Bitcoin Forum

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The limited resource of proselytising
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Presently, the bitcoin economy would appear to be mainly those interested in making margin profits in trading, with attendant financial services springing up to service those that deal mainly in currency trading - escrow, etc.

Without _local_ currency markets, bitcoin would appear to be a trader's game - more or less (to a layman) an online game that they may not understand all the rules of.  Why bother when they could invest their money in a "real" market that is so widely trusted the risk is seen as nonexistant (legitimate belief or not).

Take the time to educate that person on hidden taxations such as inflation, etc, and there is a possibility that they will begin to consider putting a portion of their savings into bitcoin - as just another way to spread risk in their portfolio.


Premise
=======

I have a small pool of investors that would like to bootstrap our local economy in bitcoins.

We have a reasonable amount of initial capital to inject into the system (perhaps a couple K USD between us) and accept that we may take a total loss as these bitcoins flee the local geographic area.

Although we have a wide range of services / goods that we can offer to each other - necessarily we will need to do (at least at first) a majority of our trades with the local community.  Obviously, we need to take our limited resources - our time and energy spent educating others about Bitcoin - and establish beachheads in the community that promote the greatest uptake.


Request For Comment
===================

What (in your opinion) are the key places to establish adoption of Bitcoin outside of our initial pool?

* Businesses dealing primarily in cash?
* College students?
* Persons that might like to have nonreputable "cash" that can't be stolen by a malefactor at point-of-trade?
* Employers of below-minimum-wage or undocumented workers?


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Now there are a few projects that must be fullfiled before this can really progress. Such projects are:
-Android Client
-Ripple Distributed Protocol for the Exchange and Instant Payments
-ATM Machin exchanges?
-POS Systems
-Animated Movie(When it is done buy tons and give them for free at schools, workplaces, universities, cinemas, grocery stores, etc)

As of the audience open minded(Young people) are more likely to adopt it at first then drag the elder ones. :-)

For the demand for software, do we have a centralized threshold pledge system set up? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system)

If we had a trusted agent for source code escrow, I would imagine that the rate of development would increase.

I know that I would immediately start looking into writing an Android client (which I would in turn open source) if someone escrowed >100 BTC.

Wait a minute - what would this offer above and beyond https://www.mybitcoin.com/ (https://www.mybitcoin.com/)?

MyBitCoin.com, although a very trustworthy site, is a central point of failure, something that BitCoin is trying to steer away from. However I am not against the idea of "banks" like MyBitCoin.com in anyway. Using these as current accounts would be best where money can be transferred instantly between each other as long as they are MyBitCoin.com account holders.

As far as android clients and what-not, what about POS technology? How would that interface with BitCoin?

The gist of my question is which merchants, rather than how.  How can get hashed out by the market once there's some buy-in.

And to directly answer your question - perhaps by having a display screen that shows inbound payments to the merchant's BTC account?

Client steps up, says what account the BTC will be coming from, and then makes their order.

Forgive my economic ignorance - are you saying that BTN has more speculative potential right now than potential for use as a new/shadow currency?

I can completely agree with that viewpoint - it does appear that BTN are still finding their level vs other currencies.

Does that invalidate or count as a huge demerit towards using it as a currency at the moment?

It seems like that provides a lot of incentive for the people at the edge of the network (BTN / real world) to speculate and trade back and forth - which will be needed at first.

If it's too early to bring BTN to the 'real world' - will there be an accurate indicator when it's finally 'safe'?  How far into 'early adopter' until I'm in 'hare-brained risk' territory?

Wasn't trying to put words in your mouth - just trying to figure out the relevance to the post topic.

We were just talking past each other.  All good.


That's an excellent point - I think I've been thinking about the problem backwards (not unusual for me) - if someone puts up a local exchange BTN for cash in the area they want to "take over" with BTN, that incentivizes initial buy-in.  Sounds like that's possibly Phase I.


But if I view my time in economic terms: I only have a limited supply of time - so I want the highest return on investment.  I can't possibly do everything at once, so I need to prioritize.  Who do I "infect" with the idea of BTN in my community in order to get the most people trading in them?  Identifying the "high value" people would appear to be Phase II...

Don't you mean BTC instead of BTN?

