Anyway, I'm looking forward to hearing more about your daily business, Mr. Pietila. This and the Wall Observer are about the only two threads I read anymore. I for one don't care if you like to throw money around for fun. I'd probably do the same if I had as much as you or Goat or BitcoinBillionaire.

rpietila,
You seem to be quite the established businessman from what I have seen while perusing your thread. It would seem that you are doing a lot for BTC and for that I respect you. Unfortunately, I am a business school student at the moment and am much too low on funds to throw anything significant into bit coin, however I do toss in whatever I can. I do hope your predictions come to fruition and we're all swimming in gold in the future. If the media catches wind of the stunt you pulled with JB I anticipate the popularity this would evoke upon BTC would definitely push us much closer to this goal. Although I cannot participate in your conference I will continue to look forward to entries within your diary as I have found these to be much more insightful than anything else I've read on the forum.

Regards,
hubba

The summit venue, Haikko Manor house as seen from the south, the direction of the sea, in June.


I Bitcoin Supernode Summit Finland 9.-12. May 2013


Bitcoin meetup for the ones most deeply interested in it.

The Bitcoin Supernode Summit will be organized first time in May, 2013. It is based on the understanding that Bitcoin is a revolutionary technology as pervasive as the Internet. What tells them apart, is the fact that adopting Bitcoin among the first 100 million people in the world, not only gives you the edge when doing anything related to economy in the future, but also increases the value of your share of the monetary stock (bitcoins) in existence, by 1-6 orders of magnitude, depending how early you got in. The ones holding the largest stashes of bitcoins - and the means to use them for the public benefit - now, are quickly emerging as new socioeconomic power centers, Bitcoin Supernodes. The Summit develops these concepts in an atmosphere of pristine natural beauty combined with impeccable luxury.


Venue

Haikko Manor, near Porvoo, Finland. Porvoo is about 30 minutes from Helsinki and the Helsinki-Vantaa Airport. Haikko Manor is established 1362. The current Manor House, was designed in 1911 to be able to accommodate the most prestigious occasion that was imaginable that time - King of England visiting by sea. The Manor House was such a large project that it was only finished and inaugurated in the 1960s. Since that time, there has been no King in England. The pretender of Russia has visited it though. Haikko boasts of a 35 acre park and shoreline to the Gulf of Finland.


Hosts

The Summit is organized by rpietila, who currently runs an approximately 1.5 class Bitcoin Supernode based in Helsinki, Finland. Members from his organization will act as hosts. Currently the named hosts are Risto Pietilä (rpietila) and Roni Blomberg (rontus).
 

Staff

There will be enough staff available for the typical needs of the delegates, and the number of staff assigned to serve you, increases exponentially with your ticket class. If you want to bring your own staff, family members, or the like, do organize their stay yourself. Non-participating spouses of Senior Delegates or higher, can stay in the same room at no extra cost. Currently there are available rooms in the hotel compound, also the hotels in Helsinki are only 30 minutes away.


Speakers

There will be no paid speakers. Whole group sessions will be avoided. The workgroups will be based on considerations of the previous work of the delegates, and the interests they currently have. We are likely already aware of your contributions to the Bitcoin economy; if your knowledge is world class, you will be appointed as a workgroup facilitator upon your request. Most of the time during the summit is intentionally left available for self-organized work. Details will be based upon the wishes of the delegates, and updated below.


Schedule


Wednesday, May 8th

19:00 CXV (115th) Club Evening in Silverclub, Helsinki (upon separate invitation only)

Thursday, May 9th

10:00 Conference backend operational. Shuttle service between the Airport, Helsinki, Haikko and Porvoo starts. If you arrive earlier, please reserve for yourself a room in airport hotel and have a good sleep and breakfast; we will pick the early birds up at 10, and transfer to Haikko.

Friday, May 10th

18:00 Opening Gala in Haikko

Saturday, May 11th


Sunday, May 12th

16:00 Conference backend closes operations. Shuttle service between the Airport, Helsinki, Haikko and Porvoo ends. If your flight is later, we will be able to book your airport transfer.


Workshops

DEALER NETWORK
BITCOIN SUPERNODE
REAL BILLS AND CLEARINGHOUSE

(will be expanded soon, also the 7 non-rpietila delegates can start posting their ideas to the thread, no need to ask my permission, you can be sure we do exactly what we want in the summit, so if your idea is good, we will develop it and the converse).

NEW: Please somebody set up a private forum for just the participants, unless this forum grants us a private section before 1st May noon UTC.


Admissions & Fees

Maximum 50 admissions available worldwide, of which currently 7 are taken.

Admission Fee is 50,000mBTC, payable to 15X968JjsbT9LBKK9kFsAeAnKwi5G6LoUp.

All (delegate&up) admission fees will be sent to this address, regardless of the method that was used in purchasing the ticket (the tickets are for sale outside of bitcointalk also). This is to preserve the order of registrations for the 98%...2% early adopter discount. This means that the admission fee for the first entrant is 1,000mBTC, for the second 2,000mBTC, and so on, until the registration window ends on Sunday, May 5th, 23:59 UTC, or the maximum limit of 50 participants is reached. You may reserve a ticket only by prepayment, and the order of payments after 20 confirmations is the final arbiter of the discount. In cases where two legitimate payments of equal amount are included in the same block, both will get discounted the same amount, resulting in a 500mBTC additional payment due from both. Send PM with your details after sending your admission fee.

