Bitcoin Forum

What is a community? it is a society of individuals that interact with each other in a strongly connected fashion.

Strongly connected graphs in graph theory are directed (bitcoins flow in a certain direction per transaction) graphs such that for every 2 individuals in the community there is a path in one direction and one in the other.

Let me relax this to redefine a strongly connected as connected sets of individuals for which each individual is both receiving bitcoins and spending bitcoins in that community.

I think this holds true for the fans on this board.

But it seems not true enough. We are sparsely connected graphs. Most of us are part of a few cycles of bitcoins.

If H (a hairdresser) and N (a newspaper seller) live in the same city and discover each other, there will probably occur a single haircut event, and perhaps a sustained newspaper events for time to come, but there is no reason in daily life that debit from H to N will be equal as from N to H. I tend to go to the same shop closeby, I dont think the supermarket will ever need my services in exchange for bitcoins.

If we spend bitcoins on commercial ads for bitcoin we better prepare it well.

Consider a cosmopolitan city, lots of people closeby, so if one wants bitcoin services, there is a larger probability of finding someone then in a village.

Suppose we take NY. Huge diversity. If we find out how much a localized commercial campaign would cost (television? radio ads? radio talk show? newspaper ads? stickers? posters? flyers?...?) and prepare all the ad content + a localized NY bitcoin website beforehand so they can easily organise a database of what services are available. Locals who wish a specific local shop/restaurant/grocery accepted bitcoin, then could arrange a few days of constant asking if they accept bitcoin (everytime a different BTC customer with a different flyer/sticker/...) so that when the shopkeeper returns home he would look it up and consider it. We also need to prepare a very userfriendly application / walletless BTC client so that he can check the payment, without risk of somebody in the shop stealing his wallet.dat. Also on the website guidelines to keep in mind when looking for services to target (i.e. the sometimes long confirmation time, so that a restaurant may be OK, or in the shopkeeper version BTC client, allow for accounts so that the customer can prepay amounts to the customer and top it up at home for next time) to prevent lines from stalling. BTC is great, but we need a "plug n play" solution for service providers who are not website maintainers and not prepared to code or script.

Perhaps target people with free time like students or jobless people? This could potentially give jobless people a chance!

The website should also be a skill database.

It would be wise to select a city in a jurisdiction where there is a fiat/BTC converter operating in a legal way.

Instead of trying to solve this problem in a disparate worldwide sense, solve the problem in one place first until it is self sufficient.
The local community will not be interested in technical aspects like we are. We would have to be very friendly to them and try to understand why they like or dislike the system, what can be improved etc.

Once the community is selfsufficient, we expect it to grow locally, and we can redo it in another city. If it fails, perhaps a new city would be a good idea, because we will have learnt, and have a clear name in a new city :D

If some of us agree except for the problem of which city to choose, then we could agree to put the bitcoins in escrow and let the blockchain decide a la The Amazing Anonymous BTC Lottery... Each donor can specify a city if he wants which gets on the end of a list of cities to convert. The previous donors choose to accept the donation on the condition all previous donors agree that the city is a viable candidate...

Sometimes costeffective ads just work.

This should go in the wiki.

If that should go in the wiki, then put it in the wiki.

You could post an address to donate btc to in order to fund a small add campaign.

to be honest, a proper bitcoin ad network that could compare to adsense would be perfect for my starting business, I'd much rather put money back into our community here than googles pockets (and botnet skiddies from cheating the system)

Does anonymousads.com qualify? :)

I don't think they are quite ready for prime time, but yeah once they build a client base they would quality :D

what about operationfabulous?

I used them before, the websites that are currently affilated with OF have traffic problems.

What kind of problems do they have.. Not enough traffic?

yeah, it was a long time since I last used them (3-4 months) but last time I checked they had double digit monthly unique visitors for their best sites.

I think that google ads would be useful.