Bitcoin Forum

I want to spread mainstream adoption of Bitcoin by doing something called "geotagging". For instance, you can look for a location on the map and "pin" it for other people to go there using their phone's GPS and do some "treasure hunting" for Bitcoin. If made possible, this could greatly increase the adoption of Bitcoin and crypto worldwide like never before. There doesn't seem to be an "app" for that nowadays, but maybe I'm missing something here.

If you happen to know of a way to do "Bitcoin Geotagging", please let me know. Any help, suggestions, or recommendations will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. :)

Hey, the idea is great, and as you say, there no app today to make this. If these were in my hands i would use coordinates and not a digital map, this way the project doesn't depend on google maps. And you can use a social network to post those coordinates.

For example, a tweet with the next information:


Another option is to make a web page where any user could register and post a place where he leave some BTC.

This was done in 2015 - 2016 I believe, by a group that also wanted to spread information and awareness about bitcoin. Sadly it never took off that much, and the project was scrapped. There was an ANN thread here as well if I remember correctly. The idea is to make it look like you're treasure hunting, and they lined up the ANN with the revelation of the then-talked about Pokemon Go to make sure the hype is up. The problem with this is that not a lot of people will join and the venture would be purely charity, to which the question arises on who would fund the project.

It might end up not meeting the primary goal which is mainstream adoption if you put up coordinates which are close to impossible to even translate into a specific place.

Phemex's Satoshi-Maze Puzzle comes to mind first. The competition ended without anybody solving it. The puzzle was too hard I am sure there was only a handful who attempted and had fun trying to solve it.

Why not reduce the coordinates to a simple degrees, minutes, and seconds format so that a lot of people will join? But the first few locations would only reveal a clue and another set of coordinates for another clue and coordinates until the prize is found.

This would be amazing though it is a bad timing right now.

With the pandemic happening right now, I don't think people would be travelling somewhere without having a doubt though it is something from the past as far as I know.

How about something like a facebook video where people would be sharing the video and they will earn Bitcoin if they are the winner. Though it would be just a simple lottery but still, with people right now mostly in their houses, that is the best thing they could do now.

I love this idea and would love it to be fully developed .
I remember seeing this thread a while back and it caught my eye.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5216753.0

Is this the sort of thing you were thinking about OP?

There have been some real life geo tagging with real paper wallets and private keys. But there have always been safety concerns about such stunts.
There was also an altcoin stunt of burying a hard drive containing $50,000 worth of digital tokens at the top of mount Everest which ended up the guide being killed due to accident. No any idea whether anyone retrieved that drive.

I remember one member being quite active in that area a few years ago, and I did my best and found his threads ->

Bitcoin GEOCACHE in Iceland FREE money!! GAME CONCLUDED (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1610684.0)
GEOCACHE AFRICA 2018 UPDATE: Cache found!!!!!! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2710325.0)

I think the idea is very good, and I believe that if there was an application that would be exclusively related to geocache Bitcoin, it could gain great popularity. Everyone knows Pokemon mania when millions hunted virtual little devils everywhere, and I have no doubt that people would be very happy to hunt something that has value like Bitcoin.

Mbitr is posted link which leads to geocaching app, and for start all Bitcoiners can use that app - I have to admit that I am very interested in trying out how it works in practice :)

The scenerio would be different if they could select more crypto friendly zone. If anyone start now, hope the result will be promising. Each day, new people are joining into crypto. This sort of campaign or business will invite new people, and new idea will come eventually. I will plan a new business and crypto will be the main way of payment along with fiat.

The idea is same as the PokemonGO, the mobile game craze in 2016 where you need to go out to look for pokemon, maybe we can use the same internal as this mobile game has.

This is brilliant if comes to life, popularity of bitcoin or any cryptocurrency will increase. Imagine gathering your friends looking of 0.01 btc in your area, looks so fun to me.

