Topic: BitCoinTorrentz.com - Torrent Download Service - page 28. (Read 57203 times)

I have decided to just go ahead and remove the remove the IP address recording of affiliates. I want this service to be truly anonymous, so if people use the site regularly enough to want a 20% rebate, while simultaneously promoting the site, I'm totally cool with that.

I will delete the IP address table in the affiliates database, and update the affiliate registration code to reflect this. It will be part of the next live update of the site.

And thinking along these lines, it might also be a good idea to introduce a sort of "subscription" service, where regular users of the site could register and get an ID # and a password, and avail of a higher-use, lower-fee based fee structure. Say, if a user downloads a total of 10gb, they would avail of a 20% discount in the future, if they download a total of 100gb they avail of another 20% discount of their current fee, etc.

Or something along those lines. Thoughts?


Yes, it is a very modest fee. Right now, the goal is to grow the business, and the best way to do that is to make it as inexpensive as possible. Once we have achieved sufficient volume, prices will determined at a level that the community and the shareholders agree on, and linked to the btc:usd exchange rate.

I have considered the possibility of the scenario you described; that users would redistribute the link. Right now, that isn't really a major concern, as the measures needed to implement an adequate solution would make the service less attractive to potential new users. I will reevaluate this if and when it becomes a problem that puts a large load on the server.

I'm glad to have been the one to pop your bitcoin cherry!

I reckon go with leaving that "functionality" for now and see what usage it gets, verses usage by the one registered user - consider it the "first one's free" method of advertising. Once they are hooked, they may well acquire their own account, to obtain the more (ahem) questionable content - i.e. their own personal tastes in porn.

I've just tried this service for the first time - it seems very very cheap (the price not the quality).

A quick question - are you not worried that once someone has the link they can start distributing it on multiple websites? Perhaps even charging for it themselves? (I initially connected to your website via a VPN from China to the UK as Pirate Bay is blocked here, and then started downloading directly from China)

It's not a problem for me, and it's a great service - it saved me the time of trying several different torrents until I found one that was reasonably fast on my connection.

Edit - and I just realised- this is the first time I've bought anything with bitcoin!

Hadn't thought of it this way... Maybe it should be possible to "delete" and affiliate account (data could be kept, except the ip-address).

Regarding the fees and IP collection of affiliates, another way to look at it is that it's a 20% fee for the privilege of using the site 100% anonymously, instead of being required to register with an email address and associated IP address.  Obviously that's not a good marketing stance to take, but it's the way I think of it and I think it's entirely justified.

I have now implemented a pseudo-unique payment system. The server will select a random address from a list of 100, and that will be used for the transaction. This minimizes the risk of others stealing your download, and adds an extra layer of privacy to the service.

I still do intend to transition to a unique based system at some point in the future, but I really would rather not run the bitcoin client on my server, where it is vulnerable to attack. I like having my wallet stored securely on an isolated machine that is not used for any other purpose.

So this is the best solution I can come up with right now, which I think is adequate for the purposes of bitcointorrentz. I would love to hear some feedback on this, especially what end-users think about it.

@molecular: by the way, I have also added the payment address to the final payment screen, as per your suggestion.

Enjoy the holiday mate. And thanks so much for your helpful input.
Hopefully I'll be able to take care of things by myself while you are gone! :p

I don't have time to react to all your answers, but the answer is "cool" or "awesome" to most of them anyways

I remember reading your explanation regarding IP-address storage now. This is good enough for me.

About making all affiliates ENTITLED to 20% discount: well, it's pretty easy to become an affiliate, right? But why not? You'll adjust the price at some point anyhow, this will just be reflected in the price calculation, then, so I see no problem with that.

Ok, off to bed and on to plane tomorrow... cu guys.

This server is not used for any other resource intensive purposes. It does host a few low traffic websites, so users are completely free to utilize the full capability of their connection using as many concurrent connections as they like.

Also, your max speed was actually over 9mb/s at one point according to a peak that I can see on my server bandwidth monitor!
It made me very happy to see that someone was getting almost a full 100mbit download speed.
It might not have been all been going to you though.

I did a new bandwidth test, from a 100 Mbps west coast USA link.

Single connection: 400KB/s (same as before)
30 parallel connections: 8MB/s.

It almost saturates my incoming bandwidth, I'm happy! Does the high number of connections put too much load on your server?

@molecular:

I totally agree with you that a complete page refresh is clumsy, and I intend to transition to an ajax-based update of the status page in the future. I am not that fluent in ajax, so I decided to go what what I know, which is a javascript refresh. Once I become a little more familiar with ajax, it will not be a problem to implement. I just wanted to get the new and improved status page up and running a.s.a.p.

I like your suggestion about including the payment address on the waiting for payment page. I will implement this in my next site update with some other improvements.

With regards to your questions regarding IP anonymity, I answered this question earlier in the thread:


So essentially, the IP addresses of affiliates IS recorded. And a check is run against the affiliates table to check if the affiliate is trying to use his own IP address. The actual IP address of the USER is not recorded, just instantaneously checked against the IP of affiliate who referred them to the site. It is not stored, just read at runtime by the server. I didn't consider this to be a problem (i.e. the storing of affiliate IP addresses) since they have to provide an email address anyway. And as I stated in my above post, affiliates are not breaking the law by pointing people to a website for legitimate use, nor are they responsible for how the service is used by third parties.

