Advertise Bitcoin on every single banknote ( and make a new game ? )

[edd]

"Defacing" bills is against US law but it hasn't really been enforced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where%27s_George%3F#Controversy

I'm afraid blatantly encouraging individuals to do this would give the Secret Service a reason to prosecute bitcoiners, even if it's a flimsy one.

I still prefer keeping it very simple.

Person finds bill with URL, visits website, enters serial numbers, possibly wins BTC.
Person learns that even unmarked bills may unlock BTC.
Person visits site often to check bills, investigates the BTC market and becomes immersed in the bitcoin community.
Person becomes an advocate of bitcoin themselves and begins proselytizing and spreading the word with bills marked with the URL.

Contests over how many bills you've marked, how far they've traveled, etc should just be gravy.

Again though, how would you prevent people from making up serial numbers?

The first time a note is entered, it CANNOT give out BTC, or else people will just start making up serial numbers.

I believe Phinnaeus was on the right track:

I've started working on this site but I had a concern. Yesterday, I received some brand new bills from a convenience store and noticed the sequentiality (sequence-ness? sequence-nicity?) of the serial numbers.

If all you needed was the right serial number to unlock an account, how easy would it be to create a bot to do it? Would a captcha help?

I know you could write a code on the bill along with the url, but I was kinda excited about using even an unmarked bill as an advertisement for bitcoin.

No need to worry about a bot, for each dollar bill has plenty of built-in security measures that can be taken advantage of. http://onhech.blogspot.com/2010/03/dollar-for-your-thoughts.html



Simply have a field to insert the Series and Year & Plate Serial Number & Printing Position Number and Letter.

For the example I gave earlier in this thread:

Serial Number: K28849219E

Passwords to claim the bitcoins include:

Series and Year: 2003 A
Printing Position Number and Letter: A3
Plate Serial Number: FW A 165

Series and Year: 2003 A
Plate Serial Number: FW A 165
Printing Position Number and Letter: A3

Therefore, your site would recognize the password as 2003AFWA165A3.

[acoindr]

^ But if identifying bill information is entered for the first time how would a site know it is valid?

[edd]

^ But if identifying bill information is entered for the first time how would a site know it is valid?

Well, the bill would have to be registered by someone in order to assign bitcoins to it, even if it's the sie administrator.

[acoindr]

^ But if identifying bill information is entered for the first time how would a site know it is valid?

Well, the bill would have to be registered by someone in order to assign bitcoins to it, even if it's the sie administrator.

Oh, you were talking about redeeming coins directly from bills. I thought you were still talking about a tracking game.

Edit: Yea, I think that could def work, and it's probably the simplest possible version of the idea. It's not as inherently viral as it could be, but maybe use as a starting point?

[Stemby]

Only one thing:

- Bitcoin - Vires in Numeris

Please don't use it: I think that's not a good Latin sentence.

[deepceleron]

There's probably enough leeway there for the government to construe widespread defacement of bills with adverts for competing currency as illegal.  I wouldn't try to start such a movement, more likely to attract the kind of attention bitcoin doesn't want.

The fed don't need to take up any "leeway" they gave, advertising on money is illegal. OP is 100 years too late to the idea of putting advertisements on US money. Somebody already annoyed them enough they made a law against it before we were born.

US Statute 18 USC Sec. 475 (house.gov)

-HEAD-
Sec. 475. Imitating obligations or securities; advertisements

-STATUTE-
Whoever designs, engraves, prints, makes, or executes, or utters,
issues, distributes, circulates, or uses any business or
professional card, notice, placard, circular, handbill, or
advertisement in the likeness or similitude of any obligation or
security of the United States issued under or authorized by any Act
of Congress or writes, prints, or otherwise impresses upon or
attaches to any such instrument, obligation, or security, or any
coin of the United States, any business or professional card,
notice, or advertisement, or any notice or advertisement whatever,
shall be fined under this title. Nothing in this section applies to
evidence of postage payment approved by the United States Postal
Service.

I'll leave it to you to find the updated penalty in H.R. 3355 (pdf), passed into law as Pub. L. 103-322 in 1994 (protip, search for 475). Enlightening reading of how a bill is written to be unreadable by adding new phrases to hundreds of other statutes instead of being new law itself, with a senator-friendly name "Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994" (unfortunately 1994 is too early to discover from the PDF properties that it was likely directly written by and lobbied for by an outsourced prison labor company like Federal Prison Industries to boost their labor force).

