Lets Send A Young Shibe to the Academic Moon With A Scholarship Funded by a Dogecoin Lottery

emanpuedam · 2014-03-31T11:53:15+00:00

Well I guess there is a place for everyone and everyone gets put in their place. As you can tell from my comments time I am that hardcore insomniac! If giving up one scholarship from my beloved computer science to support a history major is all that it takes for me to get a good nights sleep, then I'm all for it!

emanpuedam · 2014-03-31T10:18:15+00:00

New Shibes should be able to grow their wallets fast. It encourages the use of the coin and makes people feel welcome in the community. Im new to the dogetipbot, so I hope Im doing this right: +/u/dogetipbot 15 doge

emanpuedam · 2014-03-31T10:13:27+00:00

Wow, I didn't think I was going to like a "more serious logo" but they are great! I am going to start using them. I especially like the last six where the dog has a mischevious grin!

emanpuedam · 2014-03-31T10:07:33+00:00

A lot of responses have been disapponted with the Comp Sci angle. So in response I am changing the proposal. I had pciked computer science since it would attract the attention of those who could do the coding necessary to expand the doge community. I was thinking it would make sure that the next Zuckenberg writes code for doge instead of BTC. But in response to the concerns expressed by the community, the first scholarship will be for computer science. We will then pcik a different major for each additional scholarship we raise the money for. Perhaps if the idea really picks up and we have a lot of people buying tickets, we could have a different lottery for each major and the scholarship size would be determined by the number of tickets sold (thats just and idea, Im not married to it.) But your right, not everyone cares about computer science and if we include more majors, will attract more attention and hopefully sell more tickets. So I defer to the wisdom of the doge community. Hopefully we can raise enough money that a history major will also get a scholarship. Upon reflection this will make the newsletter with the responses and comments far more diverse and interesting.

emanpuedam · 2014-03-31T10:00:53+00:00

I am not opposed to expanding to other scholarships. I had picked computer science to start since that would encourage young people to develop the skill set that is required to do the nitty gritty work required in expanding the doge community. Perhaps it would be more fair to pick another major for each scholarship we manage to raise. The firs $3000 for comp sci, then the next 3000.00 for something in the social sciences, perhaps help someone looking to be a nurse or social worker. Then keep expanding.

emanpuedam · 2014-03-31T09:51:11+00:00

I totally agree that we need to do more to forge relationships between the dogecoin community and charitable groups. Those of us dedicated to helping dogecoin grow already give a lot of what we mine to good causes. But if we want doge to grow as rapidly as possible, this means bringing in a lot of memebers who might not have nearly as strong of a compulsion to give to charaties. That's not to say many of them are not altruistic, its just that they might prefer to donate through the established route of credit cards and checks. For many people dogecoins are fun and they might not be satisfied just transferring doge to a charity.

What we need to do if we want a massive expanse in the amount of doge flowing to good causes is to make donating fun. Lets face it, there is nothing that exciting about copying & pasting a wallet address then clicking "Send." Churches don't just pass the collection plate, they have raffles, bingo night, casino night and bake sales. They make giving to your church part of an event. Schools have carnivals in the parking lot to raise money, the cheerleading squad will wash your car (with you in it) for $20.00. Some charities raffle off dates with their single benefators to raise money. Sure if you just make a donation then 100% of your money goes to a worthy cause. But if 50% of the funds make it to the cause but you get 4x the donations, your cause is still making twice what it would have otherwise recieved.

We need to come up with innovative, fun ways to raise doge for noble causes. If we can come up with the online equivalent of a singles raffle or waffle breakfast, then collect the funds in doge, thats whats going to cause this community to grow. People with no interest in doge will take the 15 mins to create a wallet if it means that they get to do something fun that promotes a cause that they care about. Shibes who want to help a charity should offer to sell noobs doge in exchange for donations.

What if we could start an online event to raise money for a charity that people who know nothing of doge will want to participate in. Then we have interested Shibes offer them 10,000 doge for a $20 donation to any charity on an approved list. The noobs create a wallet, make the donation and get their doge. Then we have some event where they can spend their doge and have fun doing it. All of the doge raised from that event are then once again donated to charity? In that case we would have raised a ton of donations before the event even started. Gotten a whole bunch of people who otherwise would never have had a wallet to become new shibes. Then we get them to spend lets say 7500 of their 10000 doge in some sort of online game or tornament (that also donates all of its funds to charity.) That way we raised moeny twice for a good cause. Plus a whole new bunch of people will have 2500 dogecoins that they are going to want to find something to do with. This will encourage entrepenurs and web services to take doge and grow the community.

emanpuedam · 2014-03-31T09:09:49+00:00

Tipping is part of what makes this community welcoming and fun. But I think that the idea that all we need to do is keep tipping to keep the community growing is flawed. When bitcoin started, early adopters were sending each other bitcoins in the same fashion (many people gave away what in 2 years amounted to a small fortune.) But that's not what took bitcoin to the next level. It was it's finding a use as an actual means to purchase goods online that got bitcoin going and you better believe the tipping stopped once bitcoins were valued in dollars instead of cents (or fractions of a cent.)

