Thank you all for the responses. Consider the offer closed. We have received the investment that we needed.

It's not that we're selling our investments. It's that we're looking for other equity partners who are looking to get involved.

Hey Guys! We've had a solid couple o years matching bitcoin investors with startup projects around the bitcoin market. With that said, our small team has put in an enormous amount of sweat equity and is looking to get a return.

Are you interested in investing in Bitcoin Venture Capital? If you are, contact us today via the website and let us know what kind of arrangement you are interested in. We have a growing client base of both bitcoin based startups and miner-investors that are sitting on large hoards. Tell us what role you'd like to play in making these connections become reality!

Bitcoin Venture Capital warned you guys months ago. Without an economy around Bitcoin it will continue to drop in value.
All of these people trading have just fueled a massive bubble of speculation and bologna..

Several months ago, I posted the follow rant - when Bitcoin was at about $25/BTC --

Money and I have had a love-hate relationship, I've always had an interest in it. I got a job at 14 as soon as I could mostly so that I would be able to buy cool things like the fastest modem on the market, but I quickly realized money was always going to be necessary for things.
It has always killed me that although currency and debt is central to our lives, few people understand exactly how their assets and debt play into the currency system as a whole. Think about that for a second. You spend 1/3 of your life at your job (if you're lucky) to make money, and you don't even understand the extent of how that account balance plays into the financial system of my country.
I consider myself to be somewhat altruistic but also libertarian, so I've always been very conflicted with the reality that some people get to do very little work and enjoy lots of money based solely upon the virtue of having money in their family. Reconciling the idea that "working hard" and "working smart" with the obscene profits possible in the stock market and options market is very hard to do.
I've spent a couple of hours today watching a satirical video called [1] "The American Dream" after someone posted it to my facebook will. It's essentially a light conspiracy video, but there may be a tinge of truth in it.
I found where someone had posted it to reddit, and that led me to a documentary called [2] Money as debt which explains that the biggest threats to the financial system of the world are a lack of productivity and out of control interest rates.
This is what made me think of bitcoin. I'm very afraid that bitcoin is going to die unless people find a way to start seeding the production of goods only available in bitcoins.
The reason for this is simple. Right now the biggest thing I see people trying to use bitcoin for is making money without doing anything, as an investment. This is fine, but long term makes bitcoin inevitably tied to other currency systems. All of these people investing in mining rigs accumulating thousands of BTCs are eventually going to decide enough is enough and the end will come VERY quickly if there are no stores operating only on bitcoin. All of these ideas about bitcoin acting essentially as a forex alternative is great, and people gambling or buying things anonymously using bitcoin is good for the market, but these kind of endeavours will never generate the amount of continuous interest in bitcoin that a few prominent online marketplaces could.....
So here's what I'm thinking.. What we need are Bitcoin venture capitalists. That means people who have been running mining rigs and have accumulated several thousand BTC, but are currently just sitting there looking at is as an asset. Lets be honest, there’s a chance that you’ll get rich with your BTC sitting there, but it’s remote. At this point BTC is too niche, and with it getting coverage in places like forbes magazine and with an OPTIONS MARKET opening up, it’s just a matter of time before people start to look at is as a place to invest (see GAMBLE) instead of becoming a place where anything of value is actually created.
The plan is simple: You agree to fund a small start-up project in BTC. That start-up project agrees to conduct transactions on the internet PRIMARILY in BTC, offering a surcharge for any business conducted in any currency outside of BTC. The other details are specific to the individual agreement that is set up between the bitcoin venture capitalist and the management of the start up.
I have created an organization that's dedicated to matching early adopters with potential startup possibilities. I want to add forums, etc, but I'm very concerned about having to police spam, etc. I feel that by keeping it very simple, clean, and above board we can open up a unique place where individuals who are serious about the advancement of BitCoin can work together towards that end. With that in mind, check out the link
[3] http://www.btcvc.com/
I'd be interested in input from people


It's still as true as ever.