You may transfer your title to an admission to another. Send PM indicating the details, and pay 500mBTC transfer fee to 18BGLrjetpWjmP4PjQfTpeLXn1gSQx2Erv.

NEW: In case of no show, we will not be able to refund your ticket, unless you convert it to "virtual delegate" latest Sunday 5th. If you do this, we will be able to refund you 5,000mBTC (regardless of how much you paid for it).


Ticket Classes

2.5th class ticket = Delegate

(no additional cost)
- 2pax room, full board, and shuttle rides from and to the airport or city centre

2.0nd class ticket = Senior Delegate

(an additional 3,000mBTC)
- Single Room

1.5th class ticket = Donator

(an additional 10,000mBTC)
- Butler service

1.0st class ticket = VIP

(an additional 50,000mBTC)
- You may post a reasonable wishlist of maximum 3 sheets, and it will be granted upon availability

Details of what the higher classes get, will be added later.
A higher class gets first choice of suites, transportation, workgroups, etc. limited resources.
A higher class accumulates all benefits of the lower classes. (The costs are not accumulated though.)
Do not pay these to the Admission Fee address. We will charge them separately.

NEW_APR_29: All technical means will be available to attend to the summit virtually. If a delegate plans to do this, (s)he is expected to contact me, and start preparations from his/her part. This will entitle to a 5,000mBTC refund.

In addition there will be:
Hosts (participating staff of the rpietila supernode)
Staff (non-participating from rpietila and hotel)
Guests (paid speakers who are not bitcoiners yet)
Visitors (short term tickets issued to mainly local non-bitcoiners for specific events during the summit)


Pledges

If certain threshold numbers of admissions are reached, there will be some improvements in our living conditions, plus the overall feel of the summit:

- At least 10 admissions
Airport/city transfer upgraded to black German cars (E/5/6 class or larger).

- At least 20 admissions
Everything inside the compound will be free of charge, including spa treatments.

- At least 30 admissions
A Summit Secretariat will be organized, who will provide 24h backend services for the delegates, including snacks and drinks, taxis/limo, excursions to sights and clubs etc., completely according to your request, completely for free, for the duration of the summit. This will operate from two permanent bases, both in Haikko Manor and Hotel Kämp, Helsinki.

- At least 40 admissions
An opening gala dinner in the Romanov suite of the Manor House, with real silver tableware, engraved with the name of the delegate and the occasion, and gifted to the delegate. Afterparty in Helsinki, transfer in white limos (subject to availability).

- Sold out! (50 admissions)
We will employ the total of 30 girls to dole out free bitcoins to bystanders in 10 selected European cities for the duration of the summit. I will pledge 500,000mB of my private funds towards this free distribution.

Welcome to I Bitcoin Supernode Summit 2013!

[All info is subject to be updated.]

I am sure you will but if not just wanted to say, please do keep us informed of the number of admissions; I am looking forward to the sold out pledge.
P.S This is by a long way the most fascinating/interesting/entertaining topic on the whole forum, in more than a BTC sense.

It is blatantly obvious I paid the transactions myself after generating the address, that is not even the question here. Three tickets were sold to the team who deviced the idea and are going to pay me. The money is put there to make it easy to see if anyone is actually coming. (I am very fine with having another meeting with the same team that has met every two weeks many times now...)

So that the thread will not suffer the fate of the Finnish original (pages upon pages of rant from people who are not interested in coming anyway), let me remind you that I want comments mainly from the people who actually belong to the top 400 of bitcoiners, the Vladimir Club, and as such would be warmly welcomed to the summit, to make it a worthwhile experience for everyone attending. Trolls will be deleted as usual.

The pricing model serves the following purposes:
- Gently limiting the number of entrants, since it is a stressful experience to organize a large conference in the timespan of 1.5 weeks, but also don't want to select people, which is elitism
- (Hopefully) Ensuring that people who are interested, do sign up quickly, even if bitcoin goes up, the tickets also can only go up
- Enable lower average ticket price for all, if the summit turns out to be small. It is an incentive for me to give out more info, since at the current level of interest I am making a loss. The tickets issued so far don't cover even the variable cost per head.

In this thread, I see

1) Someone organizing a ritzy conference so that people with large amounts of bitcoin can talk about how best to use that stash of bitcoins to (1) better their own lives, and (2) better the bitcoin community and economy/infrastructure via economic development.

2) Smoothie complaining about how ritzy the conference is.

