Show HN: Earn Bitcoins with your t-shirt (opens in new tab)

This idea is not viable as far as I can tell... Besides the obvious flaw of this service (it is a centralized business, which compromises most of the benefits a decentralized currency like Bitcoin has to offer) there HAS to be an objective way to determine whether a person is fulfilling their obligation to wear the tshirt. The only way I can think of to do that is to have "eyes on the ground", a second group of people who are "verifiers" who monitor the "badgers", and who are independent contractors willing to accept a very fluid employment arrangement... at this point you are sort of hamstrung with bitcoin because it has no significant smart contract system to encode the responsibilities of the various parties (the verifiers, badgers, and badgerhunt.com)

Until a cryptocurrency-based smart contract system becomes established (such as ethereum or codius) I just don't see how this type of business idea is going to be feasible (but certainly the roads of silicon valley are paved with the bodies of people arguing this or that business model is never going to work :-)

One thing I found a bit alarming is that the FAQ page says advertising funds are held by the site. It's good they realize the threat though and say a multisig solution will be rolled out. I hope this multisig solution will be rolled out quickly, otherwise I don't see big advertisers trusting the site with a lot of money.

Why involve Bitcoin into the whole thing? Couldn't you just use cash?

Services like getchute.com use image recognition to make pictures with logos available to brands. They mostly use the pics for online advertising. In a sense, they broadcast the brand to a bigger audience than what you could make with one person in the street and offer a way to track how many people have seen / will see the ad.

How would you compete with those kind of services? What would be the advantage(s) for a brand to offer free tshirts/stickers/caps to people so they can become "living ads"?

This kind of sponsor/ad thing has been working with celebrities, do you think everyone can be visible enough to be interesting for big brands?

So this looks like a dating site for advertisers and those who are willing to provide some advertising space on their t-shirts. Seems to me, not a very new concept. But somehow, I find it less humiliating then when people are dressed as mascots for some real-estate agency. Decency preserved.

Slightly offtopic, but it's nice that the default option when signing up is "Never send me news emails". Says a lot, in my opinion.