My bitcoin story - what can I do to help?

[Vuxil]

I first learned about bitcoins back in 2010ish I believe and dived into CPU mining for a bit. I made 3 bitcoins before I wrote Bitcoin off as a nerd hobby and gave up on mining.  Unfortunately I eventually formatted that computer and lost the wallet. Man do I regret that =P

I have to say that I never really participated in Bitcoin since then, but I have always heard about it's developments and such through some of the news feeds I read. So this Cyprus stuff exploded and people are taking Bitcoin a lot more seriously now. I figure this might be a tipping point in its history, and that maybe I should throw my support behind it as well and begin participating. I'm excited

I'm a developer by trade and have had a few year's experience under my belt. I have contributed to open source projects before (Recently involved a bit in Mageia Linux and also developing an open-source Ruby gem for machine learning applications). I'm wanting to build a service or application for Bitcoin users so I can contribute here as well, but I'm not really sure what. I'm hoping maybe some of you more experienced users can point me to what's needed.

I see there are already established third party bitcoin clients, as well as physical currency exchange sites, so I'm not sure another one would really be that great. Particularly, an exchange site looks like it drags the developer into a bunch of legal stuff dealing with money and I don't want anything to do with that =P

Please let me know if you have any ideas. My specialities lie in data mining, text visualization, machine learning, and security informatics if that helps any

[AKH]

I can't really point you to what is needed, but thought i would say thanks for offering your participation in the great spirit of working for the community.

[KGambler]

Regarding Cyprus...  Bitcoins seem like a possible way to get around those onerous "capital controls".  Cyprus' economy is doomed now.  It's going to be a major depression/death spiral.  People with savings are going to be desperate to get their money out, especially the foreigners.

[lassdas]

Welcome back.

There's something wrong in your story though.
If you really learned about it back in 2010 and started mining on CPUs, there's no way you made 3BTC, simply because there were no pools back then, those came up in early 2011. So by CPU-mining in 2010 you either made 50BTC (or 150, if it was 3 blocks), or none at all. 

Just sayin'.

[Vuxil]

Welcome back.

There's something wrong in your story though.
If you really learned about it back in 2010 and started mining on CPUs, there's no way you made 3BTC, simply because there were no pools back then, those came up in early 2011. So by CPU-mining in 2010 you either made 50BTC (or 150, if it was 3 blocks), or none at all. 

Just sayin'.

Was prob 2011 then =P My memory sucks

[Stephen Gornick]

Please let me know if you have any ideas. My specialities lie in data mining, text visualization, machine learning, and security informatics

Right now there is a huge problem with price discovery.  For instance, a little over two weeks ago, a $50 price was a lofty goal.  Today $90 seems appropriate.   Obviously, either they were wrong two weeks ago or we are wrong today.

One of the difficulties in determining Bitcoin's value is there is little useful data.  So things like "Number of /r/bitcoin Reddit users online simultaneously", or "Google trends" numbers are considered for speculation instead of things like a true "economic activity" metric.

This is a problem for governments where the economy operates significantly using cash (which could be used anonymously) and it is a challenge that will be returning thanks to Bitcoin.  Knowing how much economic activity is occurring with Bitcoin is going to become more and more valuable.  Right now so little of Bitcoin's value is based on the true demand due to economic activity that this metric is pretty much worthless today.   For instance, the largest Bitcoin payment processor is BitPay, which just reported they crossed the $2 million threshold for March.  Two million dollars.   Square does that much business for their merchants in a  few hours, and they are just a tiny blip in the payment card industry.

I don't know what approach would allow an economic activity metric to be measured accurately.   Governments can mandate reports (tax returns), and industry councils can request completion of periodic surveys from their members.   Bitcoin has neither ... for now.   Bitcoin does have a blockchain in which most bitcoin-denominated transactions appear in (not all do though ... a payment handled as a withdrawal from a Mt. Gox customer's EWallet to a Mt. Gox merchant might be handled internally by Mt. Gox's spend transaction, for example).

This is one area where a site spider could determine roughly how many sites accept bitcoin and based on how much traffic each site gets determine some rough trends that would be useful in determining valuations.

If this information were to be valued it could probably be sold privately (e.g. to subscribers), or maybe there is even a way it could be shared publicly.

Either way, multiple people will eventually be working on the "how to measure the Bitcoin economy" problem, but so far there hasn't been enough of an economy that many are working on it today.  That will be changing.

[Vuxil]

Very interesting reply, thank you. I had no idea about that. I know mtgox is a major exchange, what others should I be looking at?