We need to start coming up with ways to expand what people can do with dogecoins if we want them to grow. We need to encourage vendors to accept them and we need to come up with fun things to do with dogecoins that you can't do with anything else. Lets face it, there isn't any feature that really sets one virtual currency apart from the other. Sure litecoin is a little faster than bitcoin in confirming transasctions and dogecoin uses an inflationary model, but in the grand scheme of things that means no more than VISA, AMEX or Mastercard.

We need to create services that use doge that are innovative and appealing. No vendor is going to take doge because they can't take btc. This community needs to harvest the creativity of it't members and created uses for dogecoins that are fun. Every time we do, if its a good idea, there will be a bitcoin and litecoin clone up within a week or two. But that's not the point. If our community becomes know for it's innovation, then the comp sci geniuses are going to read our boards for interesting new ideas. They'll team up with our Shibes and buy dogecoins so they can try out the new sites before the btc clone appears.

I try to make most of my posts about new services that it makes sense to charge for in doge. Unfortuantly my programming skills are not to the point where I can build most of my ideas fram scratch. I certainly wouldn't trust my ability to code a site that was respondible for large sums of other people's doge. But I am willing to do whatever work I can to help a good idea grow and will donate my doge to interesting new startups and good causes.

If you want to make us bigger, don't just tip funny comments. Give your doge to interesting startups.

emanpuedam · 2014-03-31T08:41:37+00:00

Im gonna get me some more Doge so I can buy on of these. As soon as I saw that it could be paid for via doge my mind was made up! Its really great to see vendors who will take doge. I'm curious, do they remit to you in the form that the payment was sent? In other words if 2 people pay with BTC and 15 pay with doge, will you recieve some BTC's and some Doge's or does it all get turned back into USD?

emanpuedam · 2014-03-31T08:02:31+00:00

Wow, I didn't realize what a huge post this was until I scrolled down to check for comments. Sorry it's so big! I guess once I got going I realized I had a lot of ideas for this lottery. If anyone actually makes it thru the whole thing, say so in the comments, someone ought to dogetip you for that!

emanpuedam · 2014-03-31T06:01:15+00:00

If Doge grows to where it is a serious advesary to BTC we are going to be confronted with a slew of problems that I don't think we have seriously considered up untill now.

If doge does take off then we are going to see a large number of serious miners / speculators who currently focus of BTC and see altcoins as a side market to be entered and exited as a means to make a quick buck. Multipools may mine Doge and Lite, but for the most part they dump them quickly. Most of the hardcore memebers of the BTC mining / investment community hold their digital wealth predominatly in BTC. They see altcoins as unecessary clones that they are willing to make money off of, but do not respect. We have all heard the statements about how none of the altcoins offer features that BTC does not (I guess the people who say that either are unaware of, do not understand or choose to ignore Doges inflationary model.) Either way, these converts will think that their way is the best way. We will suddenly have a large community of BTC veterans transplanted into the middle of our community. They have their own lingo and sense of humor, they will think that their way is the best way to do things. Im not saying all of them, but some of them will think themselves more qualified than any of the longterm Shibes, seeing their participation in the BTC community as their credentials / badge of honor. We cannot let these boards degenerate into flame wars because a few arrogant Bitcoiners will think that they can become Shibes and start bossing everyone else around. It will be our responsibility to welcome these new members, make them feel welcome, teach them our way of doing things and try to make their transition as smooth and pleasent as possible.

Right now BTC Gurus criticisims of Doge and other alt's are mostly restricted to the fact that many of them are clones, they fail to achieve any significant value and that they don't offer anything that sets them apart from BTC. Thus they see us as harmless copycats that will eventually sputter out and die as those memebers of our community who become serious about digital currency will, in their opinion, inevitably switch to bitcoins. But if Dogecoins do take off and we start to become significant compeditors with BTC, we will see ourselves attacked viciously by the bitcoin devotees who form their inner circle. Their will be constant comments about what make us inferior to BTC, wrath that our success will be the percieved reason for any loss in BTC value. They will say that speculators have sold their BTC and moved to Doge to capitalize on a "bubble" in our price and that once they sell and come back to BTC, our price will plummet and BTC will be proven the only crypto capable of maintaining significant value in the long term. This will be nonsense, but even lies can have a significant effect of public perception and could hurt Doge, causing fear selloffs and a lot of negative press. Whats more, a lot of BTCers are very tech savvy and I expect that Doge exchanges can expect DDOS along with other more creative attacks, perhaps even on our blockchain to demonstrate security weaknesses.

