I am an owner of a G1 and own no Apple hardware, so yes - Android will be first, of course. =)

I guess the cat's outta the bag now, isn't it!

Couple of things:

We are utilizing TXT records, just like domainkeys, and spf, sshfp, et. al. We will be releasing an RFC with the format soon. (But it's very simple) We personally are using a custom developed authoritative name server written in Erlang - for various reasons including scalability, high availability, and because no nameserver available can handle the dynamic nature of our service. (And I just like flexing my Erlang muscles =) We can service thousands of concurrent requests per second currently on extremely limited hardware.

Using an IP address is just as obtuse as a bitcoin address (which is a huge barrier to adoption), and really isn't the point of this service. You lose the address labeling/generation aspect - which is essential to running a business that accepts bitcoin. In other words, I'm not going to tell a new client I met at a tradeshow and sold something to to send payment to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, and nobody is going to remember an IP address off the top of their head - that's exactly why we have DNS.

DNSSEC is a long way off for the com and net TLDs. It's also a pain in the ass to implement and adminstration is non-trivial. We're using GPG signing - it's more robust, far easier to implement, and available today. Signing responses prevents any possibility of falling victim to all currently practical DNS attack vectors. (Along with the standard means to address spoofing...random ports and IDs, etc...)

Unfortuantely, libresolv is not available on Win32 platforms (without Cygwin), so we are using a boost library for DNS resolution. This will be implemented as a seperate application that bitcoin/bitcoind will call out to, or you can use by hand. Also there is a fallback mechanism in place: every DNS record also gets an A record that points to our webserver, so if you put the address into a web browser, you will be shown a (pretty) page with the BTC address and a QR representation of the address. Perfect for the eventual advent of mobile payment clients. (That we also plan on offering!)

IMO, there would be little reason not to trust a well-known 3rd party - as the responses are easily verifiable (in real time, you'll know very quickly if you've missed a payment). You can trust a third party with hosting your address records just as much as you can trust Paypal, LibertyReserves, myBitcoin, mtGox, your bank, or anyone really...but if you're that worried, in the future we plan on releasing our entire system as FOSS - so you can host your own after an apt-get and a bit of configuration.

As noagendamarket mentioned, we are finishing completion of this in the very near term and we will be having a public beta very shortly. We will be releasing an "RFC" and client specifications for our system in tandem so that people writing their own clients, e.g. mybitcoin.com, mtgox and everyone else can interop with our service (and any others) - hopefully the community can standardise on some format. ( Ours is very similar to existing RFCs like it so there should be no problems with using what we have )

Of course hosting your own records on your domain is simple and easy, and we encourage people who are able to do so. However, in addition to our basic hosting services, we will be offering full merchant systems with all the bells and whistles that go along with that; dynamic address generation, redundant, highly available, distributed servers (we're talking 5+ nines here), SLAs, APIs, backend portals to manage your orders and invoicing, and everything else you'd expect from an enterprise level SaaS - some time shortly after our public beta period. Currently we are working on a very, very custom (e)bitcoind that will enable even more functionality.

In other words - we got this covered. Stay tuned. =)

They're great at that, aren't they? Good thing my idea is quite a bit too advanced for the monkeys at Zynga ( I know some of their devs ) - and the actual profit motive in terms of BTC is a large part of the allure - they can't clone that.

For spammers that make thousands upon thousands of dollars a year? The payments would have to be higher than the potential profits of the spam and it would likely push it out of reach of the average consumer. I'm not going to pay $0.50 to post a blog comment, ever. A big spammer could do that a thousand times and still not cut into their bottom line. I think the fact that spammers use Mechanical Turk to break captchas already is the proof in the pudding.

That's it, I'm making a proper market.

*fires off a django install*

( Those who are fans of IP enforcement should just skip this part. Just sayin'. )

That was me, and I was specifically talking about targeting the less than legal area of file sharing.

Put simply, you're just not going to find legal content that will be effective in that market. Anything like OSS is mirrored for free and people aren't going to pay to download. Content owners aren't game - it'd be just another CDN to them, why would they pay in bitcoin, and why would their users pay per download/MB/GB when they're already paying for the content? That niche is solely about pirated content - like it or not.

