UPDATE 8 hours before campaign was over:

BipCoin, alive and well. But Dot-Bip decentralized DNS is not happening. I refunded everyone's money. Did it now before campaign is over. From what Indiegogo told me, it seems like it's easier now than after campaign is over.

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Web Censorship is a Growing Problem

Many nations censor websites. And even the USA, long proud of its free speech, just elected a president who has threatened to stop journalists from criticizing him.

If you want to skip ahead and read our whitepaper, it's here:

• Michael Dean and Dot-Bip team member Derrick Slopey did the FeenPhone campaigns on Indiegogo and  delivered on the promises of the campaigns. You can download that software and use it right now from www.feenphone.com
• We have an existing cryptocurrency, BipCoin. It was released August 20, 2016. You can mine it and trade it right now. It's on an exchange and people are mining and using it. It's at https://bipcoin.org/
• Our plan is to add decentralized DNS to BipCoin. Like what Namecoin promised, but never delivered in a usable way that got adoption.
• Domain squatting was a huge problem for Namecoin. We will prevent that by auto-updating the price of auto-registering a domain to what is currently 8 dollars US.
• This is expensive enough to prevent domain squatting, but cheap enough that anyone who can afford a web host can afford an uncensorable domain.
• We will do this by auto-pegging the amount of BipCoin to register a domain to the current price of gold. We can do this through API integration and through basically having the program do a web search and intelligently seeing which of the results are current gold prices, then averaging them.
• It will cost half as much for the first year, to encourage adoption.
• There will be no third-party domain registrar, and thus no single point of failure.
• We will provide ease of use by including a system-wide Dot-Bip domain resolver right in the BipCoin wallet. No third-party plugins will be required. Namecoin has been around five years and still isn't easy to use.
• Other corporate blockchains that promise distributed DNS-like features are actually censorable, by the board of directors, and by pressure from governments.
• Our software is always no-cost to download and use, and the source code is available on GitHub for inspection and creating derivations.
• Our goal is to make us, the team, unneeded within three years of release of the first proof-of-concept working version of Dot-Bip.

What We Need & What You Get

• We need to hire two more top-notch C++ programmers who have blockchain experience (especially with CryptoNote). We have a team, but all the programmers have day jobs and families. The one non-programmer on the team (who came up with the concept, name and most of the whitepaper), can work full time overseeing and guiding this. So we need some hardcore full-time programmer folks to come in and kick butt full time for a little while to make this work, NOW.
• We won't need repeated fundraisers. 80% of the BipCoin that people use to self-register domains will go to ongoing Dot-Bip and BipCoin ecosystem development.
• The other 20% will go to four charities committed to freedom. (Free Ross, Anti-war.com, Restore the Fourth / Reinst8, and FIJA.org) Someone at each org has already agreed to this.
• We'll also be providing these charities with free lifelong Dot-Bit domains and helping them configure everything.
• We'll be spending some of the money on perks. Michael Dean has a 100% completion record with delivering all perks as described and on time in his 4 previous Indiegogo campaigns.
• We're not charging extra money for shipping the perks. That's weak. People hate that. We'll be paying it out of our take.
• We'll also be spending money on more servers, maybe some better web design, and misc. expenses. So far this has all been out of pocket, but we need your help to take it forward.
• We'd love to make enough to set a little aside for any unforeseen contingencies. Including if we need to hire an attorney at any point. Trying to protect free speech is not free.
• What you get: much more freedom in the world, lots of tyrants having a bad day because they can no longer "SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING! that's said bad about them. + Some cool perks.
• Even without donating, once we go live, people will be able to help, and receive a share of the domain registration fees, by running a Gold Node. Gold Nodes will be special software running on user-owned Raspberry Pi computers. These computers are inexpensive (starting at around $35). Having a large number of these running around the world will increase the speed of transactions, plus do the work required to keep the price of registering domains consistent with worldwide prices of BipCoin (as measured to current gold price), regardless of that day's price of BipCoin. This will prevent domain squatting while also keeping the price of domain registration reasonable.

The Impact

Most people don't think about free speech until it's gone. You should think about free speech and talk about it NOW, while you still can.

We are NOT people who like to yell "the sky is falling." We keep a fairly positive attitude, and we hope you do too.

But we're also realists, and if you think free speech isn't in danger right now, you're not paying attention.

Risks & Challenges

• Michael Dean has worked on four Indiegogo campaigns that have all used the money raised for exactly what he said he would. This can be verified easily, the products are available as a result of these fundraisers. He gets things done that he says he'll do. More on Michael's background is here: http://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/3220
• Details on the other team members are here: https://bipcoin.org/?page_id=56
• The challenge is to get this funded and done quickly enough to get adoption growing before the next round of "chilling effect" internet prosecutions happen. If we get funded, we are confident we can do this, based on our verifiable previous accomplishments presented here and in the above links.
• If we can fund our whole goal, or near that goal, we believe we can have a solid, working beta to share with the world in a few months. This will include registration of domain names that will be on the mainnet blockchain of BipCoin, and will continue to be there as things grow and the software improves.
• More money means less cutting corners, with everything. Yeah, members of our team have experience getting things done cheap, but it always involves some hardships. The more money, the less hardships, the more time the team has to work on going forward, instead of stumbling over "how do we do this for less money?"
• If we can fund 1/4 to 2/3 of our goal, we will likely be able to get this done, it's just going to take a lot longer. And by then, free speech could be varying shades of illegal, so it may note be easy / possible to get this done then. This needs to be working well and getting adoption, pretty close to NOW.
• If we get less than 1/4 of our goal, we will simply use that money to continue work on BipCoin in general, and on spreading the idea of this plan. We will continue doing outreach to explain why distributed DNS is NOT a "done deal" just because some things resembling it sort of exist. Those things have no adoption, and this needs ADOPTION. And if we get less than 1/4 of our goal, we'll keep trying to find someone else who can help do it, either on BipCoin or elsewhere. It's a solid plan and it needs to happen, even if it's not with BipCoin.

Other Ways You Can Help

If you can't open your pocketbook, at least open your heart and help out:

• Please get the word out and tell 2 friends. (Or 200.)
• Use the Indiegogo share tools!
• Post our link above to all your social networks.
• Mine BipCoin. That strengthens the network, and costs nothing but the electricity to keep your computer on. Info is here: https://bipcoin.org/?page_id=16
• Check out and share the charities we'll be donating part of the incoming registration BipCoin to. And share their links with people also:
• https://freeross.org/
• http://www.antiwar.com/
• http://fija.org/
• https://restorethe4th.com/