Apologies.  Swear I looked it up.   :-\

That makes really good sense.

So, Phase II needs to be broken out into three parts.

Looks like what I need to round up is folk that are willing to be 'ambassadors' of BTC, that will take payment in BTC.

Then, we send them out towards the three legs.

Local college can have bulletin board postings put up.  Check.

Paying wages...  Maybe lawn care services?  Other small shops that would _like_ to pay under minimum wage or under the table...

Goods...  All I've been able to come up with here is gift cards for small local shops, and black markets.

Anyone have any insights for other 'vulnerable' market segments?

Seems to me isolating a complete supply chain loop locally would also yield benefits.

The drug trade is a big one, anonymous payment is huge in that regard.

This isn't nice at all. If people correlate bitcoin with socially unaccepted behaviours then the adoption would be harder. xD

That's why I'm soliciting for alternatives - but I'm not going to hamstring adoption by counting it out, either.

I'm interested in uptake and taking BTC to the streets - if it comes to it - by any means necessary.

Ok, this is what we need first:
The POS system and the Ripple Decentralized Protocol/Exchange(F2F)

I am working on a PrestaShop module which will use MtGox merchant service. This shall allow more merchants to start offering tangible and non-tangible goods for bitcoins.

I have leverage on my current school(about 2K students and staff) and if I can get my hands to a POS system(Where you just walk, scan a QR address pay and you are done) system I wouldn't mind donating it to offer lunch and school material for Bitcoins.

could use a cash in mail, or cash deposit exchanger in the UK for buying bitcoins and in Germany that's reliable. or a ukash to btc in both countries if the fees are reasonable. especially in Ireland

a US exchanger that sells bitcoin to moneypack

everything else could just convert to hdmoney and use atm cards or cash in mail

I'm currently considering a local BTC -> USD business, as a first step to getting the community involved.

If anyone running a local exchange can put in their .02BTC worth on their experiences, that'd be awesome!

I, too, am interested in localizing bitcoin in my town. I live in a college town with a college that mostly caters to engineering, agriculture, and business degrees. The local residents are accustomed to gathering for farmer's market every week.
My strategy is to:

• recruit friends to gain familiarity with BTC
• start exchanging goods and services between us
• grow the user base to 25 people
• create a weekly newsletter listing what people want to buy and sell, and bitcoin related services
• set up a website devoted to local exchange only
• start directing people to the website from the newsletter
• grow the user base to 50 people
• set up a scheduled time and place for people to meet and exchange what they buy (possibly during the farmer's market)
• enlist people from the community gardens to sell vegetables
• polish up the newsletter and start talking to local businesses (cafes, pizza, sandwich shops, etc.)about accepting bitcoin tips, showing them the website so they can see what they can exchange the tips for
• move the swap meets to local businesses so they can host them (and maybe compete for meeting times)
• roll out the POS system

I can do much of this through my own effort. However, I am not skilled enough to develop a website that can:

• allow me to write updates about the local bitcoin community (like a blog)
• securely authenticate users
• allow users to create their own product listings (with a quantity option)
• put hooks into clearcoin or some other escrow service for facilitating safe transactions
• create a rating system for transactions
• allow a growable taxonomy for organizing goods and services
• create "watch"es on items that either send an email or create an RSS feed based on items that are back in stock or for an item that I want that is not yet listed (so someone else can see that the item I want is not currently available and add the item to the market if they have it

Many of the website pieces exist already, but not in this configuration that I am aware of. What do you think about my strategy? How many BTC would cost for someone to build such a website (and allow people in other communities to configure it to their own location)?

These are far better milestones than my nebulous:
1) ???
2) BTC are accepted by the general populace.
3) We win.
Business plan.

It looks to me like you're setting up a cross between Craigslist and Ebay...

A few things that come to mind:

• Separating the social from the business aspects - ie managing a blog/forum/PM system seems like a lot of b*tchy political user overhead to me.
• On that same note, that implies a system of moderators...  Not a huge deal but there may be a cleverer way of setting up both a hierarchy of goods and anti-troll/spam measures with some sort of community policing.  Maybe that's just my militant laissez-faire speaking.
• Though this thread is (nominally) about a "local economy" - I don't see a reason that geographic tags can't be added to items, or sellers, or whatever, rather than limiting the scope of users by design.
• Leveraging anonymity - something else not to throw away would be the privacy BTC facilitates.  There are plenty of grey market items that might want to be traded.  There is also the possibility that BTC will attract unwanted attention from the powers that be, and being ahead of the game by allowing people to "go dark" is something that can be provided without too much overhead, if it's designed in from the start.[/i]
  

With caveats, this is a manageable project.  You have a "business" plan and what looks like the beginnings of some example use cases.

