Bitcoin Forum

This was quite a challenge for me as I'm not great at presentations and obviously never done one about Bitcoin. Because I was at a political party meeting I tried to give it a political angle and not go too technical. I was also only given 5 minutes, which turned into 10 and a fair few people had questions and comments after. One of the most interesting was that proof-of-stake was a better system for the environment and an inflationary currency would be better for society. I'm curious about the proof-of-stake, but don't think people given the choice would choose an inflationary currency over a deflationary one. The guy said that deflation helps the rich more than the poor.

Anyway, it was nice to do something like this and I hope I can maybe do another one in the future.  

Wow great, it is a great accomplishment.

I am due to do my first bitcoin / altcoin speech in a few months - very nervous!

Thanks man. I was very nervous too, but the way to ease them nerves in the future is to do more.

What type of audience will you have?

I did the classic Andreas start by asking who had heard of Bitcoin and who had some. Was a good way to get started and help the nerves.

Excellent contribution. PoW is a hard sell for environmentalists. You can stress that ASICs are very efficient at converting electricity into heat and the laws of thermodynamics incentivize miners to use inexpensive renewable energy like hydro that can than be recycled as waste heat for useful purposes.

They still may be interested in PoS, but you can clarify that PoW is valuable both as a fairer distribution model than a premined/instamined PoS coin and because it offers better security.


This is the point when you could have corrected them and clarified that bitcoin is indeed inflationary and not deflationary, disinflationary to be exact. You could clarify that Bitcoin currently has around ~10% inflation, will have 5% next year.. and will have very low inflation till 2140.

Bitcoin is a cure for communism so I can imagine it did not go over well at a Communist Party meeting.

They do not want a currency that is fair, they want one that gets distributed (stopping first in their pockets so they can determine who is worthy).

Decentralization is the antithesis of people who want power to be centralized.

Even though the Green Party is just a front for their true passion of communism and they don't really care about the environment, here is a detailed breakdown of the carbon footprint of Bitcoin's PoW system:
http://www.coindesk.com/microscope-conclusions-costs-bitcoin/

http://media.coindesk.com/2014/07/Picture-23-630x227.png

The good news is that those types of people are typically not early adopters so they will be left with their fiat to the bitter end. Complaining the whole way down.

😀

It will be at a Bitcoin meet up, just about my company and my view on crypto currencies but want to start my own courses as well so will be a good springboard.

lol - I just watched another Andreas talk - great intro.

Thanks for the information - i'll look into that.

I did actually argue that there is inflation with bitcoin, but his come back was that there are more coins lost than there are being produced, creating deflation. I said there is no way in knowing that for a fact.  

I could imagine that someone could invent a communist coin as a BTC sidechain and it could work on an extremely local level like a small anarcho-communist collective(just like bartering) but they tend to be unstable and not scale.


In fact you can pretty much guarantee that people aren't losing 3600 BTC a day. The higher the value BTC is the more steps people will take to back it up and secure it. The only reason so many bitcoins were lost early on was because they were worth from 0-pennies and few had confidence in its future. This has completely reversed.

Freicoin was created as an inflationary coin.

Haven't heard of it? Ya...because nobody would voluntarily start using a currency made to lose value.

Any small community creating their own coin is vulnerable to a 51% attack by anyone who wants to disrupt their community.

"The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used. Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste."

S.N.

Salient point and why a communist like coin would need to piggy back off of bitcoins security as a sidechain if it wanted a chance of survival.
I have visited several anarcho-collectives and am ok with people voluntarily adopting these anti-capitalist polices as long as it is voluntary and not forced upon others through coercion. There are many examples of local currencies that do "ok" and serve some useful purposes and if a group of them wanted to get together and create a
token to denominate hours worked instead of value determined by the marketplace than they should be able to. They won't attract many high skilled work with that
plan and likely remain somewhat behind technologically, but that is fine if they prefer such a lifestyle.

This being said it is important to recognize that despite the green party having the right principles on many social policies and good intentions their overall platform and philosophy tends to be more socialistic where they want to impose top down central planning upon society which is antithetical to many bitcoin principles. This means that you would need to convince them indirectly by some other means such that Bitcoin has the most momentum and is far superior to traditional banking that it would be wise to place our effort behind this project and than work on other more favorable options or change bitcoin itself in the future.

Yes, a colored coin might work in such an instance.

I disagree mate. They are the most democratic party around. Every policy they have is decided by a voting system. They support fairer economic polices and I find them very open minded, which is why I decided to vote for them a few months back. I joined the party because I wanted a better insight to the type of people running the show. I'm impressed with what I've seen. They are basically a bunch of activists that i believe are forward thinking and actually the first party to have any of their members accept Bitcoin for donations. Look here:

http://www.coindesk.com/green-activist-first-mainstream-uk-politician-accept-bitcoin/

They were very keen to have me talk about Bitcoin and the reception was very positive.

The argument against proof of stake is that the data isn't properly secured. Understanding why depends on your understanding of what the reason is for using the hash function at all. Stress this point. Understand it yourself as best you can. The hashing is not wasteful at all, the reality is the opposite.

There's nothing inherently inflationary about proof of stake. You really ought to do the due diligence here, as you are acting in a position of responsibility. Don't allow your reputation to suffer as a result of this.  

I didn't claim that there was anything inflationary about proof of stake and neither did the guy that made the comment. He said he believed more in a coin that has both these attributes.

Ahh...Green Party in the UK.

I was thinking of the Green Party of the US which is basically people who love communism but don't like being linked to the baggage of the millions of people who died under those systems. So they change their name to Green Party or progressism.

Ah, that slipped past me. Study the hash function.

