Bounty for Bitcoin Animated Movie [won]

[molecular]

By the way, provide us the synchronized subtitles so we can translate it to other languages.

Here you go: http://rapidshare.com/files/453964245/What_is_Bitcoin.srt 

nice! I saw at least 2 of the creators have german-sounding names.

Do you have a german translation yet? I'm working on one, it's harder than I thougt...

Also: I might know someone (female) who might be willing to speak german audio for a low price... do we desire that?

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[kiba]

Will Satoshi be taking a look at this video?

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

Will Satoshi be taking a look at this video?

I think yeah, that is if tsunami didn't kill him... (I mean it would be really nice if he signed in just to show that he is alive)

[hendi]

Here you can download the HD version: http://hendi.name/bitcoin/What_is_Bitcoin.mp4

And here are German subtitles: http://hendi.name/bitcoin/What_is_Bitcoin.srt

Is it possible to upload all these subtitles to the video on Youtube?

[jav]

As I have said elsewhere ( http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4793.msg70391#msg70391 ): Great work! :-) I just fear that it might not be able to inspire the kind of fascination that Bitcoin deserves. But that is hard to do, for sure, and I saw in this thread that it is meant to be more of a kickstarter and a more technical video might follow at some point. So that sounds good!

I have been kicking an idea around for a little while on how to explain the technical side of Bitcoin and just wanted to document it here in case someone finds some inspiration in it. I would approach it from the question "What would it take to build a decentralized payment system?" and from there explore the difficulties and Bitcoin's answers to it. I think this way there is a chance for a newcomer to quickly appreciated what all the alien concepts ("block chain") are needed for.

So here is a rough outline following 'Professor Bitcoin' in inventing a payment system:

-- Start of script --

Professor Bitcoin: "Let's invent a payment system today! Moving cash or wealth in general around is part of our everyday live and something we increasingly do online as well. Before we build our own system to do that, let's look at one of our competitors: Paypal. When using Paypal, you give them some of your money and the record it in their books [show some image of a big Paypal book in the center]. Moving your money to someone else who has Paypal is easy now. You can just change the owner in the big Paypal book [animation of a new transaction recorded in the big Paypal book]. So, what's wrong?"

"In a central solution everyone depends on the entity that manages the big transaction book. If they don't like you, they can just freeze your account [animation of entry in the big PayPal book being frozen]. Can we somehow get ride of the need for a big central book?"

"How about this: we just give a copy of the book to every single participant [show animation of the big Paypal book being copied and distributed to a number of participants and the big book itself vanishing] Nice, now everyone has a copy. But how do we make sure they all say the same thing? [let one of the smaller books show the transaction "Mallory to Alice" and another book "Mallory to Bob"]. We no longer have a central authority, so we need a system to keep these records in sync."

"How about some form of voting? Everybody votes on what is the correct version. The one with the most votes wins out, in the hope that honest people hold the most votes. How are votes granted though? It's the Internet, everybody is anonymous and we don't want to ask for IDs. Maybe one vote per IP address? easy to fake. Let's try this: The more CPU power you have, the more votes you get! Maybe not the fairest voting system, but at least everyone can stay anonymous and a supercomputer isn't found at every corner"

"How can we make sure that someone has the computing power they claim? Cryptography to the rescue! Fortunately there are some very hard mathematical problems with just take some time to find the solutions to, even with some of the fastest computers. To vote for a version of the transaction book, you need to spend the time solving these problems [show animation of one version of the transaction book being covered in more and more mathematical formulas until it forms a huge pile; show another version of the transaction book next to it covered in a smaller pile of mathematical formulas]."

"Very good! We have found a way for a number of decentralized and anonymous participants to reach consensus on what is recorded in the transaction book. One last problem remains: how to get money in and out of the system?"

"We can't just let everyone write something in the book - even with the voting in place, nobody could be sure the money is actually there. So we design it as a closed system instead: Those who invest CPU power to keep the voting going and keep everybody honest will occasionally be rewarded with some fresh 'Bitcoins' which they are allowed to record in the book of transactions. To use the Bitcoin system, you either have to invest a lot of CPU power yourself to get some Bitcoins or buy them from other people who are doing so. In effect you pay them for keeping the system going, which is only fair."