It's certainly something I'd entertain working on for fame, and release the code under some threshold pledge setup for BTC.  Just don't let me near the presentation layer.  ;)

I think there needs to be a printable flyer put out, a youtube video made that shows the practicality of bitcoin, and other things to directly engage consumers and merchants.

Hey guys, I guess we all think a lot a like. I might have a solution for "set up a website devoted to local exchange only". I launched it earlier today.

http://tradebitcoin.com/

It's a site dedicated to facilitating local Bitcoin commerce. I think it's something we need as a community. It would help finding other local Bitcoin users.

I've thought about changing the engine so it accepted different kinds of accounts. Right now it assumes everyone wants to be a local Bitcoin exchanger. I could make a few changes and voila we'd have listings of local Bitcoin businesses. It may be a cog in our bigger plan for local Bitcoin.

Im having a garage sale soon and it would be cool to sell some stuff for bitcoins. When I put the ad in the paper I should mention bitcoin is accepted.

People will probably go wtf is bitcoin ?

 :D

sadly we dont have any other bitcoin users in my local area...they are all a couple of hours away.

I'm working on making a flyer. I think it would be a good idea to set up a common area where we can edit the flyer, add permutations, and do A/B testing to find the best configuration of information. We could also set up a database in the common area to log the type of business we approach, success/failure of bitcoin adoption, and which permutation of the form was used. That should provide enough information for now to do statistical analysis.

Also, I think if there was enough interest in this project, we could form a company. As a company, we develop the tools (flyers, video, etc.) to distribute information in our respective local communities. Then, we find Bitcoin enthusiasts in other communities and hire them to deliver the flyers since they have a local rapport.

Okay, so I'm not that great at making flyers.

Here is my attempt at a mission statement: to develop a local community of people who (1) discover what they are most creative at, (2) share the knowledge of how to do their craft for free, and (3) receive enough in gratitude tips to live as materially comfortably as they choose.

I think a properly configured WordPress could be a very useful tool. People can use it to create a post teaching others how they do what they love to do. It would also (probably) have some sort of wallet management system so that each post automatically comes with a tip jar bitcoin address.

There are 2 other structures that needs to be built into it, if they don't exist already. One structure is geographical. There needs to be an easy way to associate with others through a wordpress system. Suppose I live in Calabasas, CA, US. I would belong to the "Calabasas" group. To me, it would just show up as "Calabasas". In the system, "Calabasas" would be a subset of "San Fernando Valley", which would be a subset of "Greater Los Angeles", subset of "Southern California", subset of "California", a subset of "West Coast", subset of "America", subset of "North America", subset of "Western Hemisphere", subset of "The World". The geographical relationships would be defined naturally by the users, not needing to be formal political boundaries. This would be very useful so that when I want to search for something based on tags, I could limit the scope of it by geography. "I'm only willing to look for a {sandwich} in {Calabasas}, but I'm willing to look for a {used car} anywhere in {Greater Los Angeles}."

The other structure is organizational. Suppose I belong to a Gardening Club. There is a president, vice president, secretary, etc. Then, there is a North American chapter with its own president. After a few steps down in the hierarchy, we get to the Calabasas chapter. Joining a chapter is a voluntary action so the whole organization is run voluntarily and survives against competition based on good management. I think this would facilitate trade between different cultures, too, since the "company" is run truly by peers of like mind rather than peers of location by necessity.

I had an idea about creating posters for local businesses. The poster will have the business name/logo on it. Also, it will have pictures of everyone who works there and each person will have their bitcoin QR code underneath. I believe I can build a rapport with them and they would accept it once they understand what I'm giving them, but I have 0 graphic design skills. I was thinking maybe I could find a caricaturist to draw the faces to give it a human touch. Does anybody have any suggestions?

