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

[Cosbycoin]

I've actually been thinking about getting one thousand $1 bills and getting a stamp that says "bitcoin.org" and stamping each one and then exchanging them for larger denominations then rinse and repeat...

Eventually people will start to take notice.

Just a thought.

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[SgtSpike]

Another idea - allow people to donate directly to the balance of all bills.  So, say someone wanted to help the Bitcoin cause, and donated 1 BTC.  And say there had been 500 bills entered (and presumably written upon) up to that point.  Then each bill would have 0.002 BTC added to the balance of it.

He can also add a "score", so there will be "the best donors score"

It'd be a good way to sort of automatically keep at least some BTC on each of the bills for anyone who wants to help out.  And maybe, if a bill isn't entered again within a year, you could mark it as "destroyed" and assume that it is no longer in circulation, moving those coins to other newly entered bills.

Good ideas

I am still interested in hearing more about your incentive to people who first enter bills.  I think it'd be great if the incentive was only realized once the bill was entered a second (third, fourth, etc) time by someone else.

Yes, all the system aims to incentive people to enter bills, there must be some good rules to make it working good.

These are all good ideas but they will require skills beyond my meager set. Anyone willing to volunteer to help?

It seems like the reward would be easy to implement on top of what you already have.
- Allow original enterer of bill to enter in a Bitcoin address.
- As soon as bill is re-entered, send out the BTC balance of the bill to the new enterer, but also send a BTC reward to the original enterer.

The amount of reward is up to you, but I would suggest an amount that would be covered by advertisers.  Maybe dedicate 25% of the income from advertisers to go towards rewards for the people who originally enter the bills.  If you find that 50 bills were re-entered in one month, and you gained 4 BTC from advertising that month, then the next month, give a reward of 0.02 BTC per bill to the original enterers each time one of their bills is entered.

If it seems that many more of a particular person's bills are getting entered than the average number of bills, then you can assume some sort of cheating is going on and just clear his BTC addresses from those bills.  Since you're manually reviewing all of these, I don't think it'd be hard to catch cheaters.

I'll help you with the coding for that if you'll throw a couple BTC my way.

On the donations, I suppose a SQL query would do it.  Run a query to get the total number of bills entered.  Then run another query, something like "UPDATE bills SET balance=(balance+donation/bills)".  I don't know how your database is set up, but I imagine something along those lines would work.

[check_status]

For the Satoshi of it, I saw some bills that had Bitcoin.org next to Benjamin Franklin and penned toward the right edge was "Bitcoins to replace this." Who ever did that was a genius. God save the Republic and a curse on those who run the Federal Reserve system.

[Ente]

Another idea - allow people to donate directly to the balance of all bills.  So, say someone wanted to help the Bitcoin cause, and donated 1 BTC.  And say there had been 500 bills entered (and presumably written upon) up to that point.  Then each bill would have 0.002 BTC added to the balance of it.

I believe this might be the most vital detail of the whole project!
That way, the "bills writing folks" donate their time (and smallish money), and donators fund the system over time and keep it going. Many people would easily donate one Bitcoin to this, not many would go through writing on a hundred bills.
Also, this would be the most clever way to "recycle" already redeemed bills.
Maybe dont transfer unlimited small amounts, but a minimum of 1 Bitcent per bill?

Also, I cant find a way to reward the "bills writer", without a huge incentive to cheat. Maybe make "just" a public list how many bills each user wrote on and how many were found? Hopefully this would be incentive enough?

(Still, people might recheck their found bills regularly, to cheat the system. Which is much less of an incentive than cheating the writer-reward..)

I like where this is going!

Ente

[SgtSpike]

Another idea - allow people to donate directly to the balance of all bills.  So, say someone wanted to help the Bitcoin cause, and donated 1 BTC.  And say there had been 500 bills entered (and presumably written upon) up to that point.  Then each bill would have 0.002 BTC added to the balance of it.

I believe this might be the most vital detail of the whole project!
That way, the "bills writing folks" donate their time (and smallish money), and donators fund the system over time and keep it going. Many people would easily donate one Bitcoin to this, not many would go through writing on a hundred bills.
Also, this would be the most clever way to "recycle" already redeemed bills.
Maybe dont transfer unlimited small amounts, but a minimum of 1 Bitcent per bill?