Marketing would take hardly any effort, as I'm sure (with a good enough user pay flow) we could offer higher conversion rates and payouts for affiliates than the other shady CC required websites. It would take time to work out a business plan, but the actual development would take no time at all. (I could do it in a couple of days with a full-time effort) The files themselves could be shoved onto S3 or something. Just have to have someone handy with numbers to make sure it's profitable - otherwise nobody's going to waste their time.

Something like x amount of BTC per GB or MB (instead of a monthly membership), with an affiliate system would take over that market. Lots of people are willing to pay for better access to niche pirated content, but are reluctant to offer up CC and personal info directly for obvious reasons.

I also don't see how bitcoin could be used as a captcha, those are used to make sure there's a human on the other end and not a spam bot...you could easily automate the payments. For this niche, it's paying for high bandwidth, concurrent downloads of pirated content; it just won't work otherwise IMO.

Agorist developers apply within. 


Ugh, Drupal. ::wilhelmscream:: I'd be willing to develop an advertising clearance house - I actually have a lot of industry experience there.

Makes sense, and it could be the very catalyst for it to be accepted/replaced in other virtual worlds/mmorpgs. It is exactly what I want to do with my game - unfortunately I never seem to have the time.    If any developers who are experienced with distributed, concurrent development and want to make a full on virtual trading market, you know where to find me. 

Not porn sites directly, but other indirect methods of obtaining porn can be paid for through paypal - and they're all owned by the same people. =)

I pay for all my drugs and hookers with FRNs.

Wal-mart isn't going to accept bitcoin, period, until after a monetary revolution. It doesn't matter if the top ten google hits are "Good Christian Soldiers Doing God's Work Need Your Bitcoins" or "CL Hooker accepts Bitcoin." or "Evil Agorist Tax Dodgers Use Bitcoin." Wal-mart doesn't accept Paypal AFAIK.

It's akin to saying that Hollywood studios aren't going to produce DVDs or Blue-Rays becase the porn industry adopted and pushed them first. (Along with everything else) It's absurd, and far from the point. Porn sites accept Paypal too, you know, along with every other shady enterprise.

I guess this is the hardcore agorist in me. I honestly don't care if Wal-mart accepts bitcoin or not, and I do not believe that it should be a major focus of bitcoin at large. When the time comes, Wal-mart will have no choice.

My .00002 BTC.

Why not replace SharingMatrix/MegaUpload/et. al with a (user friendly) bitcoin based file host, and get all the "free" porn sites (like adultbay, for instance) to use it instead. I'd actually pay for the increased bandwidth and concurrent downloads if I didn't have to risk my personal and CC details and those evil, evil automatic recurring payments.

This way we can use porn (and music blogs) in a roundabout way.

Gold is a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value; therefore, it is money. Bitcoin falls squarely under this definition. Gold is also a commodity, whereas bitcoin is not due to it not having any (current) use value.

((BTC === Money) && (BTC !== Currency) && (BTC !== Commodity) === true)

It could be considered as such for some purposes because it is a store of value. In strict financial terms, it is not one. Regardless, it doesn't (In my understanding) invalidate its use as game "currency."

Whoa whoa whoa, wtf are you talking about? Nobody's talking about breaking contracts here, dude, chill out. I'm talking about someone creating their OWN game on their OWN servers, with their OWN TOS - NOT someone creating a game on Facebook. Facebook, or any other company's TOS, means exactly dick to me. Eff Facebook. I suggest you reread my questions, slowly and carefully, before you start throwing "contract breaker!" around, or suggesting that I don't respect property rights - which frankly is laughable. You answered my first, very direct, questions with a simple "Look at Facebook's TOS" which didn't answer anything, nor did it have any applicability to my questions. You're still stuck on this - maybe you think that all games anyone could ever want to create would be FB games. Whatever your misunderstanding there is, you need to seriously examine your assumptions, and step down off of your soapbox.

Regarding your very fallacious statements: any solid answers to my questions?

Here, I'll rephrase the main one so you couldn't possibly misconstrue:

If I form a company, create my own game, write my own TOS that is carefully worded, and allow people to deposit, use, and withdraw bitcoins (just like MtGox, the Casino, etc...) what is LEGALLY stopping me from doing that? As far as I can tell - nothing. That's what I'm asking. Are there specific statutes or case law in effect? The way some other company, whomever they may be, does it is completely moot to me. The technical aspects of doing this are beyond the scope of my question. The IRC conversation focused on one very narrow segment of gaming and I do not believe the issues raised within apply to all games or ideas.

