The Efficient Market Hypotheses doesn't apply, because it's not an efficient market.

It's too cumbersome to get funds in and out (for many people), and even where it is possible the time delays mess with the market.

More importantly, the future value of Bitcoins depends almost entirely on the presence or absence of future coercive government action. That must be one of the hardest things (if not the hardest thing) for any market to predict.

It's a very well-written article, and you've approached it from a great angle too.

Here are a few stylistic suggestions to consider, but really they're so trivial that I'm reluctant to suggest them:

1. How about writing "billion" and "trillion" instead of B and T? You're presumably writing for a non-technical audience.

2. I would put a comma before "and for good reason".

3. Some of your readers won't know what a Krugerrand is. You could replace the phrase "break that tenth ounce Krugerrand into nine pieces and mail one to you" by "break their gold coin into tiny pieces and mail one piece to you".

4. I would replace the comma by a colon after "two ways to get bitcoins".

5. I would add "and there's" before "no backdoor access".

6. It's difficult for people to assimilate new concepts, but consistent wording helps. You could replace "you give one address to the payer" by "you give a payment address to the payer", and you could replace "pasting the recipient's address" by "pasting the recipient's payment address". This matches your use of "payment address" earlier in the paragraph. Actually I prefer the term "receiving address", because some readers might assume that "payment" refers to an outgoing payment.

7. Replace "hard limit" by "fixed limit". The term "hard limit" is heavily used in computing, but to the lay reader the word "hard" is synonymous with "difficult".

These things are all very minor, and it wouldn't be a problem to publish your article without any of these changes.

There is, however, one part of your article which I don't think is clear to someone who doesn't already understand Bitcoin:


Earlier in the article, you implied that the solution was bitcoin ("Bitcoin is a more modern solution"). You did also refer to "the reward for solving a problem", but didn't explain what kind of problem you're referring to. World hunger, for example? You did explain this by saying "computers solving a math problem who's solution validates transactions and prevents double spending", but that's not clearly tied to the other references.

Perhaps you could rework those parts to refer to the familiar concept of "transaction processing" instead of "solving math problems". Something like "Bitcoins are not dug out of the ground, they are generated by computers processing Bitcoin transactions in a way that is computationally difficult but which validates transactions and prevents double spending".

That's not an optimum wording either, so feel free to ignore this whole post. After all, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

I see you answered part of my question while I was composing my previous post. But...


So this means the accounting is done hourly? That's good.

If my understanding is correct, the terms have these meanings:

"Bid": The maximum amount you are willing to pay per day, to run your ad on this site.
"Limit": The maximum total amount you are willing to pay for this "mini-campaign" for your ad on this site.

Perhaps that wording, or something like it, can be added to the website.

And from the Publisher side of things, I guess the term has this meaning:

"Minimum bid": The minimum amount you will accept per day for someone to run their ad in this space on your website, except that ads run for free if there is only one advertiser.

Finally, a feature request. I need a way to specify "no animated ads" to run on my sites. I want static graphics only.

Thanks!

The Operation Fabulous website is nice and fast. Clean, simple, and easy to navigate. But the form fields need better descriptions.

On the "Add a website" page, what are the units for "Minimum bid"? Bitcoins per day? It needs to say this on the form. And I can't find a way to change the value of the minimum bid after a website has been added.

If I want to have more than one ad on the same website, do I need to add the same website more than once? What if the multiple ads are the same size, can the system cope with that?

I'm a publisher and I also want to be an advertiser, but I can't find a way to get from one part of the website to the other. This can be easily solved by making the logo clickable so that it's easy to return to the home page.

The 5% commission is mentioned on the Publisher FAQ, and also mentioned when you add funds as an Advertiser. So is it applied before the bid amounts, or after the bid amounts, or both? I actually think it's quite reasonable to take more than 5%. The service needs to be profitable for the owners, so that it can continue to be developed and promoted.

In my publisher account I see this:


...and the ad is showing correctly on my site. But this raises a couple of issues.

Doing financial calculations using floating point math always leads to problems. Sure, you can hide it by rounding to 2 places, but then you get anomalies like "I placed a bid for 0.1 bitcoins but it says my bid isn't enough, even though the minimum bid is 0.1 bitcoins" (because the minimum bid is being stored as something like 0.999999997 bitcoins). There are good decimal math packages for PHP already installed on most webhosts, if you're using PHP.

Also, what does that message actually mean? Does it mean that someone is bidding a maximum of 1.45 BTC (per day?) to advertise on my site, but because no-one else has bid, they are paying 0.1 BTC (per day?) which is my minimum. But the Operation Fabulous website says that when there is no competing bid, the advertising is free. So why does my publisher account show a balance of 0.5 BTC?

As an advertiser, if I click "Add a Bid" and select a site, I get to the Stage 2 form. Here it asks me to select an advertisement. But if I don't have any ads set up yet, it should say something like "You need to set up an advertisement before you can place a bid". It also asks for the "Height" and "Limit" of the bid, but it's not clear what these terms mean and how these amounts work.

Sorry to have so many questions, but I hope to become a heavy user as both publisher and advertiser.

The "change" problem is easily solved by making sure that none is needed. The card can be pre-loaded with keys for coins that can make up any amount without the need for change.

For example, with the following hundred keys you can make many payments (worst case is 10, but probably many more) of any amount from 1 to 99 BTC before you need to recharge your card:

25 x 1 BTC, 25 x 3 BTC, 25 x 10 BTC, 25 x 30 BTC

GIMP sounds good. Or do the EFF again, to avoid spreading the donations too thin.

Kiba, please keep my share of the refund as a small contribution to the time that you put into this.

Fedora Linux for me on the desktop, Maemo Linux on my phone, OS/X for the rest of the family. But my webhost uses FreeBSD.

A freelancer directory really needs a time limit so that listings expire unless they are renewed. Otherwise it eventually becomes filled up with out-of-date cruft.

Wow!

MIT is compatible with the widest range of other open source licenses, so it will help the uptake of bitcoin. Satoshi made his decision a long time ago, and there are surely more important things to be worrying about.

The MIT license is compatible with the GPL, so you are free to create and develop a GPL fork if you feel strongly enough about it.

Even so, I'd rather be homeless than be a jailer.


Darn, you're right. I hereby deprecate my previous wisdom and replace it with this pearl of wisdom:

"Pearls of wisdom rarely stand up to scrutiny."

Nudists >>>> Jailers, for sure. But I probably should revise my wisdom to: "The quality of your life is inversely proportional to the number of keys in your pocket, unless you're in prison".

The quality of your life is inversely proportional to the number of keys in your pocket.

An audit conducted by a trusted third party might be the way to go. The third party would announce the results of the audit. Only the auditor would know the location of the exchange.

I'm selling PB$ 210 for 5 bitcoins.

If an organization carries out fractional reserve banking, and denominates their accounts in bitcoin, that carries some risk for customers of that organization.

But that doesn't in any way weaken bitcoin. It just means that the organizations accounts (or "banknotes") are not as good as real bitcoin.

The memory stick still looks like a cigarette to me. Take a look at this drawing of a memory stick, and see how the USB connector is much longer than in your drawing:
http://www.openclipart.org/detail/28798

I love the way you can describe a debt of $10,000 per person (including babies) as "only" 3.2 trillion.

I donated 10 BTC yesterday, but I can't spare a lot of BTC.

I'd be delighted to donate a more substantial amount if you can add some alternative payment methods to the site. Cash in the mail, PayPal, etc.