Coinosphere.com - The Google of Bitcoin

[BTCLuke]

Coinosphere.com will completely solve the age-old problem of "where can I spend my BTC?"

Let's face it, BTC always seems to be a pipe dream to newcomers because they can't see it as a spendable money yet when it's not accepted nearby them... And they are not going to bother search very hard to do so.

But listing merchants & service providers in one place, like the BTC Wiki or Coinmap has proven to be a real challenge... These wikis and blogs all rely on the merchants to come to those websites to list themselves... And so far only a very small percentage of BTC-accepting merchants are doing so. (And yes I can state this for a fact.)

Bitpay says they now service 15,500+ vendors.
Coinbase says they service 16,000+ vendors.
Blockchain services thousands as well.
Heck, you can service your own damn merchant needs; just by placing a BTC address on your page...

So there are literally somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000 merchants out there accepting bitcoin right now! Some are sure to be near you, but are not listed on a map anywhere. For now, they might as well have set up shop on the moon.

So I have created Coinosphere with the intention of getting proactive about finding all these merchants. We can't just sit here any longer and have every mom & pop shop come to us... We must go to them! All services that serve the industry will be found too. -And then I'll list these sites in my directory for the world to see in a sort-able, searchable format!  

This thread will serve as the official Coinosphere thread, so feel free to ask any questions you'd like answers to below. I don't bite. However first, please check out the Bitcoinstarter.com crowdfunding campaign for Coinosphere, where I've answered a lot of questions already:

http://bitcoinstarter.com/projects/391

It's not asking for much BTC; I've already finished coding the "Eye of Sauron" engine that finds these sites for me... But displaying them in a searchable frontend is what I need some more funding for... Only enough to pay for some directory coding and the artwork for Coinosphere.com, so on January 14th I can Launch on schedule.

However, if we make it up into the stretch goals the real magic happens... I think you're really going to like what you read there!

So please, ask any questions you have for me below, check out the campaign and say hi, check out the cool prizes there, tell all your BTC-loving friends about it, and maybe even stop by the Coinosphere facebook page too if you have a chance.

Hope you like it!
Luke
Coinosphere.com

[BTCLuke]

Update time!

I've updated the bitcoinstarter campaign to include the following images, but I knew you guys here were very proof-oriented so you were probably waiting for something like these before you responded to the first post... Oh well, better late than never...

Here's a shot of the Eye of Sauron, after indexing one of the subforums here on bitcointalk:



That number is up to 63,876 merchants now by the way, although there are lots of bad listings in there that need to be discarded, such as news articles, splogs, and .onion sites. (I don't discard the pr0n sites, those get saved for a future project. )

Here's a shot of the front page of Coinosphere.com as it stands now:



I'm moving around banner locations often though, it'll probably look a lot smoother by Launch day on the 14th. Note the suggest functionality on the search bar: It's very smooth to search on there when you're in a hurry.

Finally, here's how the new listings page looks, zoomed in for better resolution:



I haven't even gone into all the other fun stuff on the site like the awesome Bitcoin events calendar, the big Map, all the different things you can add to your listings like videos & twitter feeds, nor the great news & FAQs pages. Too much to talk about before launch... But I do answer a lot of questions on the bitcoinstarter campaign page.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have here too.

Hope you guys love it!
-Luke

[darbsllim]

looking great!

[successquik]

Luke:

Are you going to filter out or at least separate porn sites and ponzi scam sites from the listings?

No comment on the porn (just curious) but would hate to see you contribute to the proliferation of bitcoin ponzi schemes that are popping up all over the place.

Just saying....   

SQ

[BTCLuke]

Are you going to filter out or at least separate porn sites and ponzi scam sites from the listings?

...

SQ

Hi SQ,

For adult (pr0n) sites, I've decided to keep the listings out, for family accessibility (& SEO) reasons, but I'm still collecting them for a secondary directory/search engine to be launched later this year. Adult toy stores in particular have a very strong use for bitcoin and I hope to give that industry just as good of an offering one day soon.

For the ponzis and scams, we'll do our best to spot and weed them out at the manual level. Although sometimes it can be tough to spot them if they have good marketing & artwork, but even if they make it to a final listing on our site, there is a "report this listing" link beside every single listing that lets the public send it back to us for further review.

Thanks for the questions!

[bitcoinstarter]

Looking slick Luke! Keep up the good work! 

[Envrin]

Really nice design, I like it.  Clean & concise, just what's needed for a successful operation.

All the best, and keep us updated on the launch!

[BTCLuke]

Thanks guys!

I appreciate the kind words and I'm working as fast as I can right now to cram all the merchants Sauron found into the directory for launch day... It's not a trivial number. 

[MPOE-PR]

For the ponzis and scams, we'll do our best to spot and weed them out at the manual level. Although sometimes it can be tough to spot them if they have good marketing & artwork

...seriously?

[BTCLuke]

For the ponzis and scams, we'll do our best to spot and weed them out at the manual level. Although sometimes it can be tough to spot them if they have good marketing & artwork

...seriously?

Sure, I do have some automated screening going on first of course... There's a lot of junk we shouldn't even see at all, and then the remainder will be judgement calls.

