Quote from: Superhitech on January 25, 2015, 07:28:28 PM

Quote from: grue on January 25, 2015, 04:57:36 AM

Nefario taught an english class in china. he had some assignment where he got his students to do something on the forum. That's all I can remember.

edit:

Quote from: Nefario on July 01, 2011, 06:09:19 PM

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?

Wait, aren't bitcoins illegal in China? Or did he run this class before China banned them?

China banned bitcoin in 2013 (using the word banned very loosely). The experiment was done in 2011.

I find it interesting to see just how many problems the experiment had. I would never had though that so many college students in China would not even have access to a computer.

Maybe his experiment had some level of impact on the chinese eventually adopting it the way they have so far.......