Topic: [DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated - page 227. (Read 1058949 times)

I have already stated my opinion on this, the ideas that have come forward so far and the unwillingness to actually think it through and everyone wanting to JUMP IN and do it. Not a good idea. I'm out of this one. As far as the project manager position, I have no trouble doing that if we have a full project to work on, and people actually work the project. But, so far I can't see that happening in this forum. Maybe the new one where we can get a little more organized, but it is too difficult in a single thread. Auction Site, at least the way it is being discussed now, I am not going to be part of.

On auction site and other ideas, concepts such as these should be comprehensively planned out and at least ball-park costed before any bounty put forward. Example - 400 shares estimated at last round's estimate works out to $24k. I can't see how or why that can be suggested without a lot more justification.

In general, I think the bounty system and a means to better assign project steps need to be worked on before stuff like this is started. Ambition is good but proposals are getting into dreamworld territory when there's little to no prior market research or analysis done beforehand.

Progress generally works in steps and it makes sense to think about the progressive developments necessary to support the workings of turning ideas into implementations. Devcoin is a means of reward for working, so there's a conceptual and practical difference between a work or bounty exchange, and an auction exchange.

If something like the auction site is a means to build a revenue base, that's great, but then perhaps should be viewed and funded in a different way to concepts that are arguably more core to the devcoin project. For example, if it's private revenue then it doesn't need devcoin bounty funding because it will pay for itself (and if it won't then why do it?). If it's devcoin project revenue then what's going to happen to that revenue, in what currency, what systems in place to reinvest, reinvest in what? etc etc. It's all a loop and that loop needs thinking through. Also, why an auction? If people just want things to buy/sell that's called a shop. Does it need complicating via an auction? Not saying an auction's necessarily a bad idea, but it needs a lot more explaining and rationale for not just building a basic merchant outlet, for example.

And that's my view as a person not an admin.

Whats wrong with the templates I gave they do all this and more.. you even get the source minus licensing?

Think of it like a hosting plan but one time payments? after that we are free to make whatever changed we want.. we can post thesource but it would only work for our site which is ok since it is a business afterall.

You have to consider bidding, cancellations, maybe tax.. adding coinpayments..

I think showing value in fiat terms is fine to start out or maybe bitcoin.. something every user is familiar with to relate market value in that currency. Thats just to start anyway. Later of we let user decide local maybe and all prices are reflected in that coin.. just dangerous to do so with the volatility so thats why I said stick to showing usd for now but you can purchase bids for $0.60 equivelant in coins we accept and or fiat if we wanna go balls out

So we want to recreate the wheel for the purpose of turning it into fully open source?

That against the vision? I think the project is evolving rather than going off track.. you still have the open source stuff if we pay but you have competing businesses that look out for interest of devcoin and its shareholders... Do you think its hypocritical to do such a thing? Honestly asking.

Whats the purpose of not using a template you buy when noone can copy it anyway.. they wouldnt have the funding we do. So the incentive to do is minimal no? Its kind of an evolved form of dvc project that allows later funding for bigger open source projects by increSing market cap with profits..

Ok, so lets ask programmers how hard could/would it really be to hack up an existing auction site package to make the currency you bid in be called bids and to display alongside the amount of that currency that has been bid a resulting actual price at which the winning bidder would be able to buy the things being auctioned if no one else bids.

That would be a very minimal first pass "kludge", it would likely confuse people who already know how some other site like quibids or whatever does it, because this currency we call "bids" would not have to actually be a measure of the number of times people have placed bids; it would simply be how much of the site's internal currency/points have been bid on the item.

A step farther would be to limit that currency to integers, so they have to bid whole numbers of this strange stuff known confusingly by the name "bids".

Maybe we could go even farther, and only allow them to bid one so called "bid" at a time. That brings us even closer to the model existing sites use.

So far this sounds almost "trivial". An hour or few. (An hour followed by gosh knows how many hours chasing down all the "got ya"s  that I haven't yet thought of... )

Next though I foresee that some auction site systems, possibly including all the off the shelf free open source ones (I dunno as I have not ever looked at any of them) might use a model where people who place bids have not got a balance already in place on the site with which to bid.

Look at e-bay for example, [I think that] they let people place bids without having first placed into escrow aka deposited onto the e-bay site the amount of whatever that they are bidding.