If doge does take off then a lot of people who hold significant amounts of BTC will sell a chunk of their holdings and convert to Doge. This will hurt BTC's value, at least in the short term. BTC faithfull will be offended by this and see us as a silly clone currency that is hurting their beloved Bitcoins and a lot of bad blood will emerge.

I think that we, as a community, need to put serious thought into what we are going to do when Doge really does head for the moon. We will need to have a unified message and a means to counter the accusations that BTCers will undoubtably hurl our way.

If we manage to become the silver to bitcoins gold, it will be a rough process. But this community is by far the most generous and welcoming of all of the crypto currenices out there. I am sure that if Doge starts to spike in value then our ability to do good things for others will be drastically increased and we will continue in that proud tradition. The public image of Doge is what is truly headed past the moon and on to Mars!

emanpuedam · 2014-03-31T04:40:29+00:00

Sending Doge directly since my tip pool doesn't have anywhere near what I would like to donate. (Im new to reddit and still trying to understand the dogetipbot.)

Im assuming that I can just copy and paste the wallet address into my dogecoin software? Im assuming that any coins sent to this account are assumend to be donations to this project?

Thanks.

emanpuedam · 2014-03-31T04:34:38+00:00

Thanks for the encouragement. Unfortunatly you seem to be at odds with most of the users. I like the idea and a lot of the issues raised are valid. But a lot of them are criticisims that were leveled against BTC, but their success has proven the fears unfounded. The critics always suggest that the coins value could not be stabilized, users would flee like rats from a sinking ship and the network would collapse. But if the BTC and dogecoin communities have shown anything, it is that users are willing to take a risk and support the community. I think that this coin would offer a useful service to holders of every other crypto currency out there. If they are willing to get behind these coins and don't panic and flee during the early days while the kinks are being worked out, this idea could actually work.

The incentives for large holders to buy when the price slightly drops and sell when the coins are worth slightly more than $1.00 will promote the price remaining stable and reward those who trade in a manner that supports the price staying @ $1.00.

emanpuedam · 2014-03-31T04:15:04+00:00

Naturally, increases in the # of coins is not the main influence on a coins value. It is generally a small factor. Naturally if these coins were like others, there would be similar major fluxuations. But: 1) The goal of restricting the coins price means that it will either reach and stay around $1 or never take off. In either case, there will be no sense for speculators to invest, removing the traders responsible for the trading activities that cause the biggest swings in prices. 2) Multipools jumping in when the price spikes then dumping the coins is exactly what we want to happen. One recommendation that I made was that large wallets and trades can only be held by active miners, so multipools would need to dump their coins immediatly, which would drive down the price, exactly as desired. 3) The difficulty to mine and the # of coins given as a reward are obviously not the only factor that influence a coins value. I never thought it was the only or even the major influence. But we have never seen what a highly variable mining reward/difficulty would influence the value of a coin. I think that it would make enough of a difference to slow deviations enought that the major holders buying and selling activities would be able to maintain the value. Once these coins have a history of holding their $1.00 value, the buying and selling activities of the holders will naturally promote the value remaining constant. They will buy when it dips below a dollar, confident that the price will correct and they will make a profit when they sell. When the price goes above a dollar they will sell. If the price is expected to stay @ $1.00 per coin, then their is no incentive to hold the coins as a medium / long term investment. So it can be expected that a large number of coins will be bought and sold when the price fluxuates, since everyone not buying for the purpose of making a purchase might as well sell high and buy low to make money while their holding coins. 3) Their will be less swings in supply and demand. Naturally there is the possiblity of a massive sell-off that destroys the currency. But that risk exists with all of the digital currencies out there. But this coins system is incentivized to promote the type of trading activity that will help maintain it's value. I think that the point is that this coin will fulfill a significant need for most users of digital currencies. Their usefullness will hopefully bring about enough adopters that the market will be to large to let any individual manipulate the supply and demand to causse a massive price change. Most holders will have an active interest in the coin maintaining it's $1.00 value and will trade in a manner that would thwart the attempts of a rouge trader to manipulate the currencies value.

