Topic: Advertise Bitcoin on every single banknote ( and make a new game ? ) (Read 17307 times)

Sorry for the necro but this thread has some really interesting ideas that I may eventually incorporate into Cryptobill.com.

Also:

Cryptobill.com is live!

Can't help but mention that my site http://coinedbits.com/ is closely related to this idea. You buy a physical coin, pass it around, track where it goes on my website. It's a fun way to spread the bitcoin message to the world.

Here's my main concern:  Without an incentive to write on bills, the only people who are going to do it are those who want to spread the word of bitcoin, and use their own bitcoins and time to do so.  That group of people isn't very large, and already has plenty of (potentially better) means of doing this (i.e., physical coins, etc).

So, offer an incentive to people who write on bills, and this project will take off.  Don't offer an incentive, and the project isn't going to go anywhere.  It's really as simple as that.  Most people are greedy enough that they don't want to spend time and their own money on donating towards this.  Subsidize the time of those people with those who DO want to donate, by offering incentives to the greedy ones using the donations of the generous ones.  And advertisements.

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?

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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.

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~

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?

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").

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.

When euro bills will be supported by this service?

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

- 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

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.

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