Topic: Help me complete my goal (Read 3002 times)

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Hon, you might want to run a spell check on this. I also can't figure out why you've got pictures of iPods up there? It also looks like you're still trying to sell picks with corporate logos on them. I thought you decided not to do that?

-Zoey

I don't and I won't go into why for personal reasons. I'm a self-proclaimed ideas man. I always have.
I literally dream ideas in my sleep, and with bitcoins setup the way they are, my ideas gear themselves towards that.

Do you have a real world job hon? Following your threads on here it seems like you have a lot of ideas and are very passionate about things.

-Zoey

Well I guess it my situation everything would be considered a hobby, but yeah. Things to consider before continuing.

Your two big issues are that you're not going to get your jalapenos before the block reward halves and that by the time people who place orders now receive their ASICs a whole heap of hashing power will have been thrown at the network by those who had earlier pre-orders and received the first deliveries.  You will still be able to mine some BTC, but your returns may be slow and small.    Hopefully they'd be enough to cover your loan repayments and your electricity costs, but you need someone to run the numbers for you (lots of people in the custom hardware forum are good at this) and work out whether you'd have anything left to put into funding the things you want to do with the coins you mine. 

You could probably earn the $300 you borrow to buy the ASICs a whole lot faster by doing odd jobs in the real world than you can earn it by mining.  Likewise, you could probably earn $20 to buy stock for your guitar pick business by mowing one lawn.  The amount you can earn from mining with your jalapenos once they're paid off might be good for "hobby" money, but it's unlikely to be enough for funding expenses, whether they're business or personal.

The guitar pick business is also unlikely to bring in more than "hobby" money at first, so you really need to be looking at setting up a lot of income streams if you're going to choose ones which don't earn much or you need to think about income streams which will provide a greater return.  You need to be making a weekly profit in excess of what you would earn in a minimum wage job in order to make these ventures worthwhile.

If what you're saying is true, then even if I wanted to get into mining I couldn't get into mining.
I feel a big bubble bursting if the difficulty gets too high.

Hon, by the time the Jalapeño gets to you, BFL's ASIC boxes will have pushed the difficulty so far up you'll never make your money back. Why don't you just put the money you'd spend on a Jalapeño towards this project?

At this point you're not going to have enough, or make enough money to catch up on mining. (My finance classes are finally paying off. Cost-Benefit-Analysis FTW! LOL!)

-Zoey

I'd like to thank everyone who's pushed me to get this started correctly, however, it was suggested privately by some people that I preorder a jalapeno and use the coins mined from that to fund this and any other future projects. I think i'm going to go in that direction. It'll give me more time to iron out any other issues I may or might have.

-Matt

yep, doing that now so it doesn't bite me later.

I'm not sure whether the Bitcoin logo itself has ever been trademarked (there are reasons why it might be difficult to trademark).  There are several trademark registrations of the Bitcoin name though.  I can't remember who holds which trademark in what class and where but MtGox holds at least one,  Paymium holds another, and someone else holds the trademark in France.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1231502

For the most part, people have registered the Bitcoin trademarks so that patent/trademark trolls can't register them in "first to file" countries and prevent them being used by the community.  For a very long time one of the reasons people wanted a Bitcoin foundation was so that it could hold the trademarks for the benefit of all Bitcoin users.

People have been using the various Bitcoin logos on commercial products for a while now without any dramas so you're probably safe in respect of that one.

Definitely keep looking for logos and other images which are already in the public domain or already licensed under CC.  Expired trademarks might also be a good thing to look for as many people will have never seen some old corporate logos from decades ago so they might have a certain "retro" appeal just because they're different.

If you look up a small padded envelope by priority mail to australia is $19 and change, and yes, my words once again getting me in trouble. B&D is a trademark, correct. The bitcoin logo, however is not, although not sure who i'd ask permission to use that on a pick. I'd probly have to knock off logo picks then if I truely can't use them.

EDIT: I just found a site offering royalty free logos for grabs, I might end up using them or find some way to use licensed logos. Good thing you folks are here to help iron things out o.O

The Black and Decker logo is a trademark registered with the US Patent & Trademark Office.  The 7-11 logo is also a registered trademark.  They are additionally protected by copyright laws and your intended use does not fall within fair use provisions.  Using someone else's registered trademark for a commercial purpose is something which requires the express permission of the trademark holder (and the copyright holder as well if they are different people/entities).  It's very easy to find out if a company logo is a registered trademark.  


Actually, you can't.  By definition, a CC licence makes a work available for use by everyone, not just by you.  The reason people trademark logos is so that they can control who uses that logo and when they do licence others to use their logo (which isn't especially uncommon) there are generally significant licensing fees and/or royalties involved.  Many companies have existing merchandising/licensing agreements contracts which they would be breaking if they were to suddenly make their images available for use by everyone free of charge.

You might be able to get away with cutting picks from expired gift/store cards issued by the companies concerned, but I wouldn't count on it if your actually selling them and especially in large quantities.  That's the kind of thing they generally don't care about if you're doing it for personal use but can get very shitty about if you're doing it commercially.

It should not cost $20 to ship 20 guitar picks to Australia.  Amazon has sent me books by international express post for less than that and guitar picks weigh a lot less than books.

No, whomever creates the work has to release it under a Creative Commons license. If the designer of a work does not specifically release their work under some sort of license it's automatically considered under copyright by US law. The logo designer can get more protection by filing for a copyright or trademark.

None of these corporations are going to release any of their corporate logos under a Creative Commons license as that would most likely invalidate their trademark and at the very least dilute their brand.

You could request to use their logo for your commercial product, but they would charge in the ten of thousands of dollars if they did it at all.

The CC license doesn't give you the right to use any work you wish, it's not like a drivers license, hon. It's something that the producer of the content has to apply to their work.

-Zoey

Actually I can ask they be released to me under CC for my use(although not sure who to ask for releasing the bitcoin logo under CC o.O)

You can't use any of those logos as they're not licensed under Creative Commons, hon. 

-Zoey

was thinking of the bitcoin logo, the 7-11 logo, black and decker logo, the borderlands logo and a few others(I have a list of what I want to put onto a pick somewhere). If you came to me and wanted a logo put onto a pick, I'd do that as well and only charge the logo price(currently 80 cents). All orders(regular and custom) would obviously have a minimum order of 1.

This brings me to my next point: shipping. Shiping on pick orders 1-20 in the US would run you 80 cents, and $2 worldwide I think(I'll have to look). Pick orders 20+ will then carry the US flat rate of $8, Mexico/Canada $12, and Australia/UK $20. I'm only restricting orders to Nigeria for obvious reasons. I don't think I can get the rates any cheaper then what they are.

That's fine. Just give us 5 examples of the logos you're going to use. Are they from popular brands like Coca-Cola? Is the BitCoin logo on there?

Just some examples hon!

-Zoey

Was planning on it - that way customers know that the images were obtained by CC.
It was also brought to my attention the the link on the first post was out of date and is fixed now >.<

I would definitely include the letter, to make sure that the attribution aspect is covered and that the "intact" requirement of the notice is satisfied.

You've already said that you're intending to put your own logo on the back of the picks.  I'd consider stamping them with the recognised symbol for CC-BY-SA as well.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/CC-BY-SA.png