Topic: [DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated - page 233. (Read 1059181 times)

It isn't that that one auction will make them money, it is that overall the 100's they do / day will make them money. 1 bid being .6$ or 1020 DVC will give them enough income for that auction (even if the auction hit 10$ that is about 600$ for them which covers that TV easily, they order it and send it off to the winner. No big deal.

I get it and I know what you are saying, but just that I dont know how that would work and its another variable. Yes it would eliminate the need to have an upfront cost, but it also eliminates possible demand. Alot of people join up on quibids because they see that there is an auction to be started in 4 hours and it will last 2 hours and they can have a new TV for real cheap. With this model its not possible unless bids are always bought at a certain rate, especially for bigger things. I don't see this as viable long term, but it may be... if this was the way to go, im questioning why quibids has auctions all the time and they didn't go this route since this would eliminate need for capital upfront, and I am not aware of an initial offering phase they went through to allow for this.

Look at it this way:

with your way if no bids are sold, no auction. Everything stops.
with my way, if noone is buying bids, an auction still takes place, someone gets something for real cheap, people find out they make sure they are ready the next time. Forces people to come in.

The loss is eaten up as a CODB, its nothing different then assigning a share to anything else we give today. We are not earning profit from it, but it may help us out in the future.

If they give you the source, you can get around the licencing. Therefore they probably don't give you the full source you need to make the changes you want.

Anyhow, I agree with Mark  on the auctions for the items coming after a certain amount of bids are sold. I don't think that was ever in question, just the people behind it and the "business side of things".

Im pretty sure they give you the source but you can't repackage up the thing and sell it to asomeone else, there is a key associated with each customer. So we use it, we can modify the source to our app, people can see our source, but they can't take it and start their own because the original company wouldn't give them a serial number that works for them. They would need to purchase a serial from them. Why does that matter anyway? We are operating a site to bring in profits, like devtome who has the source for that? How come its not published? Most of the businesses dont have to showcase their code, they can and you can see it, but we are limited by the source code originator in this case, so it is a drawback but Id still take it over doing it myself which would take a long time.

Did you not follow this thread?

I gave samples of things to auction and already had one person say they wanted to bid on at least one of the bundles I mentioned.

Each day you specify what will be auctioned next and how many bids need to be sold before it gets auctioned, along with news about any cool new additional things the previous day's sales of bids have provided us enough capital to also offer for auction.

So people always know some things that will be auctioned, they just might not know how long it will take for us to sell enough bids to make it feasible for us to actually start the auction aka to actually afford the thing we plan to auction.

So like we could say the first auction will be a 2015 Ford Taurus. Once we have sold X bids that auction will start. If you want it to start soon, buy bids fast.
Once we have sold enough bids to buy the car, we start the auction.

It is very similar to a charity raffle, actually. Instead of buying raffle tickets they are buying bids.

Very soon we should have profits out of which to buy more things over and above these scheduled in advance things.

Like "wow well done folks, you bought so many bids we will not only auction the Taurus, we will also auction a Mini Cooper!"

-MarkM-

creating as a business (at least in the US) is not just to create a business, it is for covering your personal assets and what not if someone sue's you (which they prolly will in this case) and also to get a lower tax rather then at full personal tax rates.

Exactly,

  What is stopping Quibids from using your coins at somepoint and having the user base and auctions already running compltely undermining your site. Even if they don't use coinbase and get the cash then go to quibids instead. it is a lot of work, and research that has to be done to make a site that can compete with quibids or the other one that does similar auctions and the advertising and what not to get seen and the acceptance of crypto. I don't think this is feasible for one person to take on (Even a small group of people unless they are in it heart and soul and care not about the chance of failure and no profit just to build it because they can like the open source community does. That is why I joined, way back. Because I could do it, why not.)  

They let you give out the source to anyone?

I thought they sold you a license to use the source, which brings up the question of what legal entity is to serve as that "you".

That is, who exactly, among all the billions of people on the planet or among all the domains on the web or however they structure it, is licensed to run the code? For how many users? On how many domains or URLs or physical servers?

There is no "Devcoin project" as a legal entity. Would we form such an entity? Or form a "Devbids Incorporated" entity? Or both since even given we form an auctioneer entity we might still find it useful to have a Devcoin Incorporated entity that can seed projects before spawning them off into separate new corps of their own...

With free open source we could even form the project, have music dev-auctions site, sculture dev-auctions site, paintings dev-auctions site etc, or even just two different teams or ten different teams each of which wants to evolve the code in a different direction...

-MarkM-

Problem is noone would buy bids until they "see" something they desire. Through word of mouth or advertising, hey someone was able to buy an ipad mini for a fraction of the cost, ok let me buy some bids and try it myself!

If you sell the bids first every time, then the user has to assume you will put something up that they like, and if that changes you lose their trust. You need to offer the good first (initial risk) as with any business, you must take an initial hit hoping the market will come to you. With this business model , I am highly certain that there is a market for it especially being only in crypto's and not having to register as a business? No tax?

I think the business model is indeed in question.

What will it take to convince people to use our actions instead of famous ones, ones that have lots more items up for sale at all times, ones that do not require muscking about with cryptocoins even maybe. Already people with bitcoins can supposedly use a widget in their browser that lets them buy anything at any normal (or major?) website, with the website only seeing the fiat it wants and the bitcoin user actually paying the magic card people (who make the browser plugin) in bitcoins. Cannot such services work on auction sites as well as retailing sites? If so, why not just use such a service and go to the real quibids or whatever and use your cryptocoins there?