[RGBKey]

For the ponzis and scams, we'll do our best to spot and weed them out at the manual level. Although sometimes it can be tough to spot them if they have good marketing & artwork

...seriously?

I don't know, insanity dice was pretty convincing.

[MPOE-PR]

Sure, I do have some automated screening going on first of course... There's a lot of junk we shouldn't even see at all, and then the remainder will be judgement calls.

You miss the point. If "artwork" is a problem in terms of determining whether something is a scam of not, you're way, way out of your depth. Artwork has absolutely nothing to do with it. Your idea is basically that deciding whether a piece of fruit is ripe or not hinges upon the visual quality of the price tag.

You have to understand how fruit is picked.

Maybe have a read here.

[BTCLuke]

You miss the point. If "artwork" is a problem in terms of determining whether something is a scam of not, you're way, way out of your depth. Artwork has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Thanks for your concern, however keep in mind that Coinosphere is primarily a search engine, like google. Google does not attempt to screen out such stuff, as that would require paying for a million or so knowledgable people to read every new page on the web 24/7.

There is no way anyone can afford to spend enough time on each site to look at such factors; but I can proudly say we screen a heck of a lot more than google does because our market is still small and I want to categorize them all for fun browsing.

I'd say that we spend between 5-10 seconds on each bitcoin-verified site on average now, so in that time, if we can spot a spammy/scammy site from the front page, we'll remove it.

...And of course if the site is reported by users, which is simple to do from the "Report listing" link beside every listings' page.

Hope this clears a few things up! Thanks again for your input.
 

[MPOE-PR]

Hope this clears a few things up! Thanks again for your input.

There wasn't anything to "clear up" other than your demonstrated lack of understanding as to what constitutes a scam and how it can be identified. This is a problem for you to resolve, or not, but you'll have to do one or the other. Suggesting you're qualified to do it sometimes or whatever (despite being very confused about how to "spot") and pointing to how other people fail at it isn't in any way a solution.

[BTCLuke]

There wasn't anything to "clear up" other than your demonstrated lack of understanding as to what constitutes a scam and how it can be identified. This is a problem for you to resolve, or not, but you'll have to do one or the other. Suggesting you're qualified to do it sometimes or whatever (despite being very confused about how to "spot") and pointing to how other people fail at it isn't in any way a solution.

Perhaps I should reiterate that I'm not starting a review blog here; nor was I in any way trying to suggest that me and my employees are qualified to scan (in 5-10 seconds per site) to see if a site is a scam or not... With as many as a thousand new sites pouring in every hour to be checked, all I can offer as a scan against scams is the very basic most level of a look-over... But I assure you every site will be seen by human eyes.

I hope you'll be happy with this service since it is far and away much more than google does to protect you against scams showing up in their listings.

[MPOE-PR]

Perhaps I should reiterate that I'm not starting a review blog here; nor was I in any way trying to suggest that me and my employees are qualified to scan (in 5-10 seconds per site) to see if a site is a scam or not... With as many as a thousand new sites pouring in every hour to be checked, all I can offer as a scan against scams is the very basic most level of a look-over... But I assure you every site will be seen by human eyes.

I hope you'll be happy with this service since it is far and away much more than google does to protect you against scams showing up in their listings.

Listen. As the operator of a directory, you can either 1. purport to disallow scams, or 2. not. If you do 1, you must necessarily understand what makes something a scam, and how this can be determined. No matter how quickly you do it. No matter how much better or worse some other group is at it. No matter anything else.

If you do it anyway, you are creating a pathway through which scammy operations can paint on more appearances of validity, however small that might be, and however much it might be limited in its effects to the new and uninformed. That sucks.

Do you understand? If you don't know how to do something and you're not interested in learning how to do it, for fuck's sake don't say you're doing it. To any degree. At all.

[BTCLuke]

Due to unforseen technical difficulties the launch of Coinosphere will not occur tomorrow as originally planned. I apologize for getting everyone's hopes up for a launch so soon.

New Launch date set for January 28th, a 2-week delay while we work on some site problems.

The good news is that more features will be available on Coinosphere by launchtime, so hang on tight and we're sure to overdeliver!

[PinkPotatos]

Due to unforseen technical difficulties the launch of Coinosphere will not occur tomorrow as originally planned. I apologize for getting everyone's hopes up for a launch so soon.

New Launch date set for January 28th, a 2-week delay while we work on some site problems.

The good news is that more features will be available on Coinosphere by launchtime, so hang on tight and we're sure to overdeliver!

good to see you are addressing technical difficulties before launch!

[XFox]

I've just pledged, thank you for this great project!

[BTCLuke]

Thanks XFox! It's appreciated.

One week to go and the remaining problems are starting to clear up... I just don't know with how many listings yet.

The indexing crawler count is over 131,000 bitcoin-accepting domains now, but again, there's a lot of questionable sites in there that needs to be manually reviewed so I'm hoping to just have between 10k & 20k listings showing on launch day.


As for scam warnings, I'm more than open to working with any provider that has a service to spot and list bitcoin scams.

If they have a list of Verified scam sites that I could simply feed that into my database, I could rip those out of my listings automatically. If they offered a service for doing so, I would even be willing to share data with them. This would be a great little business model for someone like MPOE-PR if they were feeling entrepreneurial.