-- End of script --

This has some holes, especially the part of what it means to "write in the book" and how you can not just write anything (but only move your own coins around). I'm not sure there is a nice way of explaining that without having to go to deep into public/private key stuff. But still, maybe this approach to explaining it can turn out to be useful.

[Stefan Thomas]

I've uploaded the French and German subtitles. Since they're even longer than the English subtitles, they're too fast in some parts. Any changes to shorten them would be appreciated. Don't worry if you change the grammar a little as long as you get the meaning across imho.

Will Satoshi be taking a look at this video?

I've emailed him yesterday, we'll give him a few days to respond. I don't suppose anybody has a phone number?

[bytemaster]

I just saw the weusecoins video on a link on the front page of slashdot!!   It answers what and why, but not how.  I suspect that the video is perfect to explain to "customers" what bitcoin is, but is not sufficient to explain to businesses why they should use it or developers why they should advance it.

I can say that I am very happy with the video from an educating the users perspective and it is certainty of a quality worthy of the bounty, perhaps half of the bounty leaving the other half for someone who finishes the technical explaination that addresses:

0) Security
1) Fraud
2) Legality
3) Backups / Hazards

etc.

[FreeMoney]

I need to say in this thread that my pledged 100 has been payed. With Justmoon's approval it was used to buy an ad on the Agora I/O unconference page.

I'd like to see the main bounty go to Justmoon's fund, but it probably is appropriate to hold back some for the complete technical explanation. I hope that one is produced by the same people, I love the style.

[Anonymous]

I just saw the weusecoins video on a link on the front page of slashdot!!   It answers what and why, but not how.  I suspect that the video is perfect to explain to "customers" what bitcoin is, but is not sufficient to explain to businesses why they should use it or developers why they should advance it.

I can say that I am very happy with the video from an educating the users perspective and it is certainty of a quality worthy of the bounty, perhaps half of the bounty leaving the other half for someone who finishes the technical explaination that addresses:

0) Security
1) Fraud
2) Legality
3) Backups / Hazards

etc.

The  5000 coins I paid into the bounty can go to this video. The rest can be left as motivation for a technical video imo.

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

I've uploaded the French and German subtitles. Since they're even longer than the English subtitles, they're too fast in some parts. Any changes to shorten them would be appreciated.

Told ya.
That is because the video is too damn fast. It will be impossible to create good subtitles, or voice record in some languages because of that.

It should be slowed down at least 15% to make various translations possible.

EDIT:
Or perhaps you could release the background music and voice separately, so people can make modifications necessary for other languages

[grondilu]

I've uploaded the French and German subtitles. Since they're even longer than the English subtitles, they're too fast in some parts. Any changes to shorten them would be appreciated.

Told ya.
That is because the video is too damn fast. It will be impossible to create good subtitles, or voice record in some languages because of that.

It should be slowed down at least 15% to make various translations possible.

EDIT:
Or perhaps you could release the background music and voice separately, so people can make modifications necessary for other languages

I've watched the video with my french subtitles, and it is ok, really.

Keep in mind that french people are used to read french, and german people are used to read german.   It's not because those languages are a bit longer than english once written, that german and french people read more slowly than english people!! (well, I hope not anyway).

[M4v3R]

EDIT:
Or perhaps you could release the background music and voice separately, so people can make modifications necessary for other languages

I double that. I'll happily use my voice to record polish version of the movie. Nevertheless, I'll upload translated polish SRT in a while.

Edit: Polish subtitles available here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1127246/What_is_Bitcoin.srt

[Stefan Thomas]

Or perhaps you could release the background music and voice separately, so people can make modifications necessary for other languages

This is on the way (someone on YouTube already requested it). There were some details to clear up, because the final mix is a lot more complex than just some tracks on top of one another. Volume levels of individual elements adapt to the speakers voice. Change the speaker and the sound effects and music sound like somebody is playing with the volume knobs. We've decided to create a flat mix out of the sound effects and music alone. That's the best raw material for another sound engineer to go and mix a new voice into. If somebody does a translation without professional mixing, well, it won't sound perfect, but there is nothing we can do about that anyway.