(Maybe though it might only let you do that if it has your credit card? Or does it let you bid even if paypal does not know your credit card number nor can grab from your bank account nor has a sufficient balance in paypal already that can be held until the end of the auction to ensure you are able to pay if you do win the auction?)

Obviously since we want to sell "bids" up front, so that people cannot bid first then pay for that "bid" later, we need a system that makes people do their bidding only from existing balances they already have on the system.

If none of the existing free open source auction site systems feature such local to the site balances, then it seems to me we have run up against our first bounty: we first need a free open source auctions system that uses site-local balances.

That could be a good and useful mod or module to any free open source auctions system, so maybe before we even worry about hacking in the special handling that our special local currency known as "bids" will need we should secure/cause the existence of a free open source auctions system that uses local to the site balances.

Since rumour had it that there exists more than one free open source auction site package, maybe we could do our usual multiple form of bounty for this mod/module, maybe the number of free open source auction site systems out there should limit how multi we make the bounty.

That is, if for example there turn out to only be two such packages out there, then maybe instead of a six-step bounty where the first six people to do it get so many shares, we should limit it to a two step where the first to do it gets so many and the second to do it gets so many, so that if we are lucky maybe both people who do it will do it to a different one of the existing free open source auction site packages?

Then once at least one free open source auction site package that supports site-local user-balances exists we can go on to look at the matter of how to adapt such a package to make its site-local currency act the way we would like our proposed "currency known as bids" to act?

Next we will probably want users to be able to purchase the site-local currency by means of cryptocoins.

So the next mod/module we would likely want to see in place and working would be the ability to accept cryptocoins in return for the site-local currency. That is, the ability to sell the site-local currency for cryptocoins.

If there already exists a payment gateway for selling the site-local currency to the users, such as a module/page/scrypt that lets people use paypal or suchlike to buy it, then the easiest/quickest way to accept cryptocoins might be to use a similar type of service but one that happens to handle cryptocoins (possibly in addition to other forms of currency).

If not then we'd need to decide whether we want to make the thing depend upon such third party services or prefer to have it do its own accepting of cryptocoins, with all the potential cans of worms that could lead us to open...

...All this just to get us to the point where there exists a free open source auctions site that uses site-local balances and sells users its site-local currency.

Once that is in place, then hacking the site-local currency (aka site-local balances) to act the way we want "bids" to act should seem a relatively minor task.

(Then we would of course proceed onwards to now they can win auctions lets look at having them actually buy the things they won the right to buy, at the price they won the right to buy it at...)

-MarkM-

This would be a big business for devcoin's current market capitalization. I'd guess it would take around 400 shares total. If most people want it then we'd do it.


I agree that we should do this only if there is an open source package, or if we develop one. There are open source ecommerce packages, and open source lottos, it should be possible to make an auction package if there isn't one already. That alone would be a worthwhile bounty.

The concepts for the planned sites were secret because we did not want anyoen to run out and grab all the good domain names.

We have secured a number of the desired domains, possibly even all of them now though so I am not sure why there would be any continued need to keep them secret.

On the other hand with a forum of our own on the horizon maybe this single thread is not the best place, because on our own forum each of the sites could have a thread of its own for example.

So maybe we will be able soon to start saying oh well if you want deeper information about the project join its own forum...

Re the auctions I do not think we should be offering bounties for people to go out and buy closed source software.

I think in the past there has always been free open source software a person seeking a bounty could use, if the bounty was not about actually developing new free open source software.

For example the bounty for a devcoin based business, there are oodles of free open source packages one could use to set up a commerce site, or various other kinds of business. The bounty for an exchange there was Open Transactions and there are a couple of free open source web-based exchange scripts, albeit in horrible shape but still someone could have fixed one of those up and used it.

If we have already established that there is no free open source package for the kind of auction we want, I think our first step, if we need this thing that desperately, is to get a free open source package for doing such sites developed. Once a working package to do such sites exists then we would be in a position to do a bounty for actually setting up and running such a site as a site that accepts DeVCoins, or in a position to look into hiring people to run such a site on behalf of the DeVCoin project itself, or we could create a corporation that will run it and set it up as a non-profit corporation that donates whatever would have been profit (after salaries and expenses and employer contributions to whatever employers have to contribute to and so on and so on) to the Devcoin project or something.