Affiliates can use the service and be assured that they can not be identified as doing so. If you wish, I can provide you with access to the PHP code molecular so you can verify that this is the case. As I said above, I might transition to a cookie based system of identification of affiliates, but then there is nothing to stop them from just deleting their cache and getting a 20% rebate.

Actually, you know what, I think affiliates are probably ENTITLED to a 20% rebate. Do you think I should just get rid of this and allow affiliates to avail of a permanent rebate?

By the way, if you want to try and screw me over, use your referral key to download a file from an IP address other than that which you used to register as an affiliate. This way you can also test that the affiliate system itself is working, which is what I suspect you were also trying to do.

With regards to secure deletion of files, they are deleted using a 7-pass overwrite of the data.
I will include all of this in the FAQ as per your suggestion.

First off, let me express my amazement at this project/company and how you handle things (well, quickly and in an open way, that is). I also love that my input as a user and shareholder is taken seriously. It's been some time since I had this much fun and excitement watching and participating in something in the bitcoin world. Very refreshing!

Ok, enough of crawling up peoples butts and on to some comments:

1.) I think halving the fee for now is the right decision. Thanks for considering the idea of lowering price and going for it. I hope it'll work out as intended (bigger userbase)

2.) I went through the torrent upload/download/payment process again 2 times. It was really enjoyable and fluent. Payment accept was quick, however, as you clearly state it can sometimes take longer (I'm assuming in case your node misses the transaction for some reason and has to wait for a block with the tx in it), and in that case I'm looking at a squiggly thing and some text saying "waiting for payment", which is allright. What I would love to see here in addition is the payment address, because: should the payment take longer, I might decide to check wether or not I sent the money to the right address, which as of now, I can't. Next up: the download progress page. It's very cool, thanks for implementing that (figuring out how to pull the info from your torrent client or whatever you had to do for that), I've really missed progress info the first time around. A little ugly: the fact that the complete page is reloaded. Some ajax would be cool, but that's not high priority at all, it's totally acceptable as it is.

3.) I read through your sales pitch and one thing that got me thinking: you say the service is 100% anonymous. Now, when I did the last download, I figured I might as well try to screw you over (sorry for that) and try to get the 20% referral bonus for my own download (I didn't do this because I needed 0.006 BTC desperately, but because I was trying to figure out how you would identify me as either "having visited before without referrer" or "being the referrer himself"). So I deleted all www.bittorrentz.com and bittorrentz.com cookies. The downloads did not get credited to my referrer account (which is correct, of course). So, how do you do it then? You can't be using my ip-address, right, since the service is 100% anonymous, so you don't record ip addresses. Note that I'm not really complaining here, but this is something we might get attacked on by users and it's better to clear this up now, right? Maybe it would also be good to be more specific about this issue on the site, saying that you don't keep logs (only if that's the case, of course), that you securely delete the .torrent files, etc... maybe an FAQ entry "What measures are taken to ensure my privacy?"

On a personal note: I'll be on vacation starting tomorrow for three weeks. Sadly therefore, I won't be able to participate here, at least not as much as I'd probably like to. So keep up the great work, (not just mjcmurfy, but all of you) and have fun doing it.

Ok, I have halved the current fee to 0.05 btc / GB. That extra 0 after the decimal point should indeed attract a more significant amount of interest. At this price level, I think there is huge potential for organic growth of the service, at which time a more structured pricing plan would be introduced.

I have also changed around the prose and layout of the main landing page, as this is where the sale is won or lost. I would appreciate any input into the wording of the "sales pitch", or the general layout of the text, on the homepage.

Also, the share price of BitCoinTorrentz on GLBSE has risen by 250% since my IPO!!!
I'm flabbergasted...

Nice! Are you planning to sell more of your 800 shares any time soon? The demand seems to be high, price already went up to 0.3BTC/share.


Awesome, I assumed you would be transparent about the business numbers. Nice to see this in writing. It's nice to know there actually are quite a few downloads.


I'm not sure about wether I would like to see the business numbers and investor info stuff on the site itself. I really like the idea of a google spreadsheet. There's also editgrid and others if google scares you.

A shareholder mailinglist also seems a good idea. I'm not sure wether or not I would try to keep things secret from non-shareholders. Probably not worth the hassle, why not let users/interested people see the numbers, too.

I also like your promotional ideas. I think it's important to build a solid userbase, which is a no-brainer, actually.

A "sliding scale" might be a good idea, but why not make it simpler to understand for users by making it a fixed fee per download plus a (lower than now) fee per GByte?

For me, the frequent and informative communication through that spreadsheet was a key reason for my initial and subsequent investment,

As a mining company I think the effort of daily communication and div payout is necessary.

Once this company is sufficiently developed I would be happy with say five times the content every two weeks.

 What are other investors thoughts on this?


 

the only reason i update daily is because I pay out daily.

It's so weird you suggested that.

I was having a look at smokey mountain mining and saw the link to your finances spreadsheet at the top. I thought it would be a good idea to do something similar for my site. Then you suggested it, literally about an hour later.

I love the transparency of it, and your info/comments are so detailed. I especially like the comment on row 25!
You clearly run a tight ship! Fantastic work.

You update that spreadsheet daily? That seems like a lot of effort. I would prefer to have a financial statistics page integrated into my site directly so that I could automate a lot of the work of adding entries that way, without having to manually edit it every day. I might follow a similar format to yours, but do it via html/php and mysql queries instead.

Interesting...

Love the constant bouncing back of ideas and questions between developer and user/shareholder in this thread. Keep it up guys!