Topic: [DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated - page 233. (Read 1058949 times)

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-

LOL no lie, I will be looking for a flat somewhere outside of London at that point.

On the ebay auction thing, careful about this: You must request the free VPS rental in order to receive it with purchase, Each additional month is billed at 49.99 dollars USD.

Heh we all know that as soon as we start making any sort of good money that we will get noticed, and who will be the first ones on our backs?

Ok, I take it back, I don't want to work with you LOL :-p

I didnt know that, cool... I was actually looking at one that seems to be professional and better than the others I looked at... its $899 on ebay original price of $1200: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/171047705105?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

There are others like: http://itechscripts.com/quibids_clone.html which is $240 + $160 for source and $70 for SEO package. I think the first one has some better featurs, but the second one would do the job as well.

THe first one (if we plan to allow fiat) would have ability to set tax codes up or just simply enable it and the current tax rates would be applied to where you live... and the second one allows you to simply say hey, your in USA? Sucks to be you, you cant register.

An important thing to remember is that I suggested a penny auction, not just a normal auction. These style of quibids style auction sites generate insane profit and are easily organized since the company is the only one who is doing the selling. What we want to leverage is the share system so that we can buy things and put them up for sale and generate profit on the go. Report these profits monthly, and spend the profit either to buy up the exchange rate or on another resource like maybe funding bounties or something.

By leveraging the share system we actually seperate ourselves from a traditional business so you can answer the question, "Why dont I just start this business my self without the help of Devcoin?", well devcoin is funding it so unless you have a continous funding stream good luck, with Devcoin we have it and so we use it to try to bring in a profit.

Im not sure what the right number is, but we need for it to grow as demand increases. Either the price rises of devcoin to allow for this or the number of shares are increased and sold at market to buy the things needed to sell. Anyways I'll try to start a writeup.

It would almost be easier to start with your own system. Godaddy doens't have one that I would personally start with.

if you search for auction on GoDaddy, you get: (this is for plesk, not cpanel)

webauction v0.3.10
Web Auction is a simple auction designed for organizations or individuals who want to hold an auction.