That's a bad idea. There's a sneaky business in those services, but I've always thought the anonimity methods are there for the privacy minded bitcoin users.
What do you mean by a sneaky business? In VPNs, you mean? Or in survey websites? Obviously we would only acquire survey responses anonymously, and only ask for a withdraw address for a prize draw/few satoshis reward.
I mean even though, as you say, it is some kind of anonymously collected data, I would not like to using it. Not even for a prize reward. I simply do not like the idea, but that's my view regarding it. Nothing major
That's totally understandable; I suspect users do not want to be open and honest about their activities, even with onion routing, as I suspect a not insignificant portion of the currency's activity is on the grey or even black side of the law, but then I don't imagine they waste much time with Bitcointalk.org, either.
It's a game of aligning incentives, for people to use the survey, for people to donate so that we can incentivise people to actually fill out the survey, and to encourage honesty (even surveys in seemingly much simpler fields such as sexual preferences often flop due to bias).
Nevertheless, I've thrown a landing page together with a Limesurvey implementation at
bitcoinstatistics.site, so if you'd like to take a look and give me some unreserved criticism, feel free
Also, once we get a few responses I'll make some nice graphs for the landing page. We can change the questions, add some delete some, change options etc, depending on what you think is the most valuable information.
I'm aware there's some value to be had in Blockchain.info's charts and stats, but they are of limited helpfulness as they only go on addresses, and individuals may have a greater or lesser extent of these. But with the parameters we have here, we can at least establish a distribution of Bitcoin net worth, say, and how this correlates with class/country/uses/etc. Could be really quite helpful knowledge.
However, libertarianism is such that one must encounter a high degree of suspicion and mistrust: only natural, it's what keeps the crypto world alive, after all, but we do want to broaden out the technology, amirite?
