>The closest you get are F2P games like LoL which are not nearly as bad as this
Just to put this in perspective, LoL has more (by 400,000 users) concurrent players than the entire Steam platform.[1][2] I would also put forth the argument that you do gain an advantage by paying for stuff like new heroes which are almost always OP. I think the only element of PC gaming that is keeping more major studios out of the F2P models are dedicated server and p2p gaming where it doesn't make sense and is probably hard to accomplish in any meaningful way.
I recently hopped on your service (found with a quick Google search) and it seems to work well and does exactly what I need it to do. I recently started getting big into the Freenode chatrooms for several projects hosted there and realized I needed to setup a bouncer again to catch some of the chatter that goes on during my offline hours. I'm glad your service was there to fill my need.
One question: how do you compete with some of the other IRC bouncer services that seem to offer their bouncers for free? It seems like there are at least a couple that are running on just donations (found with the same search 'irc bouncer hosting').
I think it comes down to reliability. We offer a service with very little downtime (only a few hours in 2013 during a large, planned transition we were doing).
Additionally, we do a lot of support for folks, usually with fast response times.
I've talked to a few folks coming from community hosted bouncers and I hear, anecdotally, stuff in line with the above.
Thanks for the awesome link, I'm surprised I missed this Ikeahacker post. I might have to bring a dry erase marker along on a future trip there. I'm definitely going to do this for a future home office upgrade. Now I just need plan out some kind of dead simple rig for taking photographs of the whiteboard that would automatically sync with either Dropbox or Evernote. This might be a good use for one of my old android phones.
To put it in perspective, Bitcoincharts.com [1] reports that the market trade volume is around 200,000 BTC (I believe this to be a 24hr stat). BTC-China is currently the largest exchange and their 24-hr volume is 67,500 BTC. So yeah, several thousand BTC being traded at once could be a significant disturbance in the force.
I wonder if it would be possible to come up with some kind of market indicator to detect when one of major holding addresses starts to sell off on one of the exchanges. This may be possible if the escrow/intermediary accounts are known. If one of these 'major holders' really felt like being evil, they could test out some of the BTC to USD processors to see how well their setup to handle large transactions and nuke them with 1000BTC conversions. Coinbase.... BOOM!... BTCQuick.... BOOM!
It would be trivial to write a script to watch the top however many addresses for movement. You wouldn't know if the coins were headed for an exchange or not, though.
$38500 aint bad, but it isn't $771000. I wish I would of purchased more than one when it was around $65 (right after the first pop). Now I'm trying to find the thumbdrive that contains the bitcoins that I got from the original fountain.
I would imagine this might be a tad optimistic, mainly due to their use being limited to only a few forms of advertisement (print being the main one). The only time I can remember using a QR code was when I watched a stream of the Google I/O 2010 conference and they showed one to get a CR-48 chromebook. Needless to say, that QR code will forever be my favorite one.
If we take your idea and added a mechanism that plays new episodes (from those pre-selected series) at a user-designated primetime showing, I think we would have a winner.
Why can't one of these services just give us our own legit pseudo-channel? (Hulu???) BTW, you can sort-of do this with a combination of XBMC, a few plugins (mainly pseudoTV), Couchpotato, Sickbeard and a good tracker, but it is way too much of a headache to setup and maintain.
Just to put this in perspective, LoL has more (by 400,000 users) concurrent players than the entire Steam platform.[1][2] I would also put forth the argument that you do gain an advantage by paying for stuff like new heroes which are almost always OP. I think the only element of PC gaming that is keeping more major studios out of the F2P models are dedicated server and p2p gaming where it doesn't make sense and is probably hard to accomplish in any meaningful way.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Legends (para. 1)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software) (para. 3)