Also, I cant find a way to reward the "bills writer", without a huge incentive to cheat. Maybe make "just" a public list how many bills each user wrote on and how many were found? Hopefully this would be incentive enough?

(Still, people might recheck their found bills regularly, to cheat the system. Which is much less of an incentive than cheating the writer-reward..)

I like where this is going!

Ente

These are the things I can think of to help prevent cheating if a reward is introduced:
- Monitor whose bills are being re-entered often.  If one person has 50% of their bills re-entered, and everyone else is averaging 2%, then you know the 50% is cheating.
- Definitely don't allow the same bill to be entered from the same IP more than once.
- Perhaps don't allow public IPs (i.e., IP of a library, etc).
- Only give a reward if the bill moves a certain distance away from the point of origin.  IP has to be from a different city, or maybe even a different state.

Really, the most important factor is the first one.  If someone's bills are regularly being entered much more often than other people's bills, then they shouldn't be rewarded.

[HostFat]

- 1 bill : 1 account
No one can add more than 1 time a bill to an account

- The reward for the first account ( the first one that signed/entered the bill ) comes only after "another account" has entered the bill
The bill must pass from hand by hand.

- The reward for the first account must be higher than rewards for next accounts, example with the same bill:
first account - 0.01 ( only after another account entered it )
second account - 0.0001 ( and the first account will the "the reward" 0.01 )
second account - 0.0000 ( the user tried to enter again the bill )
third account - 0.0001 ( first account will also get 0.0001, or 0.00001 ... )

( these are just examples, you should find the better values to make it working good )

- There must be a limit to withdraw bitcoin from an account, example: 0.1 Bitcoin

[psiborg]

This is a cool idea, I'd love to deface sign some euro bills

[clak899]

This is a cool idea, I'd love to deface sign some euro bills

When euro bills will be supported by this service?

[edd]

This is a cool idea, I'd love to deface sign some euro bills

When euro bills will be supported by this service?

I'll be moving this game to another domain and making it a bit more user-friendly. Supporting currencies other than the US dollar is definitely a priority but it may be some time before I get around to it.

[Kaos]

I had a different idea altogether.

Why not create a website where you can sell the stamps that say "whateverdomainaboutbitcoins.com" and all the profits go to a faucet (sponsors can the buy stamps and use them to promote the idea of bitcoins). When a user visits for the first time the website walks them through the idea behind bitcoins (or link to another website that does that, like http://www.weusecoins.com/). If the new user then types in the serial number of the fiat plus their own wallet they get some bitcoins. I guess we could re-use the same  techniques/precautions as the bitcoin faucet.

On top of that you can use that platform to promote other Bitcoins-for-Free projects.

I still like bitcoinishappening.com as a domain (it's begs the question, what's bitcoin and what do you mean by "happening").

[Andrew Vorobyov]

Ok, I did some thinking and came to this model... As far as I see it is viable... please prove me wrong here..

1. Mark banknote and receive 30% of donations.
2. Submit photo of marked banknote and receive 50% of donations.
3. Participate in contest to win 50% of the jackpot if your banknote has photo, somebody found and made donation through it.
4. Donate and get 50% of the jackpot if your donation wins in contest.

What do you think guys?

[Phinnaeus Gage]

Ok, I did some thinking and came to this model... As far as I see it is viable... please prove me wrong here..

1. Mark banknote and receive 30% of donations.
2. Submit photo of marked banknote and receive 50% of donations.
3. Participate in contest to win 50% of the jackpot if your banknote has photo, somebody found and made donation through it.
4. Donate and get 50% of the jackpot if your donation wins in contest.

What do you think guys?

As is, the system could be gamed by one person submitting a banknote and the claiming-he-found-guy as the same person.

I like your photo idea, though, and percentage payout concept.

~Bruno~

[Andrew Vorobyov]

As is, the system could be gamed by one person submitting a banknote and the claiming-he-found-guy as the same person.