No you don't, there are plenty of domains available everyday. You can spend days searching for an available ones by choosing them randomly, or you can use Webengers and pick an open one today.

Hey guys, check this blog out, they list some cool domain names every day.
If you've got a bitcoin startup you're trying to get off the ground and don't have a cool name yet, maybe you can grab one from this list!

http://www.webengers.com/

If you trade

Says the guy selling a $20USD cup of coffee. Through the internet. Like it or not, you have to deal with the fact that BTC can be traded for other currencies.

Unfortunately there's no real good way to "short" bitcoin.

What I meant is that the same people who are investing money in stocks are investing in bitcoin, so a contraction in the stock market leads to a contraction in bitcoin. Up until this point bitcoin has been controlled by traders - hence the focus on API's and exchanges, etc. Bitcoin needs to be focused on a good and service based economy.

I'll cover 50% of the cost of the meetup through BTC, dwolla, or (sigh) paypal, I just don't have time to set it up this evening.

The markets are down across the board. Most likely people are trying to get to less risky investments and don't see the difference between a bitcoin and a buck.

Then where do you think the money is going to come from? Thin air? New people have to adopt the use of bitcoin for it to work. For that to happen, there need to be people who are incubating small businesses.

There are for-profit poker rooms all over Seattle.

Some of my fellow cohorts and I were kicking around the possibility of opening a poker room in Seattle that would offer to payout in Bitcoins.

There has been a lot of talk on the forums lately about how the currency is slowly spiraling down. This is true, and there's a good reason for it. At this point, Bitcoin is little more then a stock. It is diving because it is primarily being used as an investment vehicle, similar to a junk bond or a penny stock, and people have hyped it up and now are dumping it off. It is a classic pump and dump. If you want to see examples in the market, go look at LEXG, CCME, SPNG. It was tragically foreseeable that bitcoin would be pumped and dumped the same way -- so now what. The miners making more bitcoin every day is called dilution. It happens with penny stocks too.

The biggest difference between Bitcoin and a penny stock is that bitcoin can easily be transferred from one person to another, directly, without having to deal with any kind of broker or third party. This means that as long as people are willing to accept BTC for goods and services, BTC will always have SOME kind of value. What people need to realize is that the run up to 30$/BTC was caused by an infusion of cash from daytraders who were using bitcoin as a cheap version or forex, or playing arbitrage games. These do NOT stimulate the value of bitcoin in any way, and these people can continue to use Bitcoin regardless of the price, because there money is in and out quickly enough to not suffer from downward price swings.

So Let's talk about how we can get together and make some good publicity for bitcoin.
I'm sure we've all got skillsets we could be putting to use to help generate interest in bitcoin - it's a pretty straightforward process.

Find something you're good at, preferrably something that can be transferred over the internet - web design, graphic design, coding, database work, writing copy, doing research, anything really - and set up a website where you offer your services. Offer the standard industry rate, accept paypal and bitcoin, and do it 20-25% cheaper for bitcoin. Yes it sucks doing things on the cheap, but you're not planning on selling your BTC right away anyways, you're planning on waiting until the price stablizes and goes up. The only thing that will make it go up is people having a reason to use bitcoin, and that's will be a steep discount at first. If you think that doing something for 20-25% cheaper is insane, consider this -- your BTC is worth 50% what was less a month ago, where do you think it's going to go if the world economy continues to contract and people are no longer looking at fringe investments?

There's a meet up in Seattle tomorrow that some of us in the area will be attending, I'll be bringing these points up. I think a lot of miners will be at this meeting, probably scared to death.

Moved

Can we get a count of whose planning on going tomorrow, I'd like to submit this to reddit's bitcoin subreddit and seattle subreddit.

Yo dawg, I heard you liked trading volatility, so I wrote an option, on your ETF, that's backed by futures, written on an index, whose value is derived from options, on stocks, within another index.

Seriously though, it exists. http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=VIXY

Self interest for whom? You realize that all this means is that the government will be giving more money to the banks in interest.

How hard would it be to throw in a loading screen? Hell, you could sell ads on it.