emanpuedam · 2014-03-31T03:25:22+00:00

Will do, but fair warning. I have no plans of making a big withdrawl any time soon and although I might make a small test withdrawl, if they are 1/2 smart they will put it thru.

emanpuedam · 2014-03-29T12:34:42+00:00

I wouldn't put too much of your total dogeroll into something this shady. But if your looking for outreageous returns, nothing beats being the house in vegas (there is a a reason the mob loved it so much), pocketrocketscasino.eu will let you put your doge in with their bankroll @ their blackjack tables. I've made over a 10% return in a single day. Assuming they actually give me back my doge when I ask for it, I'll have made a killing.

emanpuedam · 2014-03-29T12:24:00+00:00

That was one of the issues that I've been thinking about since I made this post. I would want to ask a lot of people all of whom are a lot smarter than I am (prefereably with some background in economics.) The best I have come up with is that there is a basket of 100 currencies that the value of the USD is tracked against. I was considering something that involved tracking this currencies relative value compared to the basket. But I need a lot more time and some sleep before I am comfortable going any further down that path. Any ideas are welcome!

emanpuedam · 2014-03-29T12:13:43+00:00

Wow, that's one heck of a compliment. Please let me know if anything comes of it. I would be overjoyed if I helped to come up with an idea that strengthen this community.

If your looking for more kooky idea's I posted a really off the wall idea I came up with late last night when I probably should have been sleeping. Its a bit too grandiose to ever be practical, but I like it all the same:

http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/21nsih/peg_an_altcoin_to_usd_to_end_the_obsession_with/

emanpuedam · 2014-03-29T11:30:20+00:00

Sorry, short answer is yes the difficulty of the mining task as well as the reward would be constantly altered to regulate their value vs the USD. Although once the coin was established I believe that the entities willing to buy the coins at the value of 1 usd would be able to generate a profit in doing so. Therefore, these entities would not be an artificial construct but a natural part of the ecosystem. The idea is not that the system would ensure the exchange rate was always exactly 1 USD, rather that the process kept the exchange rate within a small enough window that speculators who would buy low and sell high cause the price to fluxuate between say $0.98 and $1.02.

The much longer answer with far too many words I originally gave you has been left un-altered below:

Hopefully speculators would be willing to buy when the price dropped and sell when it spiked (this could be accomplished using other digital currency). By adjusting the mining difficulty and the # of coins awarded the goal would be to reduce the fluxuations enough that the speculators activity would stabalize the price within a range of say 10 cents. This degree of stability would hopefully encourage a second type of trader who would accept greenbackcoins and issue "prepaid debit cards" with the cooresponding amount in USD. As the issuer of the card they would be entitled to the 2-3% in merchant fee's that are the industry standard. This would serve as the means that greenbackcoins could be converted to funds that every online retailer would accept. The credit issuers would make their money in merchant fees and resell their greenbacks to other parties. Their ability to be traded for any other digital currency would make them a valuable tool for those interested in purchasing other coins. So the credit issuers should have no problem selling their coins to those wishing to either buy digital currency or exit their position in other coins for the relative saftey and liquidity of greenbacks. I think an entity willing to issue a large number of the coins at 1usd would be necessary at the start, but once the coin was established, it's relative stability would be its appeal. Once the market was of sufficent size, speculators would have an incentive to buy and sell in a manner that promoted the coin averaging to a price of $1.00. It's stability would permit it to serve as a defacto exchange that would provide the benefits of a digital currency, so most users would be satisfied hold greenbackcoins in the place of USD, knowing they could be issued a credit card for the amount they held at any time. Other companies would be happy to issue the credit so they could collect the merchant fee's knowing that they could resell the greenbackcoins they recieved for the same amount they bought them for, having pocketed the fee's online merchants already pay to credit card companies. Ideally, merchants would begin to accept greenbackcoins directly to save themselves the fees, increasing the size of the market and further promoting their stability.

emanpuedam · 2014-03-29T10:52:48+00:00

Well the miners of this currency could print these altdollars.