No, this is taken care of because 50% donation goes to jackpot... and if nobody donated - person is in isolation because he will not be participating in jackpot.

[SgtSpike]

As is, the system could be gamed by one person submitting a banknote and the claiming-he-found-guy as the same person.

No, this is taken care of because 50% donation goes to jackpot... and if nobody donated - person is in isolation because he will not be participating in jackpot.

But if people donate, he can take 50% of the donations....

[Andrew Vorobyov]

But if people donate, he can take 50% of the donations....

Idea not to let people to participate for free in jackpot draw... somebody must pay for it... because real money involved.


I have 10 BTC. I'm about to cheat system..

I mark 10 bills, photo them, upload to the site.

In 1 month I fake 10 discoveries...  Result - so be it... you not participating in jackpot

If I donate 1 BTC upon finding banknote - 0.5 BTC goes to jackpot.

So participation in jackpot draw will cost 0.5 BTC -  Result - it's ok...

[Andrew Vorobyov]

But if people donate, he can take 50% of the donations....

If you found a bill and donating - 50% of your life-time donations will be gone to person who marked the bill... I think he deserves it

[SgtSpike]

But if people donate, he can take 50% of the donations....

Idea not to let people to participate for free in jackpot draw... somebody must pay for it... because real money involved.


I have 10 BTC. I'm about to cheat system..

I mark 10 bills, photo them, upload to the site.

In 1 month I fake 10 discoveries...  Result - so be it... you not participating in jackpot

If I donate 1 BTC upon finding banknote - 0.5 BTC goes to jackpot.

So participation in jackpot draw will cost 0.5 BTC -  Result - it's ok...

If that's the case (people have to pay to enter the jackpot), why wouldn't they just enter a less complicated lotto?

[Andrew Vorobyov]

If that's the case (people have to pay to enter the jackpot), why wouldn't they just enter a less complicated lotto?

It's donations we are talking about here...

I found a bill on the street, googled it, found idea good enough, bought some quick btc through https://blockchain.info/wallet/sms-phone-deposits

After getting know that there is jackpot I can win ( or even without this knowledeg - just for the sake of Bitcoins ) I donate

[Andrew Vorobyov]

We can even take PayPal donations for this - to fund jackpot

[fergalish]

This is my 3rd time writing this... computer crashes >:-(   It's similar to Vorobyov's idea.

1. I mark a clean banknote with "win-bitcoins.com"
2. I make a donation to a deterministic address based on the note's serial number's hash, and register the public key at win-bitcoins.com, specifying currency, value, location, date, etc.
3. At least one month later, recipient of this note can reclaim ¼ of my donation and enter a monthly draw to win ¼ of all donations received during the month. The person who marked the winning banknote wins another ¼.
4. Banknotes already redeemed can be re-entered once into successive monthly draws for the last ¼ of donations, but never to the same user.

There is no point in cheating, all I get is ⅓ of my own donation back plus a chance to win the monthly prize AND I'd have to hold on to the banknote for one month.  Any person re-entering a banknote for the jackpot(s) supersedes any previous entries.  This means I could, in principle, save a database of the hashes of all banknotes I come across and enter them all at the end of the month, assuming I could create enough user-ids on win-bitcoins.com.  See rate-limiting below to solve this.

Fishing for hash collisions (given the small keyspace of banknote serial numbers) is possible but there are ways to prevent that:
1. Use the multisig feature in v0.6, so that donations and prizes can only be redeemed if authorised by win-bitcoins.com.
2. Rate-limit interrogations of the database of registered banknote-serial-number-hash-public-addresses to about once per minute from any IP, or once per 30 minutes from any abusive IP (where 'abusive' is defined somewhere).  This should also prevent people trying to enter lots of banknote hashes in the last minutes before the monthly draw takes place.
3. The person marking the banknote should also write the date on the note, providing extra search space.  Better still, write some random nonce.

Lastly: I'm pretty sure you can't deface legal tender.  Would this be considered defacing in any jurisdiction?  I know this has been discussed before also in the context of blacking out "in god we trust" from dollar notes.  What was the conclusion?