Graveyard of Dead Bitcoin Websites

[Phinnaeus Gage]

If you really want to list dead sites, I suggest you start with this list: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

Many broken links.

[1713250006]

1713250006

[theymos]

Ubitex, unfortunately. I thought this was a very good idea.

Also, the original Bitcoin wiki is down now. (I still have the database if anyone's interested.)

[payb.tc]

this is still functioning but gets no traffic and not being updated: http://bitnot.es

i will likely let that domain expire.

[Maged]

http://btcinch.com/

Quite recently, too. It's sad...

[Stephen Gornick]

- http://www.bitcoinrigs.com
- http://bitcoinmorpheus.tumblr.com
- http://bitoption.org

[SgtSpike]

This thread is kind of depressing!

Oh well, you know what they say:  90 out of every 100 new businesses started fail within the first year, and 99 out of 100 fail within the first five years.

[Matthew N. Wright]

This thread is kind of depressing!

Oh well, you know what they say:  90 out of every 100 new businesses started fail within the first year, and 99 out of 100 fail within the first five years.

That's totally true.

[FreeMoney]

This thread is kind of depressing!

Oh well, you know what they say:  90 out of every 100 new businesses started fail within the first year, and 99 out of 100 fail within the first five years.

That's totally true.

Yes, I can think of several reasons for such a high apparent failure rate of Bitcoin sites.

Bitcoin inspires people who haven't done certain things now to try it now maybe for the first time and also possibly overextend themselves.

In older sectors a lot of non-fail sites have had time to build up so even if a similar fraction of new businesses die, there are a lot more established businesses (and these get more attention too)

Bitcoin lowers the costs of entry. People can try riskier things because failing doesn't cost so much.

But really it's probably a conspiracy.

[tvbcof]

Yes, I can think of several reasons for such a high apparent failure rate of Bitcoin sites.

Bitcoin inspires people who haven't done certain things now to try it now maybe for the first time and also possibly overextend themselves.

In older sectors a lot of non-fail sites have had time to build up so even if a similar fraction of new businesses die, there are a lot more established businesses (and these get more attention too)

Bitcoin lowers the costs of entry. People can try riskier things because failing doesn't cost so much.

But really it's probably a conspiracy.

Most of your hypothesis make a lot of sense to me, and I expect most of them are a factor.  Here's a factor that I suspect.

I think that the concept of Bitcoin generally tends to attract people with either a short attention span, or have borderline manic depressive tendencies depending on how charitable one wishes to be.  That is the case with me I will admit.  Half a year of being interested in something is unusual, and my interest is wearing off.  To some extent that is because I've achieved some of my targets, but I did have tentative plans to do a lot more than I likely ever will (which I suspected after a lifetime of monitoring myself and thus tend to not jump into things which require ongoing effort.)

Another part is that I am losing confidence in the implementation to be frank.  I feel that key features of the solution will need to be sacrificed as it grows in order to satisfy scaling constraints.  If that does not happen, I suspect that that will mean that the demand did not require the growth, and that the Bitcoin solution was an interesting novelty.  Or that a more scalable solution superseded it.

[Technomage]

More accurate term for "dead" in this case could be inactive. Inactive sites are sites that are not down but no one uses them and no one updates them. These are even worse in my opinion than a site that is down. I think this thread is important and we should identify all dead sites, whether they are actually gone or just inactive. Removing these from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade should be a priority.

[2weiX]

this is still functioning but gets no traffic and not being updated: http://bitnot.es

i will likely let that domain expire.

what exactly is the purpose of this?

[payb.tc]

this is still functioning but gets no traffic and not being updated: http://bitnot.es

i will likely let that domain expire.

what exactly is the purpose of this?

it was for people to keep notes for addresses/transactions/blocks, etc.

eg. http://bitnot.es/addr/13QTW27b3SgqrEjefB9PbiZ6hcrVCJAxfx or http://bitnot.es/addr/1Lg2rvxbBPC8jp2YJoV5xL7sdyTjueMUot

i started it around the time when people were trying to investigate and keep track of all the addresses that belonged to mybitcoin.com, and the idea was inspired somewhat by 'the bitcoin police'. if it were well patronized, searching it could come in handy, but alas it seemed too much effort to actually annotate everything in the first place.

edit: hmm, check out this one: http://bitnot.es/addr/1L1TC4HiJhwswF5FZu15HuXbGdMMu6PLNe

[DiThi]

If you really want to list dead sites, I suggest you start with this list: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

Many broken links.

We should remove all dead links. Each of us should revise one section.

[Technomage]

I think that the concept of Bitcoin generally tends to attract people with either a short attention span, or have borderline manic depressive tendencies depending on how charitable one wishes to be.  That is the case with me I will admit.  Half a year of being interested in something is unusual, and my interest is wearing off.  To some extent that is because I've achieved some of my targets, but I did have tentative plans to do a lot more than I likely ever will (which I suspected after a lifetime of monitoring myself and thus tend to not jump into things which require ongoing effort.)