But first I think a free open source package one could use to achieve the bounty should exist. Otherwise people who resort to proprietary packages will have an advantage, maybe in context an "unfair" advantage, over free open source people who also would have liked to go for the bounty.

Once we start offering bounties that basically amount to "go buy that there proprietary software and use it instead of free open source software" I think we are way off track, in fact maybe directly at cross-purposes to our mission.

So I would like to suggest too that we formalise this idea somehow: do not offer any bounties other than actual development of free open source software to do a thing for the doing of a thing that no existing free open source software already does / can do.

-MarkM-

Yeah I thought so too. It seems to have something to do with "testing the support". If the price barely budged with that sort of volume, whoever still have large amounts of coins aren't in the mood to sell right now. It's a way of discovering other's intentions.

Its funny that person who dumped 25 million or so devcoins on vircurex last week seem to set a low in price..always seems to be that way in the market finding pain thresholds and punishing those who dont have patience. Ive seen this in all forms of markets all the time.. psycology is the same in all markets dealing with money I guess.

Exactly! I was saying that what would drive me here is the goal of having a business thats bringing in profits to the project.. it would set us apart and let people see the real value of devcoin share system. Its a niche yes but people are looking to spend their coins on somethig and since we are early adopters all businesses related to
crypto are also early adopters.. howver niche. We are providing a service for coins that diesnt exist. If another site opens up so be it.. but profits would be made until then atleast.

I do also agree with some of what markm says that it is expensive to bring in and convert people into customers and part of that is rectified with the idea of a penny auction being so lucrative as a customer. The ebay template offers a mailing list of 4.5 million interested parties in a marketing campaign that they offer help with.

The market may be saturated for fiat penny auction sites which is why they really arent working but not for one specifically targeting coin holders. If we convert one of the big players to take in our coins Id consider that good news not competition thats bad.

It will take some good marketing and everyone on board
and I am even thinking if going ahead myself privately if devcoin doesnt accept
but I kinda think it would be cool to offer a business giving back profits indirectly benefiting us who hold coins.. and help from community here as valuable feedback amd
development consulting.

I see your point, but regarding this part, it's about who's going to profit. If the devcoin project is looking to obtain 100% of the profits, then they should be taking the capital risk. Like you say if someone else sees it as profitable, then they should be taking the capital risk.

I'm not particularly keen on the quibit style auctions; I think they're very poor value for money for customers and seem to be in the vein of gambling/free2play style games with microtransactions and whale hunting. Having said that, though, I obviously have a different value of it than all the people actually making Quibits lots of money, so there is a market there. Perhaps you're right about it being a saturated niche market already, and not the most effective use of funds, but it will cost a lot less than devtome, though, so the risk is relatively small (3-5 management shares per round + a budget of something like 30 per round for bounties).

I think the real value in something like this is developing a system of running projects for profit, with the devcoin project being the main benefactor. Devtome is, as far as I can see, a huge investment with an equally huge risk. Open Transactions are really hard to understand for the average person, but have tremendous potential. On the wayside, while Open Transactions are being subsidized by devcoin, is there going to be any return on investment from it?


Is this road-map of future websites listed anywhere? I'd be interested to see it.

The things like the auction site are just suggestions on ways to get the market cap higher so we can attempt more meaty ones. I think the infrastructure on project management needs work, though, to be honest.


Hey Smeagol, yep that's normal if you run the script by double clicking it or with ./shotgunbot.py. If you run it from command line itself, and use the command "python shotgunbot.py" it'll run the script in the open window (as opposed to opening a new command window and closing it when it's done).

You can put 0 and it'll work fine.

EDIT: It seems vircurex changed a key on their api, so errors weren't being returned correctly. Changed the key title and uploaded the working version to github, git pull should get that fixed. Also, I just threw in an "press key to exit" so you can run it either way, now, and see any feedback before losing the window.

@Hunterbunter, I set the BTC I wanted to put up as 0 in the shotgun bot and put DVC in as my entire balance, but when it placed the BTC/DVC buy orders, the bot cmd window closed.

Is that normal?

