Bitcoin Forum

What do you all think is the area in the Bitcoin community that needs the most help right now? That is, if I had some money and/or man-hours to sink into something, what should I use those resources towards that would benefit the community the most? Should I help with the main client, develop my own client, pool, exchange, trade, store, or perhaps introduce new people to the concept that is Bitcoin?

Yes.
Big people.
And big companies.

But it mightn't be easy.

Or even just give away what you can afford to people in the form of paper keys, smartphone apps, or whatever is easy for you. Show them how easy bitcoin is to use. Show them how secure bitcoin is.

Actually,  I think too big of a company right now would be horrible for Bitcoin.  Watch them adopt it and eat up 50% of the market.

I think #1 issue is insurance.

If they tried, the price would shoot up too fast.

I think an important issue is turning more of the Bitcoin community from working on Bitcoin-centered solutions (clients on different platforms, new websites to manage bitcoins and calculate earnings, etc.) to working on growing the amount of business to accept Bitcoins. The infrastructure seems to be pretty stable, there are a lot of steady miners hashing it away, but you can't buy all that much with Bitcoins.

It needs people to genuinely care about it and use it as a currency, and not as a get rich quick scheme.  Right now everyone here just wants a massive influx of users so their own wealth skyrockets long enough for them to cash back out into worthless fiat dollars.  See Atlas' lamentations about how low the price is and how we should be doing everything possible to "spread the word".

The reality is that if you get a massive amount of people to buy bitcoins, you'll just have a lot more registered users here all asking the same questions you are: what do we do with our bitcoins?  They're cumbersome to manage, expensive to transact with, and they're a beacon for scammers of all shapes and sizes.  This is to say nothing of the USD/BTC volatility which makes serious vendors laugh at the idea of accepting them.

Mainly we need solid and financially reasonable merchant services. Supposedly there are a lot of people working on this. But I haven't seen anything I can sell to businesses yet.

At the price it is, we can afford to give away bitcents to LOTS of people. We tell them what it is and it's potential. Bitcoin will become collectable. The more collectable it becomes, the more valuable it becomes. As it grows in value, people will begin to trade bitcoin for goods or other currencies. Vendors will adapt to accepting bitcoin. Rinse. Repeat. QED

Make these forums official again so when people reference the "Bitcoin Community" it can actually have a definite meaning.

Or take down the link to the Bitcoin Stack Exchange and that Google search link on the front page of http://bitcoin.org and point to this page https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin:Community_portal

^10

There needs to be a wider variety of goods and services available for bitcoins at rates that are at least as good as other currencies. One of the main attractions for me when I first heard about bitcoins was the elimination of the need to pay credit card companies or Paypal to accept money electronically - that's a huge savings for any merchant and it should be passed along to the customer.

Hmm, this would be an interesting idea - set up some fund, get some people from the community involved in donating some coins, and then sending some coins in form of QR-codes to some charities, computer-related internet celebrities, or other things that would get the community some good publicity and exposure.

Bit-pay.com

Education / information resources. Currently someone who learns about Bitcoin can't get clean, concise, accurate information. The wiki might be the proper venue for this but currently leaves a lot to be desired.

A good PR campaign. Preferably not one run by any of the people on the forums who want to or think they are qualified to run one.

Get an official letterhead from a large, well known company (Amazon? Apple? Facebook? eBay?), write up an "internal memo" referring to how they are supposedly setting up their retail servers to work with Bitcoin and plan to accept Bitcoin soon, and secretly "leak" it to a bunch of newspapers, as if it's coming from someone deep within the company, but the information is supposed to be kept secret and will likely be denied.
Then sit back and watch the firestorm as papers and magazines publish about the leak and the company scrambles to deny it, despite the "leak" implying they would, anyway. With a large enough company this may generate quite a lot of publicity, and, if they are forced to look into what the heck it is, may even convince them to accept Bitcoin after all.
This would have to be done by an expert troll tough, way beyond my capabilities.

