Over the past year, we have noticed a drastic increase in new indexes and found two particular problems; the lack of unanimous trading volume coverage and no transparency in the underlying data.

In fact, the bitcoin price most users commonly rely upon is derived using a volume-weighted average of about 60% of the total exchange trading volume. At IHB, we do not discriminate towards an exchanges' trading volume, location or entrance/exit currency; we are only concerned about getting as close to 100% coverage as possible. Right now, Bitcoin Average is more representative and those guys are doing an awesome job, but we are adding exchanges quickly and hope the trail of changes in our data helps people understand price, timezone, and currency issues in more detail.

All of the data used in the calculation of our Global Bitcoin Index™ price is made publicly available to export in CVS format. Data for 10 second intervals is made available by email request with restrictions.


The Global Bitcoin Widget™ is our tool for you!  It is your gateway to the Bitcoin Blockchain (with some serious technology built in that you will notice as our Beta progresses, its kind of why we have https:// setup on our newsite).  

In order to gain momentum and publicity for our state-of-the-art widget, we are going to release its' features in the following phases:

• Phase 1 (Current): Release widget without customization (gray version) Freely available for everyone right now.
• Phase 2: Provide background images, height and width and spinner customization to accepted Beta users
• Phase 3: Allow you to replace our logo with yours
• Phase 4: It's kind of a secret, but you know that saying. Give a man a widget and he eats for a day, teach a man to program his own widget and he eats for life. (read revenue opportunities)

Community Contest

Phase 4 is our attempt to involve the bitcoin community in our widget's development process.  We have some awesome functionality of our own that we will share with our Beta testers, but our goal is to incorporate the most desired or unique features on the Global Bitcoin Widget™ and we believe the best source for this additional feature set is the community itself.

Challenge: Get creative!  This is the time to think "outside the box".  Don't be scared to share CRAZY and abstract ideas, we like those the best!!

Task:  Post your best idea on this thread and send supporting information to our Head of Business Development, Greg Garneau, at greg@ihavebitcoins.com.  We will respond if we feel you are qualified and provide adequate information and thought. Either way we will respond to everyone within 15 business days of your submission.

Contest Winner:  Once we have received the bulk of ideas, we will filter out the ones that received the most recognition on this thread.  All finalists will be notified and a separate "poll forum" will be created for the community to vote on the most desired new feature to be added to the Global Bitcoin Widget™.


Reward: $100 in Bitcoin!

Let the creation begin!!

We thank you again for all of the continued support! We really love being a part of this community and are just excited about Bitcoin when its at $388 or $1051.

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Sincerely,

Greg Garneau and The IHB Team

ps. the new fonts we are using are Akzidenz Grotesk Standard and Montserrat

ps. If you like what you see please follow us on twitter and like us on facebook. It really helps.

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