Second, very simple, very direct question:
Is the bitcoin casino (and MtGox in a way) not, in effect, using bitcoin as an in-game currency. If not, why?

The other questions I raised were merely me questioning your faulty logic, statements, and assumptions. All Virtual Currencies are Proprietary is a fallacy as is everything based on that assumption that follows. All TOS Contracts Limit Ownership is as well; just because it is so for every example you can find does not make it absolutely true.

If you can't answer my questions, or don't understand them, maybe you shouldn't respond like you're some authority on the subject; especially not in an underhanded manner.

This is a fool's errand. Trying to bend their rules while also paying respect to their authority is only going to get YOU bent and serviced. Stop trying to beat them on their own terms. Pun intended.

According to what, though? According to the Mt Gox TOS? What if the TOS said the explicit opposite? Is there case law already regarding this?

Is not the bitcoin casino, in effect, using bitcoin as in-game currency already? If not, what's the differentiating factor?


I don't follow the logic here. It doesn't absolutely have to be the case, just because it is usually the case. Just because some company says so in their TOS doesn't make it true in every instance, and it doesn't make it true that every company would desire to create their own proprietary virtual currency.

Exactly - and isn't that the point of all of this, really? You can't have it both ways, people.

I've read about them, of course - hence the "or closely tied to" part. I do not believe the issues raised within that thread to be a major problem. ( I think the answer lies in carefully worded TOS agreements, etc...) If they become obstacles, then it's as simple as buying in-game 'tokens' with bitcoin. (Or paying for the game with bitcoin, whatever...) Problem solved. The economy is not too elaborate, but the game itself is, which is why it's a multi-year project of mine. Besides, if Helicopter Ben and Turbo Timmay can run an economy (into the ground...), what's stopping me? 

I'm not going to go into my project much further, as I hate thread jacking - I only brought it up to say that I've made games/large applications in these languages before and would like to help with anything I find interesting and using a language which I also like - and that furthers bitcoin of course!

What laws and rules are applicable here? When you say "As long as you cant cash the tokens out for any cash equivalents immediately you wont face any repercussions." what exactly do you mean? How does it work in the context of online poker, or the bitcoin casino? You're playing games with BTC directly, and can win BTC. You could then exchange BTC for USD. Legally you'd need to file a W-2G, correct? As far as I see it, as long as you do not engage in things like interest bearing accounts, engage in fiscal policy like the FED ( money out of thin air ) or provide a method to directly exchange BTC for USD ( that is up to the players to handle ), then there's nothing a government can do, correct?

For instance, say you had a virtual market game, where you bought and sold virtual commodities with BTC. There is no money being created by the game itself, so where is the issue? It is up to the traders themselves to report that income and pay applicable tax, if and when they exchange their earned BTC for a government issued currency. Obviously any profit made by the operators of such a game would need to declare and pay on that, right?

As far as I understand, the IRC discussion revolved around RPG style games where gil is created out of nothing and earned through things like battles and quests and such. In that instance, the concerns are founded - but what about games where money is not created at all - only virtual items that are traded with exchangable monies?

My main point was if someone wants to make anything interesting in Erlang, JS, Scala, or Clojure I'd be very interested in helping, as I have an affinity to those languages. Erlang/OTP is perfect for online games, Scala's Actors are a good fit as well. I have a ton of experience with JS (functional and server-side, i.e. Node.js style) and Erlang, but not so much with Scala.

My game idea is related to BTC far more than just tacking on betting in BTC to any random board game, as BTC would be the actual in game currency (or closely tied to it) - it would become part of the mechanics of the game itself. A virtual economy using a digitl currency. There's very deep similarities with Agorist/AnCap philosophy in the game which BTC invariably shares - I could go on; use your imagination. SL meets Alongside Night with BTC as the currency. Wrapping a popular, highly addictive virtual trading game around BTC could help grow BTC exponentially - and be profitable for all involved.

I've actually been (slowly) building something based on Javascript/Node/NodeRed (check out my github - same handle - for a very rough start) for a game that I've been wanting to make. ( A real-time "web2.0" remake of dopewars...but with an actual persistent market and mechanics...with an Actor paradigm so you can run swarms of cops / thugs / bitches / arbitration, the works...all little javascript NodeRed clients running in the cloud...sadly not enough time on my hands to go it alone...hint, hint )

I'm definitely down with helping with anything in Erlang or Javascript.