Completely off-topic, but FPI's front company Unicor made me think of another orwellian labor company that changed it's name to avoid it's reputation.

[acoindr]

...impresses upon or attaches to...

Well, there goes the "clean" QR code stickers.

[HostFat]

@deepceleron
So the website will track any paper/object that has an unique number printed/wrote on it.
It must be on a domain that isn't com/org/biz/us/...
People will "spam" on everthing they want. If they'll use bill than it isn't your ( site owner ) business.
It will work on every places on the earth

QR codes only are a bad idea. They aren't easy to write by hand and they can only be used by nerds.

[Red Emerald]

@deepceleron
So the website will track any paper/object that has an unique number printed/wrote on it.
It must be on a domain that isn't com/org/biz/us/...
People will "spam" on everthing they want. If they'll use bill than it isn't your ( site owner ) business.

QR codes only are a bad idea. They aren't easy to write by hand and they can only be used by nerds.

Aren't easy to write by hand? Lol thats an understatement.

[SgtSpike]

I agree with edd about keeping things simple, but actually the game I described is no different in simplicity from a user's perspective. They're still just entering bills into a site. The site does all the rest of the work for calculations.

I also agree a note can't give credit the first time entered, or people will make up serial numbers. I think the key validation is having the second person verify the details of the bill. From the tech standpoint checking the I.P. geo location is the best way to guard against one person pretending to be many others.

As for the illegality of marking bills it's interesting that wheresgeorge.com has set a precedent. The Secret Service themselves commented that as long as the site ceased selling the rubber stamps to mark with they wouldn't look into it too much. If bitcoin created its own game that did nothing different what would justify a new crack down?

It's a gray area, but it's interesting that the current system has no problem using gray area to their own benefit, such as with so-called "voluntary" income taxes and capital gains taxes on legal tender gold/silver coins.

The anonymous features of Bitcoin makes it possible to safely take a political stand. It's just a question of whether the resulting PR would do more harm than any benefits of exposure from actions taken.

If you go by IP geo location, wouldn't that cause problems?  Most bills stay in the same locale for quite a long time before moving elsewhere in the country.

I believe Phinnaeus was on the right track:

I don't see this solving the problem of people making up serial numbers.  Sure, you can make sure the serial numbers match a specific pattern, but I could just take a legitimate bill and start incrementing values by 1.  What would stop me?  Or put a random set of numbers in.

The only way to protect from people making up serial numbers is to have numbers funded when they are initially entered.  Don't give out any prizes or anything, but after the bill is entered a first time, you can give out BTC when it is entered a second time.

[SgtSpike]

I like the idea of a small sticker with a QR Code. Stickers aren't expensive to produce and ship, plus the notes stay clean.

In my opinion this should be crowd-funded, i.e. each person puts a few bitcents on a few bills and hands them out to strangers. The idea is not to get rich, but to metaphorically use fiat money to spread the word about a new kind of money. With crowd-funding there is no need for complicated means of verification via IP/email/whatever, it's first come first served.

I think you'll get a lot fewer people participating when they have to put the money in themselves though.  I know I wouldn't.  It's not that I don't want to see Bitcoin expand, it's that I don't want to be at a net loss for doing so.  And I think a lot of other people are as... stingy... as I am in that regard.

If it can be done for free, there will be a lot more people participating.

[acoindr]

If you go by IP geo location, wouldn't that cause problems?  Most bills stay in the same locale for quite a long time before moving elsewhere in the country.

That's true, but that could be a plus. You only receive credit for a bill re-entered outside your state, so the best way to improve your chances is to label more bills...

[kurtosis]

There's probably enough leeway there for the government to construe widespread defacement of bills with adverts for competing currency as illegal.  I wouldn't try to start such a movement, more likely to attract the kind of attention bitcoin doesn't want.

The fed don't need to take up any "leeway" they gave, advertising on money is illegal. OP is 100 years too late to the idea of putting advertisements on US money. Somebody already annoyed them enough they made a law against it before we were born.

I was sure that was the case, thanks for digging up the statute.

I'd estimate this idea has a negatively assymetrically skewed expected payoff for bitcoin as a whole, better to shelve it and come up with something else that doesn't directly antagonize governments.

