Trustless crowdfunding in bitcoin

[ilpirata79]

I am trying to understand if there is a way in Bitcoin to perform a trustless crowdfunding campaign.

I mean: establish an amount of bitcoin, let the people send bitcoins to an address until a certain date. If before the date the established amount of bitcoin is reached, all the bitcoins are unblocked and spendable, otherwise the go back to the senders.

Is that possible?

best regards,
ilpirata79

[OnkelPaul]

I believe with plain bitcoin this is not possible, as the things you can do in a script are pretty limited. However, Ethereum should be able to do it, I just don't know how you'd write it exactly (note to self: read some stuff on EtherScript.)

The "swear jar" example on the EtherScripter.com site should serve as a suitable starting point: http://etherscripter.com/0-5-1/

Onkel Paul

[AgentofCoin]

I am trying to understand if there is a way in Bitcoin to perform a trustless crowdfunding campaign.

I mean: establish an amount of bitcoin, let the people send bitcoins to an address until a certain date. If before the date the established amount of bitcoin is reached, all the bitcoins are unblocked and spendable, otherwise the go back to the senders.

Is that possible?

best regards,
ilpirata79

I do not believe that is possible with the current protocol or the new OP Codes that are being added currently.
With the new codes you can set a date in which the coins can be unlocked, but haven't heard of a code that
would require the address to have a certain amount of bitcoins within it before allowing it to be placed into a block.

There may be sites that can do it or can facilitate this, but then it wouldn't be trustless since you'd have to trust the site.

Also, it is possible to do it now with a trusted escrow agent from this forum. Just set down the rules and respected
escrow agent and then point your potential donators to your page with the escrow address. If you never meet
the goal, the agent can send back the btc to the addresses that originally sent it. This isn't trustless either tho.

[nakedbitcoins]

I am trying to understand if there is a way in Bitcoin to perform a trustless crowdfunding campaign.

I mean: establish an amount of bitcoin, let the people send bitcoins to an address until a certain date. If before the date the established amount of bitcoin is reached, all the bitcoins are unblocked and spendable, otherwise the go back to the senders.

Is that possible?

best regards,
ilpirata79

You can do this.  BitcoinStarter.com  was the first to enable this. They are coming back online this week at some point.

[Randian Hero]

It would suprise me if this is not possible. However it's not exactly easy to accomplish and I don't think there is any wallet or GUI that can accomplish it without programming knowledge.

[aizzaku]

I am trying to understand if there is a way in Bitcoin to perform a trustless crowdfunding campaign.

I mean: establish an amount of bitcoin, let the people send bitcoins to an address until a certain date. If before the date the established amount of bitcoin is reached, all the bitcoins are unblocked and spendable, otherwise the go back to the senders.

Is that possible?

best regards,
ilpirata79

Hello, are u asking for some script or this to be achieved manually ?

well trust is a very very rare word here in bitcoin world. i am nt sure how many good souls are stil out there to fund for a cause or anything.
It is because of all the scams recently and the freq. has increased exponentially

[countryfree]

So it's not possible to do it automatically, but it would be easy to do it manually. You talked of something trustless, right? The real problem is that you'll have to very convincing to make strangers give you money. Very, very convincing...

[calkob]

I think once smart contracts kick in there will def be solutions and there prob already is using ethereum. 

[European Central Bank]

You can do this.  BitcoinStarter.com  was the first to enable this. They are coming back online this week at some point.

Isn't that arrangement gonna depend purely on how legit the website is feeling? And coming back online don't sound too reassuring. I guess the OP is talking something automated.

[ilpirata79]

This is something, as someone pointed out, that can be easily done in an ethereum-like platform.

In bitcoin, you might need a new opcode that restrains the spendability of an output in the following way: it is spendable only togheter with other outputs that refer to the same address and so that the total amount to be spent is equal or greater than the required sum... or something like that.

I think this is an interesting use case, so maybe it could be worth a new opcode.

best regards,
ilpirata79

[nakedbitcoins]

You can do this.  BitcoinStarter.com  was the first to enable this. They are coming back online this week at some point.

Isn't that arrangement gonna depend purely on how legit the website is feeling? And coming back online don't sound too reassuring. I guess the OP is talking something automated.

They didn't come offline because of anything just re-development of the website. At the time they had a way to refund all bitcoins to everyone automatically.