There's probably enough leeway there for the government to construe widespread defacement of bills with adverts for competing currency as illegal. I wouldn't try to start such a movement, more likely to attract the kind of attention bitcoin doesn't want.
The fed don't need to take up any "leeway" they gave,
advertising on money is illegal. OP is 100 years too late to the idea of putting advertisements on US money. Somebody already annoyed them enough they made a law against it before we were born.
I was sure that was the case, thanks for digging up the statute.
I'd estimate this idea has a negatively assymetrically skewed expected payoff for bitcoin as a whole, better to shelve it and come up with something else that doesn't directly antagonize governments.
Why isn't wheresgeorge shut down then? There must be some way around it if they have managed to keep straight for so long.
I think you'll get a lot fewer people participating when they have to put the money in themselves though. I know I wouldn't. It's not that I don't want to see Bitcoin expand, it's that I don't want to be at a net loss for doing so. And I think a lot of other people are as... stingy... as I am in that regard.
If it can be done for free, there will be a lot more people participating.
How about a combination of both? You can enter in a serial number, fund it yourself, and release it into the wild or you can enter it and wait for the site admin to fund it.
Now that's not a bad idea...