I think this has more to do with the fact that geeks are simply more prone to having some type of ADHD. Bitcoin community has a lot of geeks in it so that makes sense. I'm sort of a semi-geek and I do not have an especially short attention span. This is why my approach to Bitcoin is very long term, I see that even in the best case Bitcoin breaks into mainstream perhaps in 2015, possibly later. Revolutionary technologies tend to take 10 years to break into mainstream, Bitcoin could definitely be faster but not much.

I've been involved in Bitcoin since May and I'm just getting started. I've finally come up with a business plan solid enough to go forward, my company is starting next month. We're focusing 100% on the Finnish market in the beginning though, so it's probably not very interesting to most of you. My opinion on Bitcoin startups is that most people really underestimate the costs of running a successful business. In fact I believe most don't even have a proper business plan, no idea of how important marketing is in a new market such as Bitcoin.

I can only think of a handful of businesses in the whole Bitcoin economy that can be successful right now without significant marketing push. For my business I've estimated that we need to perhaps spend 80% of our budget on marketing the first year and basically create the products with voluntary work. There is just no way for it to work otherwise, most Bitcoin startups require not only the attention of the Bitcoin community but some attention from the outside world as well. This is exactly why Bit-Pay is at shows such as CES, it's because they have to be.

My company will spend a good amount on marketing, advertising online is very important and we will go to every relevant exhibition there is, in Finland of course. There is only a small amount of users at this stage, we must create a larger userbase to be able to run a successful business. My company needs partners though and it's 100% sure that I will be at the next European Bitcoin conference.

Your comment on the scalability of Bitcoin is a bit off-topic but my take on it is that we are nowhere near the amount of usage that would cause issues to the Bitcoin network in terms of scaling. Especially with my prediction that 90% of Bitcoin clients will have a server-side in the future. Not necessarily a centralized server solution, Electrum based clients have good potential and anyone can run a server in that setup. The user security of Bitcoin is also continuously improved, the multisig feature is essential to getting to the next level.

I admit there could be scalability issues in the far future but I see nothing that couldn't be fixed. It also doesn't require breaking the decentralization of Bitcoin, there will always be a choice between convenience and reliability. What is so great about Bitcoin is that it gives people choice and this must be, and will be, the case in the future as well.

[tvbcof]

My company will spend a good amount on marketing, advertising online is very important and we will go to every relevant exhibition there is, in Finland of course. There is only a small amount of users at this stage, we must create a larger userbase to be able to run a successful business. My company needs partners though and it's 100% sure that I will be at the next European Bitcoin conference.

Your ADHD supposition makes some sense to me.  And I'm probably in that catagory.  I do tend to take a long-term view of things, however, and to that end my base objective was to have a certain amount of BTC squirelled away and I met that.

I'll be interested to learn more of your efforts as things progress.

Your comment on the scalability of Bitcoin is a bit off-topic but my take on it is that we are nowhere near the amount of usage that would cause issues to the Bitcoin network in terms of scaling. Especially with my prediction that 90% of Bitcoin clients will have a server-side in the future. Not necessarily a centralized server solution, Electrum based clients have good potential and anyone can run a server in that setup. The user security of Bitcoin is also continuously improved, the multisig feature is essential to getting to the next level.

I admit there could be scalability issues in the far future but I see nothing that couldn't be fixed. It also doesn't require breaking the decentralization of Bitcoin, there will always be a choice between convenience and reliability. What is so great about Bitcoin is that it gives people choice and this must be, and will be, the case in the future as well.

This is where I have a big problem.  If/when we reach a situation where it is technically challenging for individuals to run clients, it will mean that the utilization is approaching something other than minor fringe.  I would estimate the number of individuals participating in the transmission of Bitcoin at a vastly lower percentage than 10%.  Worse, they will likely be highly reliant on non-consumer-grade networking services, and possibly processing services as well.  This, to me, is 'centralization' and Bitcoin becomes a very different beast.  I would consider it highly unreliable at that point because 1) it would be becoming a significant threat to other monetary systems due to the high utilization, and 2) it would be prone to attack due to the centralization and reliance on corporate controlled infrastructure.

BTW, I consider it highly likely that the Internet will change fairly radically in terms of the freedoms that most of us currently enjoy.  We are seeing signs of it in the recent SOPA fiasco, and I expect that more competent persons will be driving such things going forward.  A Bitcoin-like solution which would appeal to me would be one which, by careful core design, would degrade rather than be destroyed in the event of a much more restricted global internet.

[Technomage]

At the end of the day it's about evolution. Technological evolution in this case of course. Cryptocurrencies are an idea that will not go away no matter what, if developments happen that destroy Bitcoin in a sense, some other implementation will gain favor instead. I wouldn't really worry about that at this stage, it's always a possibility but there are a lot of smart people developing Bitcoin and I wouldn't count them out even if we need to address some fairly serious issues in the future.