[edd]

I think you'll get a lot fewer people participating when they have to put the money in themselves though.  I know I wouldn't.  It's not that I don't want to see Bitcoin expand, it's that I don't want to be at a net loss for doing so.  And I think a lot of other people are as... stingy... as I am in that regard.

If it can be done for free, there will be a lot more people participating.

How about a combination of both? You can enter in a serial number, fund it yourself, and release it into the wild or you can enter it and wait for the site admin to fund it.

[SgtSpike]

There's probably enough leeway there for the government to construe widespread defacement of bills with adverts for competing currency as illegal.  I wouldn't try to start such a movement, more likely to attract the kind of attention bitcoin doesn't want.

The fed don't need to take up any "leeway" they gave, advertising on money is illegal. OP is 100 years too late to the idea of putting advertisements on US money. Somebody already annoyed them enough they made a law against it before we were born.

I was sure that was the case, thanks for digging up the statute.

I'd estimate this idea has a negatively assymetrically skewed expected payoff for bitcoin as a whole, better to shelve it and come up with something else that doesn't directly antagonize governments.

Why isn't wheresgeorge shut down then?  There must be some way around it if they have managed to keep straight for so long.

I think you'll get a lot fewer people participating when they have to put the money in themselves though.  I know I wouldn't.  It's not that I don't want to see Bitcoin expand, it's that I don't want to be at a net loss for doing so.  And I think a lot of other people are as... stingy... as I am in that regard.

If it can be done for free, there will be a lot more people participating.

How about a combination of both? You can enter in a serial number, fund it yourself, and release it into the wild or you can enter it and wait for the site admin to fund it.

Now that's not a bad idea...

[kurtosis]

Why isn't wheresgeorge shut down then?  There must be some way around it if they have managed to keep straight for so long.

Government couldn't care less about WheresGeorge.  Judging from the legal history of alternative currency attempts, they care a great deal about that.

Keep in mind that while there is a lot of energy and enthusiasm among bitcoiners, the project is still in its infancy, is still relatively untested, is breaking new and unknown ground, and still needs to be husbanded to maturity and robustness before 'taking on the world'.

There are still known problems that have to be solved, like concentrated mining pool power undermining the whole notion of a decentralized currency, and unknown unknowns (say, what if Facebook created a bitcoin client which overtook the canonical one in users and then forked the blockchain with an incompatible mod?).

So I think it's best not to get too ahead of ourselves just yet, stay humble, and avoid antagonizing governments.  

Further, the establishment appears to be doing the work of popularizing bitcoin all on their own.  It's looking more and more inevitable that the USD is on a path of no return, and one day the consequences of decisions being made now by the Fed and US Govt will materialize, and all of sudden things like bitcoin and precious metals and other non-inflationary assets will get real popular real fast.  No need to rush it or force it, it will happen.  In the meantime, better to focus on working to the make core technology and supporting ecosystem as hardened, robust, and mature as possible.

Patience, grasshopper .

[acoindr]

^ sound thoughts.

[Transisto]

Sorry to rain on your parade, but this is the farthest I would push this.

The obvious thing is that by increasing the Bitcoin knowledge it will also increase the Bitcoin value, so it's a win-win!

The dollar bills is what we're competing with, We don't want to turn people into being on the lookout for every bills that come across for BTC profit or a fun game. (I did not read much, but this is what I gathered)

Some 10 years ago I had though on doing advertising this way, I used a inkjet printer and printed a url small enough not to catch attention but big enough to be visible.  It printed ok but I didn't do many.

What about writing any phrase that come to mind including both the words "bitcoin" and "money"

Bitcoin - Finally, Fair Money
Bitcoin: Virtual money
Bitcoin the future of money
Bitcoin will replace traditional money
Bitcoin · Electronic money
Bitcoin, Smart Money
... learn more.

(from quick Google search)

[Matthew N. Wright]

Only one thing:

- Bitcoin - Vires in Numeris

Please don't use it: I think that's not a good Latin sentence.

+1

[edd]

Okay, I've put together my take on this game at SearchingForSatoshi.com (yes, Phinnaeus, I know you prefer WheresSatoshi.com but it's my site, so there.  )

It's a little clunky and needs some prettifying and I'll be manually approving all withdrawals until I can think up the best way to discourage "cheating," but I'm still confident this could be a great way to promote Bitcoin.

Please check out the site and provide some feedback here before I create another thread to announce it's release.