Etc.

-MarkM-

The source is given to you in either case and you are free to use it for any purpose you desire. If we use fiat then yea maybe we have to create a legal entity for Devcoin and for the business, but for coins do we need to register an actual company? I dont think so, its like an exchange offering only crypto's like crypto-trade.com  or cryptsy ( i think they dont do deposits / withdrawls of fiat)

Ok, this is a complete departure from the initial discussion. If someone were to build the site themselves and do the research and what not, what would be the motivation besides the "possible profits".

There would not be any bounty.

Someone would get a share a round to be our initial market-research auctioneer, run an auction. Or maybe it'd need four one share a round people so we get forty hours out of it at minimum. (Remember the hours per week or month to get shares is a minimum, you don't get more by doing more hours.)

The whole idea of using a bounty for this is massively premature. We don't even know yet for sure what needs doing so are not in any position to start enumerating all the little things needed let alone assign to each step or component a reasonable bounty.

We could for example start with a normal auction site and auction off our "bids". Or plan sell them for a fixed buy now price.

Then, using that same normal type of auction, auction off, for bids, the price a thing will be sold for. Basically the total number of bids placed will, at close of that auction, tell us how many pennies or devcoins or whatever the item is to be sold for.

Then we sell the item for that price to the winner of that auction.

For this initial market research we could even just let the auctioneer auction something themselves and keep the profit themselves.

If the model is in fact profitable presumably the auctioneer's pay can easily come out of what they manage to auction stuff for.

If not maybe they are not a qualified auctioneer and we need one who is better able to excite people into bidding.

-MarkM-

Agreed, no this needs to be open or licensed directly to the community, but the auction thing you are talking about is all in the business plan of Quibids. That isn't under discussion here or debate.

Not sure if non free open source off the shelf is the way to go. Who would be the legal entitity owning the license-to-use-it?

As to using shares to buy products, I say no. I say sell the damn bids first, then buy products to put up for auction using the money the bids were sold for, since until people have bids they cannot bid anyway so there is no point auctioning anything anyway. Let the sale of the bids finance buying the things to auction. Shares will be eaten as it is just for simple one share per round admins and auctioneers and site-maintainers and maybe even for creating of new features or for modifying any features the admins cannot themselves for some reason modify.

-MarkM-

I don't think the business model is in question, quibids makes money they way they have thier site set up. No doubt. Handling the payments after they are won, or handling adding auctions, and where they are sent and the database and the security of the site will be the big time sink in this I would think. Scripts are nice, but you still have to build them and then hone them. Not to mention the initial design of the site. And then advertising to get people there. If it isn't right the first time, word of mouth will travel faster then your advertising.

About the start off with scraping, not going to happen, no one is going to take that job on.

I think that is the way quibids works and I would imagine this would work. You buy points using coinpayments, and you use these points to make a bid. Each point would cost say $0.60 and each bid would move price by $0.01 (translated to some metric, like devcoin or maybe stay in fiat?) This way you can sell points packages aswell right, and someone may end up getting a package for 500 points for less than $500*0.60, alot less depending on their luck

as far as mysqladmin or whatever it is because kids coming out of college or high school don't know what a command line is. (tongue in cheek)

With all the follow on parts you were talking about. Do you think that anyone would do that once the bounty was paid? Someone would have to be really into the idea to follow up for that amount of time and that amount of data collection and work to create those scripts and stored procedures after the site was launched and the bounty was paid, unless there was a continuing policy of adding bounties for more automation, but then really who is to say that the work done is in line with the best interest of devcoin or the community with the one installation of the auction site (or would people just take the open source auction site and make it their own, adding thier own scripts and what not to work it out if there was no bounty or even in lieu of the bounty.)

I saw that, I think a CPanel must be installed, and its $39 a month. We have to host it anyways.

Well bear in mind that we need to do market research anyway, so that we would only be starting out with one auction at a time.

So maybe we can start with just manually holding such auctions, to see if there is even enough interest to make it seem worthwhile to even just make a few shell scripts or python scripts or whatever to ease the manual work the auctioneer actually turns out to need to do?

The usual free open source route in other words: you have someone who does a certain thing (in this case holding auctions) and gradually over time he or she hacks up some little scripts or figures out some database fields and records to use in mysqladmin or maybe more likely simply using a command-line mysql client, and once that has evolved into a useful final set of fields and records and scripts and so on they gradually tie all the parts together more until eventually they have a full collection of database tables and scripts showing what to do to those tables when various events happen, at which point anyone who feels there is need or demand for a GUI or a CGI or whatever has all the specifications, in working code, for all the moving parts other than the user-interface, which initially is the command-line or maybe the commandline for the scripts and mysqladmin for editing the database if for some reason mysqladmin is found to be more convenient for some reason than the commandline mysql client...

Another idea, totally a change the shape or orientation of the box kind of idea, is fix the price of the things to be "auctioned" and auction off the points they are priced in.

Like hey this car costs 1000 points, how much am I bid for one point today?

A let it evolve approach could start with little things like "the auctioneer needs to scan the auction's thread for bids, so how about having a website scraper that scrapes bids from forum threads? Each auctioneer could thus scrape from his or her own auction's thread any bids, saving them the need to actually read the thread..."

-MarkM-