I'm starting to think we should focus more on bounties:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Active_Bounties
Both offering them and completing them.

I'll blame myself first, I've been all talk and no actual work.

Hmm, almost all of the bounty links seem not to be working...

It's impossible to tell what part of their services are launched and what part are "coming soon", and from what I've heard their rates aren't very attractive. Their website needs a lot of work.

I quote myself.  Insurance is #1.

Insurance? Which kind? Buying insurance with BTC, or insuring BTC?

In the first case, easy enough today, I could have an agent in about 30 minutes who would sell you a policy and wait for it to be valid until the payment came through the chain, no issue.

In the second case... far greater issue. Insure that the chain will stay intact? Insure that you will not be scammed by some flaky alt-coin or fly-by-night exchange and snake oil dispensary? Too many variable, and too many additional opportunities for the criminal scumbags who lurk in this world to create their instant web identities and rip people off. Trust is a mighty rare thing around these parts, and it is most often abused.

Perhaps what it needs most is a bump from something legit, an article in the WSJ, a breakthrough into more mainstream media, again, and go for the bounce that happens when the new adopters flock to it, and filter in the next generation of users.

I agree. But we do live in a market system. Good ideas get competition fairly quick, I for one am actually working to start a company that will provide services similar to Bit-pay. I can already guarantee it's going to be cheaper. And I have a feeling that I'm not the only one doing this.

What Bitcoin needs is known companies accepting Bitcoin as payment for goods and services. It also needs more publicity. Everything will happen in due time, but it does take time. For example I'm planning to start my company early next year and that's as fast as I can do it. It'll probably be well into the second quarter of 2012 until I have a complete product.

This is why I think that if Bitcoin really rockets it's going to happen next year. On this note, one very important market for Bitcoin is micropayments. It's very convenient to send small amounts of money using Bitcoin, it's fast and usually free or with very low fees. This is where Bitcoin will flourish.

One exchange has posted that it has liability insurance to cover losses.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=48226.msg576459#msg576459

Individual businesses can almost always insure themselves in some way if they're prepared to pay the premiums.  It's hard to know what the extent of compensation by an insurer would be in reality until a BTC business tries to make a claim and the various defined events in the policy need to be interpreted.  Obviously only certain types of losses are going to be covered by an insurance policy.

One issue with Bitcoin is that many services seem to be started with little or no capital behind them - I suspect that a lot of them wouldn't have the funds to purchase insurance in the first place, let alone to self-insure.

I do mean insuring BTC.  I actually posted a thread about an interesting idea I had about creating a business acting sort of like a BTC reserve (like a BTC fort knox).  The value of this business, as it acts as a reserve, would constitute backing for BTC, and it's assets could be insured federally.

The business would have a triple role as a BTC reserve, a mining pool/company, and a computer/GPU manufacturer and retailer.  People could donate old rigs/GPUs to the company and they would be used either 1) to add to the Business mining pool.  The company would essentially a massive mining farm and donators could receive a share of the pool.  Or 2) the materials would be used to create new rigs/GPUs for retail.  The idea is to tie BTC value into something that is integral to it - computers!

So, again the 3 roles of the business would be...
1)  Act as a BTC reserve by associating the company value with BTC backing value.  This value is established mainly by the computers being sold and used to create BTC.  This seems to make sense since not only are the computers doing the work, but the computers confirm the value of BTC through the Bitcoin client.  No computers = no BTC value due to 0 confirmations.
2)  Act as a mining pool/company.  It would use some of the donated material to run a mining farm.  Donators receive a share a the mining proceeds.
3)  Act as a computer manufacturer/retailer.  The rest of the donated materials would go toward financing new computers and GPUs to be sold and used for mining.  Not only does this create a nice little cycle (i.e. create, sell, mine, donate, repeat), but it would establish the company as a business.  The company value could be insured, and this would be a nice little backing for BTC.