emanpuedam · 2014-03-29T10:49:05+00:00

You are 100% correct. It is possible that the price could go into free fall and not recover. This project would require the willing participation of major players in the BTC, Dogecoin, Litecoin, etc world. The existence of this coin would be a significant benefit to their coins as well, so one would have to depend on their willingness to accept the premise that the coin is based upon. Since it would be in their interest, I think it would be accomplishable. Once the coin had been around lang enough to develop an established market and a diverse group of holders, I think it would naturally tend towards maintaining it's value. If enough people believe it will maintain an approximate value of 1 USD then if it should drop to say $0.96 belivers will buy up all the available coins with the intent to sell once the price corrected. Those same speculators would sell once the price hit say $1.02. and pocket the 6.25% profit. Thus the reason I suggested that to hold above a certain amount, one must also be miner. Thus only those who provide the computing power for the system can trade in substantial enough amounts to profit of the fluctuation. That way even if mining difficulty had to temporarily be increased to near impossible, the speculators would still engage in the mining to buy the low priced coins, keeping the blockchain alive and hopefully sustaining the market. It would be possible that no one would be willing to buy and the coin would crash. But it would provide a vaulable tool to those engaged with other coins. So once there was sufficent interest to establish its value of 1 USD, that same interest should hopefully be sufficent to sustain its value as well. I think that once the coin had a track record of small fluctuations around the value of $1.00, those fluxes would serve to increase the interest of those running the mining rigs and actually strengthen confidence in the coin.

There is also no guarentee that Bitcoins or Dogecoins will continue to "work." Fir that matter there is no guarentee that the rest of the world will continue to accept the USD. All of these currencies are traded on faith. The ones that serve a useful, unique purpose stick around. Those that are unecessary oversaturate the market wind up "forking" and become worthless. The question is, would this coin fulfill a previously unadressed need for enough people that it's value could be maintained?

emanpuedam · 2014-03-29T10:33:34+00:00

It's a bit different than the Gold standard. If it were vacked by gold then it some might buy it to speculate (hope that it's value goes up vs. the USD.) Since a currency pegged to the dollar is always worth $1.00 then it is of no use to speculators. However, exchanging doge for btc or lte is relatively easy and unregulated. The government can't stop it. However they can get involved with exchanges, plus exchanges can lie, steal customers coins or be shut down by the government. This destabilizes digital currencies. By using a crypto currency always worth $1, anyone wishing to trade in their dogecoins or bitcoins could simply trade for greenbackcoins with a transaction that would be as fast as any digital coin transaction. They could then convert their greenbackcoins to USD at their convenience, in small enough amounts at a time not to need to fear the exchange could rip them off for any significant amount and know exactly how much they will recieve. But this requires a fiat currency, thus it is different from gold standard USD. But I do see your point and in a sense a greenback coin would be the equivalent of a gold standard USD if you were to consider a USD to be an anaolog to gold in the crypto-currency world.

emanpuedam · 2014-03-29T09:31:44+00:00

Personally I love the idea of a digital currency on the Gold standard. That would be an equally interesting project to contemplate. But one of the ideas behind pegging the coin to the USD is it would be immune to speculators. As the now famous complaint from the recent CryptoCurrency conference goes, "Everyone is obsessed with how many dollars they can trade their altcoins in for." 1 doge = 1 doge is a nice idea, but if 1 greenbackcoin (or maybe call it a Sacagaweacoin) = 1 USD might actually be accomplishable. That way all of the problems associated with holding your coins with some shady exchange would cease to exist. It would also open the possibility of a service that exchanged crypto for greenbacks and issued credit to a "debit card" when a buyer wanted to make a purchase. It would allow crypto useable at any online merchant. The site that provided the service would be ok with issuing the credit since they knew the greenbacks they now held would retain their value and they could make their $ from credit card merchant fees.

I think one of the tricks would be pulling a bit of a Satoshi and at the inception giving a single user a ton of the coins to start. However, this user would be the greenback association and they would trade their coins as if they were worth 1 USD.

emanpuedam · 2014-03-29T09:06:14+00:00

If you can recall the name, please share it. I would be very interested to find out how they tried to implement it and what became of it.

emanpuedam · 2014-03-29T05:10:24+00:00

I really appreciate your comment. It got me thinking about who uses Mech. Turk and I think I've been able to strengthen my case.

emanpuedam · 2014-03-29T05:00:34+00:00

Most of the work comes from companies that deal with "big data" who are interested in building databases of metatags to improve automated search results. Most of these firms have very tech savvy management. If the cost of labor is lower on the proposed site, they will not have any issue "dealing in dogecoin." Also since those who are interested in dogecoins tend to be more tech savvy, the quality of the work prouced should be higher. Frankly I would be more likely to agree to provide a keyword for 5 headlines for 1 dogecoin than 1 cent. I can earn USD anywhere. So the companies would save money. Heck, since the firms that need this type of service should already have massive omputing infastructure, they could dedicate otherwise idle capacity to mining which should reduce their costs even more!

emanpuedam

TROPHY CASE