Communism isn't the right definition , but I think Elwar was using it as a descriptive sense rather than categorically.

The point is they are structured in such a way that they support a much different type of "democracy" than what exists in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is permissionless, open source, and voluntary where one vote can decide a new direction and the majority can not force the minority through coercion.

Thanks, I will.

Yes, well I don't think you'll find a political party on the planet that is behind Bitcoin yet, but I believe the UK Green Party are open minded enough and if they can see true benefits for society which are better than the alternatives, they will get behind it. It's a long way off, but I hope I have at least planted a few seeds. 

Aha.... I did wonder if we were talking about the same party. Thanks for your comments though. I didn't realise what the Green Party in the USA were all about.

This is great. Early on it was people doing stuff like this that caused bitcoin to explode. When it did, it seemed to attract a lot of people who just wanted to get rich ass sitting. Nice job Yorkydude! Please PM me with one of your receiving addresses or post it here. I for one would like to tip you.

Agreed. Next time, film it and upload it to youtube and I will give you a large tip as well...Yorkydude. Thanks.

Honestly speaking, even if you don't do a presentation about bitcoin, or by just merely saying anything about bitcoin, it will be hard because most people don't know the concepts and the facts behind bitcoin. I tried discussing bitcoin to my economics teacher once, and she ended up telling me that "it is a scam." I don't know, but maybe people aren't that "ready" to accept bitcoin yet--even the idea behind it.

Ah, cheers dude. That be very nice as I've not been tipped for anything before.

Cheers :)

http://hostthenpost.org/uploads/16656fd72a49a6338e6d5be5d6830228.png (http://hostthenpost.org)

Haha..... sorry I didn't realise how big the screen shot was going to turn out

Yes, once I get better at them I would definitely like to record them. I'm learning Spanish too, so my dream of a goal is to do one in Spanish.

Economics professors within colleges and universities are 99% keynsian in their philosophy and have been trained to believe that anything that isn't inflationary and centrally controlled is flawed. They will be the last people to accept bitcoin and probably only use it if they didn't know they are which is likely to happen in the next 5-10 years . There is no reason people should waste their time arguing with these people unless they want to hone their debate skills or if they are prepared and in front of an audience.

Haha, i was actually pleasantly surprised with the feedback. It's definitely encouraged me to do more and try to push these ideas more. I followed up with one of my favourite Andreas Antonopoulos youtube videos on their Facebook page. I agree though, mostly people give you some very negative responses.    

So how the response after the presentation ?

Well since I'm still college guy, everybody still underestimate bitcoin because nobody ever heard about it. So it also lack of response.
Be gratefull for us for who had known bitcoin earlier  8)

Best way to convert someone IMHO is to get them to use it or experience it first hand. Next time you are going out for a dinner party make sure you go to a restaurant that accepts bitcoin and pay for your meal or everyones with your cell wallet. You will immediately get them interested and asking you questions and than you can go into all the reasons why you prefer it over credit cards and cash like..

1) If someone steals your cellphone you don't lose your bitcoins (as you have a HD 12 word backup)
2) If someone steals your cell they cannot use your BTC as they need your pin (mycelium and others) and with a cc they can create fraud and you can be inconvenienced by needing to order a new cc and paying the deductible
3) That local businesses appreciate it more as they don't get charged a transaction fee and thus it helps the local economy
4) There is no risk of hackers attacking the business or payment processor(I.E... target) and committing identity theft and fraud as bitcoin was designed to secure you by not giving over your personal identification , credit cards are flawed by design and while applepay is better is still weaker in security than bitcoin.

ect...

Gracias por difundir la palabra.

.01337 tip sent to a "leet" bitcoiner!

Muchas gracias señor! Espero hacer mas y mas :)

I agree, the best way is to get people to use it. Which is why i've been giving paper wallets with a small amount of BTC on to all my friends for their birthdays.

Awesome that you had an opportunity to present bitcoin to an audience.

I have always thought that the best way for someone to really learn what bitcoin is, is to give a simple demonstration. Transmit a few dollars worth of btc from your phone wallet to an audience member with a laptop. Then have them order something with a btc merchant.

When folks see how you can transmit bitcoins over the internet for themselves, it starts to click. I may start doing this in my local internet cafes, and try to get the coffee shops themselves to accept bitcoin, for ease of demonstration.

H.

Hi,

Yeah I suppose showing people how it works is a good way to make people understand it better. And I suppose if it ever does go main stream most people won't need to know much more than this.

This presentation was only short and I had to stop in the middle of what I was saying because I ran out of time, but I hope I can do a much longer one someday.

I was very surprised that everyone in the room had heard of Bitcoin and two people actually had some. Not what you'd expect from a political party with only about 30 people in the room. If i'd have asked that question 2 years ago i'm sure it would have been close to zero. It's so interesting to see where this is all going.

The topic itself is a bit challenging.
The next time i would like to suggest you to present to the audience some facts.
https://99bitcoins.com/test-yourself-are-you-the-ultimate-bitcoin-expert/
That i learned today and are very interesting and would make the audience more attractive to your presentation.

Even with all it's negative connotations, PoW is still king and the best way to go about securing a blockchain. PoS is in my eyes a scam. I would rather have an algorithm issuing currency than depending on some stakeholders.
Of course communists aren't going to deal with the pretty much natural law of risk and reward. They just don't get that the super early adopters bought BTC when it was meaningless, therefore they deserve a lot of reward.
Someone buying it now, deserves a lot of reward vs someone buying it 10 years down the line, etc.

And what makes you think I didn't present any facts?

Thanks for the quiz. I'll give it a go later.