Thats not a bad idea actually.  You could tip them personally for good service and know the boss wasnt going to take the cash.  :)

Unless the boss owned all the bitcoin addresses.....


We have witcoin.com for posting stuff on which lets people tip you .

This business makes good food and the owner is fairly open minded. http://www.highstdeli.com/ (http://www.highstdeli.com/) Take a look at their website. What would be the easiest way to integrate Bitcoin into their business? There seems to be some way to order online, but I haven't tried it out yet.

I'll make the pitch to them, but I've never made a business pitch before. Does anybody have advice?

Practice what you're going to say ahead of time, to friends or family or whatever.

Past that, just try and explain why bitcoins are convenient for a business owner, and answer questions as they come up, and if you don't know something don't try and guess, point them here or ask yourself, and we can help explain things.

Mining should not be brought up, unless it is asked as a question, otherwise people tend to get the idea that it's free money, which it isn't.

Fantastic idea.  You should print up some physical Bitcoins and exchange them.


A deli is a perfect business to pitch Bitcoin to.  That's a great idea.

I was thinking maybe we could build free websites to business like this Deli that are willing to accept bitcoin.

We could have something like bitbusiness.com/yourBusiness (just made up this name) where we could host these websites.
In the same "bitbusiness" (or whatever name we choose) we could help people tracking these places.

I would go to a pretty far place only because it accepts bitcoin! All we have to do is convince business owners of this.

I could set up the websites for the shops at the rate of a couple per weekend  (initially with wordpress, of course) and the main website where we would track this places and accept applications from local shops willing to participate.

I would just need a place to host and someone to talk to local shops to convince them

This is great! I was also thinking of people, too, as well as shops. Since I've started talking to more strangers recently, I've noticed that a lot of them have their own hobbies and dreams they would like to do or achieve. They don't follow them because they don't see how it can be done practically, so they work "normal" jobs.

I was thinking that if I had a website like the one you could set up, I can teach them how to take their craft and show it off online. Everybody gains from the free knowledge and it builds up a good name for the "hobbyist". I think eventually, this type of system will create demand for the "hobbyist's" real services and they can actually earn a good living doing what they love. Positive reinforcement is the most powerful kind.

Was this a joke? I really didn't get it

Not a joke at all. Most people I talk to in person hate their day job and feel stuck in its structure because they see it as the only way to pay their bills. I talk to them, get them to open up about what they really want to do with their lives, then design practical plans/solutions to help them achieve what they want to do.

If they are willing to sell a service or product for bitcoins we can include them for sure!

This is how we understand it online, but the way they understand it is translated to "we are willing to pursue our hobbies, hopes, dreams, whatever and if we get congratulations, high fives, words of recognition or praise, tips in bitcoins for it, great!".

Help people figure out a practical way to do what they want to do and they will naturally see bitcoin as an informal (and then formal?) way to keep track of the "congratulations, high fives, words of recognition or praise".

If you (take the risk to) build it (and build it right), they will come.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHTsQ9qePrQ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHTsQ9qePrQ)
(But who are the businesses that come?)

I think spreading out flyers redeemable for a small amount of BTC is the way to go. For the best impact, they should be spread in a tight-knit group of tech-savvy people -- a college, say.  A flyer might look like this:


Redeem this for 1 BitCoin, a new kind of money at:

http://yourdomain.com/HXV13   <--- different path for each flyer printed

Learn more about bitcoin at: http://www.bitcoin.org/


If you and many or most of your real-life contacts have BitCoins, then using it as a medium of exchange seems like the natural next step...

Simpler to point them to the faucet. And I think you get a steeply decreasing marginal promotional benefit from an extra .95BTC.

I think this would be considerably more effective than giving them a link to the Bitcoin Faucet. For one thing, there are a lot of goods worth 1 BTC (http://www.99only.com/), but virtually no real-world goods you can buy with 0.05 BTC.  And furthermore, there are usually better deals available to students (reduced prices) than to non-students -- why not give them a better deal here?  It's an investment in the future of the BitCoin economy.

And finally, everyone likes to be part of an exclusive club. How exclusive is it if _anyone_ can go to the BitCoin faucet? It's about as sexy as a drinking faucet. If you want to sell someone tickets, you sell them VIP tickets. :P