Topic: Why does this board exist in the forum? (Read 20873 times)

We had a Chinese field trip a loong time ago

Haha have not made a trek to the pizza for bitcoins thread that's classic
Thanks

Thats nothing:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/pizza-for-bitcoins-137

So I was hunting the Chinese Students forum since I wasn't sure what this was on a tour of all these micro subforms on this site but darn now wish I had a prof experimenting with bitcoin back then that 75 Bitcoin would be 7,500 dollars

thanx

that question is easily answerable.  nefario moved and now works for intersango exchange in london.  he also developed and operates glbse stock exchange.

So 4 months later how many of them still talk of bitcoin? You mentioned the kung-fu video twice. Can you provide a link?

Did the teams get their coins and sell them at 30?

Are you planing to repeat the experiment any soon?

How was your colleagues' reaction?

Have they had any previous experiances that would make you expect anything different?   This is my question.  If they have never been entrepreneurial, and have no marketable skills (kung fu movies aside), how could you expect anything different?  Isn't this result the most likely one based on what you knew going in?

Teach them what?

I've got 4 classes of 100 students each, the vast majority of whom have a terrible level of English.

One group actually made two really good Kung Fu movies (10 mins each).

It doesn't seem to be a case of giving them the skills, it's more that... they have no drive or innovation. Some of the students did surprisingly well.

Nefario.

Ok.....

In the worlds current education paradigm, that's pretty much standard - Basic education, no marketable skills outside of a factory or corporation.  Now that you've proven what you already knew, why not try teaching them how to do something marketable, and then try it again?

The internal market was supposed to develop as teams found out one team was better at some things than others. For example, most teams all had skills that would be needed by other teams. Some teams had better I.T. knowledge, others had better English, and others had a better understanding of bitcoin etc.

The idea was teams would hire each other to do certain parts they couldn't. I even gave each team capital (in bitcoin) at the begining. They never used any of it. No market ever developed.

Most students really had NO marketable skills (marketable to their classmates at least).

Isn't the real issue with the internal market (and frankly the external one too), that most people just don't have many marketable skills they can perform on their own without at least a decent capital investment?  Even something like screening T-shirts has start-up costs - Did your students have any capital going into this, or was it just "Sell what you can get people to buy"

Seems like this concept might be better recieved if it was married with a "This is how to make something that people will actually want" hands-on portion.

It's starting to take off here, we're at the point now in China, where we were about....November in the rest of the world. Except that bitcoin is worth a lot more and difficulty level is sky high.

Because China's slow to the game they're going to have to pay a higher price to come to the bitcoin table, but they'll come allright. It's going to become the most popular way of doing business with someone in the country online.

That is quite cool!

A bit of topic however, how is china doing with Bitcoins?

Really I think the market not developing being due to a lack of entrepreneurial drive by nearly all the students. It's something to do with the environment that they're in here combined with Chinese culture that prevented growth in this area. I did try to encourage an internal market but with no success, although I do think that if you try this somewhere else you probably will be successful.

Perhaps having a kind of market process, like a jobs board or something for a class would kickstart it.

With regards bitcoin value, when we started the project bitcoin was less than $1USD, when we finished it had hit $30, thats a big jump. So in the begining they saw no value but after about a month they began to realise, especially as they saw how others valued it.

Nefario.

So, could you elaborate on why you feel the internal market didn't developed, and did you gave them that idea or just hoped for someone to come with it in the inner circle?
Did the students felt that Bitcoins had a value at the beginning apart of the grades and or exchange into local currency offered or implied by you? Did they saw value in Bitcoin after the experiment?
Could you correlate language and writing abilities with a successful entrepreneurship?

Quite good experiment, a school I know is planning on doing the same.

Sorry, mixture of slow and lazy.

3 Classes we're involved, with roughly 80 students per class.

The classes were broken into companies of their own choosing, each company needed a CEO and CFO
And that's all the rules really. The general idea being that they had to do business with foreingers for bitcoin (as at the time only Westerners had bitcoin).

When I started I did have lots of complicated rules, but that just confused everyone, so kept it really basic MUST MAKE BTC, marks given for genuine effort.

The total amount earned by all companies combined was 75btc in a period of about 1 & 1/2 months.

The largest being 31 btc by a single group.
Next being 16btc
10,8....0

There were 17 companies, only 8 of them had any bitcoin at all, the rest got nothing.

I had expected an internal market to develope where companies would specialise and people would be lent from one group to another for a price but nothing like this happened at all.

What did they do?

Apart from spamming the forum and pestering people here are some of the things that we're tried.

Translating Chinese jokes to English
Selling Mp3's and video's about Chinese culture
Making a Chinese cookbook and attempting to sell recipies.
Having a magazine about Chinese medicine
Making two homemade KungFu Movies (which were actually very good but no one bought)
Giving advice on how to enter the Chinese market, open a Chinese bank account etc.
Selling traditional Chinese Medicine advice.
Begging.

The most successful of these was translating jokes, so successful that it convered the majority of bitcoin for the first 3 groups (two of which saw how we it was working and jumped in).

Problems
Language, obviously many of the students could not write a clear advertisement to save their lives.
Understanding bitcoin
Knowing how to use a computer
Having a computer or internet access (most students dont have).
Product ideas.

In roughly the above order.

Of all the students involved about 20 really made an effort or took part. And it seems to be those from this group that are continueing to use bitcoin (after counting they asked for their bitcoin back).

In most ways I would deem this experiment something of a failure, it was poorly executed on my part, and most of my hopes (of developing an internal market inside the college based on bitcoin) came to nothing, but there were some minor success.

Most of the winning companies were in the same class, most of the failing ones were together also, it seems success and failure are contaigous.

Questions?

Nefario, a week went by and I still don't see this results. My school also wants to do this for the 10-12th(High School).

I hope not they will never increase in value hahaha

really?  guess the exchange: https://btcchina.com  the mining pool: http://21bitcoin.com/pool will be closing down soon then.

maybe you are thinking about their use of qq, which the chinese authorities had a problem with.

When you think about it, isn't the use of Bitcoin currency illegal in China?

Bitcoins soon to be valued in Yuan lol.

Yeah, sold out 

Actually I'll be giving the final results of this experiment before the end of the week.

That sounds rather ominous

This isn't really relevent as the task is now over and there are no more Chinese students.

Nefario.

But why in the marketplace section? Unless of course the chinese students are trying to buy and sell stuff all over the rest of the forum - but then they can use the normal marketplace sections, and why is it a bad thing if the forum is "overrun" by chinese students?

Why not? Maybe the administrator is a Chinese student.

Or maybe if you consider how many Chinese students there are in the world, maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all in order to keep all of the other forum areas from being overrun.

哈哈，student exchange...

haha, students exchange

it's a marketplace for buying and selling chinese students obviously

wow! so you are a college teacher? Looking forward to your report!

About a month ago I had all my students using bitcoin and they we're all over this forum, so we created this board to put them all.

I'll have a report on the whole thing for everyone to read in about 2 weeks.

 

WHY?

Why Chinese? Why Chinese students? Is this kinda strange taste of the administrator?

I am just surprised. It just make no sense.