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

Or perhaps you could release the background music and voice separately, so people can make modifications necessary for other languages

This is on the way (someone on YouTube already requested it). There were some details to clear up, because the final mix is a lot more complex than just some tracks on top of one another. Volume levels of individual elements adapt to the speakers voice. Change the speaker and the sound effects and music sound like somebody is playing with the volume knobs. We've decided to create a flat mix out of the sound effects and music alone. That's the best raw material for another sound engineer to go and mix a new voice into. If somebody does a translation without professional mixing, well, it won't sound perfect, but there is nothing we can do about that anyway.

Thx a lot.

[Stefan Thomas]

Audio tracks:

Master (Everything): http://www.weusecoins.com/materials/wib_video/What_is_Bitcoin_Master.wav
Voice: http://www.weusecoins.com/materials/wib_video/What_is_Bitcoin_Voice.wav
Music: http://www.weusecoins.com/materials/wib_video/What_is_Bitcoin_Music.wav
Sound Effects: http://www.weusecoins.com/materials/wib_video/What_is_Bitcoin_Sounddesign.wav

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
The "Music" and "Sound Effects" tracks are for use with the video "What is Bitcoin?" or parts of it ONLY.
These individual tracks are NOT under a Creative Commons license, because we ourselves do not have the rights to release them as such. However you are allowed them to combine them with parts of our video and release the result under Creative Commons. If you need free sound effects for your own videos, check out the Free Sound Project or just invest some money into hiring a professional sound designer.

The "Voice" track is released under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license.

How to create a new voice over
The basic process is:
1. Record voice in sync with the video.
2. Mix your voice with the "Music" and "Sound Effects" tracks.
(Having step 2 done by a sound engineer is 100% worth it in our opinion, it will sound a million times better.)

We are also planning to create a "Materials/Press Kit" section on weusecoins.com where we collect the vector graphics source files from the video, the video in various formats, the above audio tracks, the subtitles in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Catalan, Hebrew, Polish and (hopefully soon) Chinese, the Bitcoin logo and acceptance logos and anything else that we can find.

------------------------

Now, as for the bounty: Satoshi still has not responded after one week so at this point I would request we go with Gavin's approval instead, which he has already given:

Wow!  Great job, excellent video (I like fast), fully deserving of the bounty in my opinion.

As per the rules, we suggest waiting one week from today for more submissions and holding a vote if there are any. Kiba, noagendamarket, bytemaster, can one of you please confirm whether you agree with this procedure?

As for the amount, we were hoping for the full amount, but 5000 BTC plus the 434.88 BTC we received from other donors are enough to pay the costs for this video (2000 BTC) and have a budget for the next one. The technical explanation video will be a very different beast - it'll be much, much longer (15-20 minutes or even more), less visually dense and the script will be developed in public with community involvement. Also I'd love to include some real-life footage with developer interviews from one of the next meetups. I might also use the chance to record some user interviews/testimonials for weusecoins.com.

In order not to raise false expectations: The technical explanation will take a while to do. "What is Bitcoin?" was about two and a half months of work 10 hours a week for me and about three weeks 25 hours a week for our designer. I earned nothing and he earned far less than with a normal project. Taking all that into consideration, I would realistically aim for a late summer release. Having a budget up front is what makes it possible to do it as a professional video at all. To give us a chance at the rest of the bounty would require the bounty organizers working with us to define exactly the content the video should have and setting the bar fairly high, so somebody else can't come in and snatch the bounty with a slapdash video while we are in production. Another way of doing this would be to set a due date for the bounty, upon which users will vote on the best candidate.

[eMansipater]

Excellent work Justmoon, this is incredible!  I'm very much looking forward to the next video as well.  Although I haven't contributed to the bounty myself, my donation was part of the amount sent afterward; and you can be sure I will also be donating in support of the next one if it turns out at all on the same level--bounty or no bounty.  If you need any input on addressing common misconceptions in plain language, just let me know--I have quite a bit of experience with that both on these boards and in many other arenas of life.  I would love to contribute in any way I can.

[em3rgentOrdr]

excellent video!  Great explanation/introduction for your average Joe.

[yesman]

Lithuanian subtitles available. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11505623/Kar_yra_Bitcoin.srt

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

So is the bounty paid already ?

[kiba]

So is the bounty paid already ?

No.