If the project is the creation of free open source software, fine, like bitcoin and Open Transactions it can, if it is mission-critical to Devcoin's mission, have some of its key developers receiving a share every round. (I am still not convinced it is mission-critical in any way though, quite the contrary I think it is a foolishly wasteful idea, that the publicity effort it would need to get anywhere would be far far better spent on trying to convince existing established auction sites to accept cryptocoins.)

If though you are still thinking of doing an auction site startup, probably the most important thing is how many hundreds of thousands of interested parties you have on your mailing list, how good your capture pages are at getting people onto your mailing list in the first place, how good your autoresponder series (the series of messages people on the mailing list automatically get sent in sequence once they are on the list) at eventually "converting" them and at getting them to come back to buy more stuff, what the retention rate is (how long before they unsubscribe/quit), and the average amount of money you end up extracting from each person before they unsubscribe/quit.

Advertising, aka "customer acquisition" is horribly expensive, often dollars per customer. Heck even just getting a visitor costs dollars per visitor in some fields, presumably someone will have already looked up how much e.g. Adwords charges per visitor for keywords related to auctions? Care to let us in on that little secret?

So you need someone very very experienced at getting hundreds of thousands of people to sign up for mailing lists and websites and at keeping them on the list and getting them back regularly to the website and extracting money from them while they are there.

I bought my house with money made from websites but that was back before the adult entertainment industry started buying up search engines and turning them into pay per click traffic engines. Nowadays it is really hard to get "natural" (as in "gratis") search engine traffic in any field that is commonly known to involve some nice amounts of money. Heck even "the long tail" is probably heavily congested, all kinds of obscure search phrases less and less obviously relating to auctions are probably being "worked" heavily already.

It would quite likely be much more effective to focus all that effort into "converting" existing sites into accepting Devcoin than to try to go up against them on their own keywords, their own field, their own years of search engine optimisation, their own years of A/B testing of capture pages and auto-responder sequences and so on and so on.

Probably a heck of a lot cheaper too.

We don't need more holes in the net to throw money into. Its not like we have more moeny than we can spend so need to come up with far fetched ideas like "lets try to go head to head against e-bay or quibids" to find ways to throw our money away.

The very fact that no one thinks it a good enough idea to "just do it" but instead keeps trying to get us to throw money at it kind of stinks. If it had an reasonable chance of being profitable someone would do it. Evidently only people who are imagining someone else's money being thorwn away instead of their own seem keen on the idea.

So how about instead come up with an idea you are so sure will be profitable that you are willign to pay for it yourself?

Or that you can so convincingly prove the profitability of that some Angel Investors will get on board and help you through to your first 'A' round of venture capital investment?

By the way, has everyone forgotten we already have quite a few websites on our road-map, domains already secured for a number of them, but that our market cap is not yet high enough for us to afford to start any of them yet?

I wonder if we will be able to start on one of them if this current exchange rate doesn't collapse too darn far too darn fast? Or are we also going to wait until we have Devtome at least covering its own cost before moving on to the next planned website?

Or is the forum going to be eating quite a bit of the website-subsidy budget?

-MarkM-

Cool,

a question about moderators - is anyone able to add anyone as a moderator? or just themselves? or just from a list of official forum mods?

I made one and put myself as moderator, seemed to work fine, but is that the intended design? Just curious how it's going to work.


Awesome, although should we see if someone who's not already an admin is willing to step up to the role? There is the factotum title too, for the extra staff behind a project...I don't know...Unthinkingbit? What's the deal with this? Is this a feasible idea to prototype a devcoin-managed business?

::raises hand:: I have project management experience

This may be doable. Depends on the group of admins chosen or who step forward I guess.

Would it be better to then assign an admin (or team of) on a project management payroll, and have them build the project? They would serve as the connection to devcoin, and maybe have an allocation of shares per month or so to create bounties for work snippets. Devcoin bounties are great for getting snippets of code done, but not projects. All projects need some sort of project management to work well.

Yea i said this in the dogecoin thread yesterday that the institutional investor era has now begun, they lookin for cheap coins to pump... and probably dump but we should see level stepping upwards on the long term charts. Funny that the very next day devcoin takes a leap.

I'm against this as well right now. We have a lot of work to do before a hardware wallet is really needed. I could see this being something for the future though.

Yeah probably. What is it? What's the rationale? What steps would be required? etc

Updates are being worked done for all clients. Apologies that's still going on - assumed it had been resolved.

Is anyone else having this problem with a mac?