 

Rich people gonna be rich, don't hate. Sure, a set of silver dining utensils with your name engraved as a gift is a little ridiculous for a conference, along with butler service and white limos. On the other hand, your 1995 geo metro and your iPhone can also be compared to "starving kids in Africa" with the result of questioning how much is really necessary.
If there's anything we need more of, it's the bitcoin economy getting serious, developing projects, developing serious infrastructure so bitcoin will be well underway to defeating Fiat, which is the goal of nearly all of us (except for those ideologues hanging onto socialism and fiat debt/tax slavery for dear life). Complaining about a conference because of its butler service is missing the forest for the trees. What we have here is people with lots of bitcoins talking about what to do with them. It could be worse... they could be sitting around on MtGox figuring out the right moment to dump in order to tank the price and buy lower... that's what SOME people with lots of coins like to do.

If Reptilia wants to organize a ritzy conference with his coins rather than DDoSing Gox and initiating panic sells via huge sell-offs, more power to him, and I'm not going to complain. IMO it's a better use of his time anyways 

The coolness of the summit does not depend on the pledges.

The reason there are pledges, which cost more and more when the # of participants is increasing, is that otherwise I would benefit too much from the tickets. The ticket income increases quadratically with the number of admissions, the costs go up perhaps in the 1.5th power. This leaves me excess money that I don't need or want. Original intention was to refund it equally to all the participants. Then I realized that was uncool. So better spend it on vanities, since at least there will be a major ripple effect. Nobody is forced to drive in the limos, we have used cars available too.

You can easily buy money with coolness. You can hardly buy coolness with money. So the cool guys (in Bitcoin economy at least), have no shortage of money (bitcoins). The only thing they need to take care of, is that they stay cool.

I have been playing with DVC/BTC on Vircurex, and found simple tunnel-vision sets in. Basically I do not care what dollars happen to be worth or not worth, I only care that both my BTC holdings and my DVC holdings are increasing.

If LTC/BTC traders feel the same way, then as long as they are getting more bitcoin for their litecoins and more litecoins for their bitcoins as they trade it would require some third party arbitrageur to bother to notice whether dollars are going up or down relative to the LTC or the BTC or both.

This might well not be at all similar to the silver/gold markets because, well are there even any actual XAG/XAU markets at all or are there only XAG/fiat and XAU/fiat markets?

By XAG/XAU markets I mean markets where people are trading gold for silver and silver for gold and basically need not pay attention at all to whether all fiat or any fiat goes up or down since either way they are getting themselves more silver and more gold and those are afterall the things they are interested in. I have not noticed any major markets structured in such a way but maybe that is because I do not hang out in the back rooms of coin-and-bullion dealers?

-MarkM-

Workshop: DEALER NETWORK

This workshop will be held in I Bitcoin Supernode Summit Finland 9.-12. May 2013.

MISSION STATEMENT:

We believe that setting up a decentralized, enormously liquid way of determining the USD/BTC rate, is beneficial for the continued increase of the rate. We believe that it is possible to gather together the owners of 3,000,000,000mBTC (about 30% of all the bitcoins aboveground) to regularly post their willingness to sell a part of their stash to the rising prices. The ultimate counterparty would be a new bitcoin user who buys these coins. The intermediary would be a Bitcoin Supernode dealership. We believe that this operation can be set up in 3 months, and it will be the ultimate stabilizer of the price, even though we expect that the actual number of coins traded by this mechanism would likely not exceed the aggregate turnover of the exchanges, even after the 3 months.

TECHNICAL:

1. We set up a Bitcoin Dealers' Association, which will accept members upon very strict scrutiny. The number of members will be limited to about 200, and it is not mandatory to have more than 10 for it to work properly.

2. We set up an order matching software, which will process the net dealer orderbooks of the BDA members, every 8 hours. I propose this happens at 00:00UTC, 08:00UTC and 16:00UTC, continually, every day. There will not be continuous trading at all in the first stage; it can be added later if found beneficial. I don't think it will add anything, since we already have the exchanges for play.

3. Net dealer orderbooks will be sent encrypted to the software, it will find the market clearing price, and send the details to the counterparties of the actual trades. The software cannot (ie. it is mathematically impossible to) cheat. If all of the participants see their net position fulfilled at the fixing price, the software has worked properly.

4. It does not cost anything for a member to send their orderbook, also there is no fee for the trades matched. The fees are a fixed membership fee and a one-time registration fee. In addition, members can buy the stock of the association (stockholders decide the directors etc.) and they will have to post a significant bail, which will cover the maximum of outstanding trades by the member, and is held in a 3-out-of-5 escrow perpetually during their membership.

5. The trades are settled T+4, which means that the trade contracted will have to clear in the other end in 96 hours from the fixing. Eg. fixing on Monday at 00:00, will have to be paid and cleared in the receiving end by Friday at 00:00.

6. If there is a delay in settlement, a penalty will be imposed + all the expenses of the counterparty will need to be covered. If this is due to negligence, a warning is issued. If there is further negligence or an outright default of the payment, the bail will be used to cover the damages and the member is expelled. If (which can not happen unless the scamming party can also hack the blackbox software to give him a larger outstanding orders limit than his bail covers) the damages exceed the bail, all other members pay prorated, and the scammer is expelled and criminally prosecuted.

7. The software will publish the fixing price automatically and immediately to the public. The volumes and counterparties of the trades will not be published.

8. Later on, the settlement can be extended to futures contracts, and options on futures can be written.