Topic: Advertise Bitcoin on every single banknote ( and make a new game ? ) - page 3. (Read 17320 times)

Wow, I can't believe btcbills.com wasn't taken. We'll let that baby propagate and then I'll point it to searchingforsatoshi.com.

SgtSpike, PM me your first few serial numbers and I'll add some BTC to them as my way of saying thanks for the URL suggestion.

Damn, I didn't think of that.

Let me see if there are any good short urls out there.
brb

First things first, the url is too long.  That's a lot of handwriting to do.    I was hoping for something short and sweet, like btcbills.com.  Maybe you could grab a short domain and just have it forward to the searchforsatoshi.com domain.  That way we could write either or.

That said, I've just switched to using all cash for my day-to-day transactions, so I'll probably be putting this on a lot of bills.  Well, as long as I don't have to write out that long URL anyway.  :p

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.

+1

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

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)

^ sound thoughts.

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 .

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

Now that's not a bad idea...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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 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.

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

@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.

...impresses upon or attaches to...

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

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.

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

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?