It would be just hard if the coordinates happens to be located in isolated places, devs will surely do that  :D

" Let the treasure hunting begin! "  can't wait to see this announcement

You'd need to spend millions to actually make the difference in terms of adoption. Now ask yourself, who would be giving away Bitcoins for free just to promote them? In the early days people did that with faucets, but the amounts that were given away were worth fractions of a penny at the time. Would someone go treasure hunting for such "treasure"? You'd need to bump that to dozens or hundreds of dollars.

You could always just leave paper wallets with small amounts on normal deposit boxes provided by Geocaching sites.

This way you would probably introduce new people to bitcoin as well as they would be surprised. They would have their smartphones on because they would need that for geocaching and they would probably take a look at this bitcoin thing.

What do you mean by "treasure hunting"?Finding BTC that has been given away by other people for free?
What's the point of this and why would anyone give away Bitcoins for free without demanding anything in return?Let's not turn Bitcoin into Pokemon Go. ;D
Such app could be used for finding truly local Bitcoin traders to do offline crypto trading with.
However,this can be quite dangerous,if you stumble upon a scammer.

Maybe people who have enough money for a hundred lives on this planet? Millions of dollars or euros are pocket money for someone if he is a billionaire, and in fact only one rich man could make a huge difference if he really wanted to. If we consider another way that involves ordinary little people with small funds, then the power is in the numbers and it doesn’t matter how much someone actually left BTC in some hidden paper wallet.

Recently, someone donated several charities to the forum with 1 BTC each, and it is known that there are a lot of projects worldwide that raise funds in crypto. Faucets pay very small amounts, but just 4-5 years ago anyone can get 0.01 BTC daily from them with help of some refs - and if BTC price is just increase x10 in next 10 years (and will probably be a lot more), each satoshis can be worth maybe 100 times more than today.

Put $100 in your bank account and wait for what will happen in 10 years - take $100 worth of BTC and keep it for the same time - I think the difference will be huge.

I saw threads like this on this forum, where people suggested that rich early adopters would pay millions of dollars for Bitcoin ads and other promotions, and it never happened on practice. I think it's for the reason in your second statement - rich people would rather donate to charity, because it will save someone lives, instead of promoting Bitcoin, which isn't even guaranteed to achieve more adoption or boost the price.

Stuff like this will certainly help alot, not just for hunting for Bitcoin but also for buying and selling things in times of serious crisis. But it will need to be done without violating national/environmental laws. I think it'll be great to build such application on a well decentralized system... a system that is based on clear rules

It's called geocaching and you can try doing it for fun. Image if nobody finds your coins and the price explodes. You'll have more and more people treasure hunding for that cache when they find out how much its worth.

I remember there were some promotional events where people were hiding coins all over their towns to make whole crowds of people look for them.

Some sites that give maps for adoption and regulation on bitcoin
https://coinmap.org/view/
https://www.bitcoinregulation.world/

Yeah I don't think there's really an app for it, but there are definitely communities out there and I believe the correct term for this type of treasure hunt is "geocaching". One of the earliest I remember from this forum is this thread about Geocaching (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2710325.msg27720734#msg27720734) and as you can see, it certainly generated some early interest from people. Think the OP also mentioned some other follow up.

Seems like people are right that it's called geocaching. I am completely unfamiliar with this thing, so it's hard for me to fully understand the situation, and the closest thing I know to it is Pokemon Go. I am sure the hell lot of BTC would need to be spent on this, and the profits are very doubtful (unless you're planning to do it as a charity). But there's also another aspect to that. Bitcoin is mainly in the gray area when it comes to legal status, and according to Wikipedia,
So if anything, it might make the authorities even more hostile to Bitcoin, and this is not what we need. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's just a thing to consider before starting a trend of Bitcoin geocaching. By the way, if you Google 'geocaching Bitcoin' you'll be able to see that some people already tried it.

Yes, that's because afaik the "treasures" are usually somewhat hidden in the pinned location, usually to avoid people get them by mistake.
And the result is that people search the place and act quite weird/suspicious, attracting police, bomb squad, .. name it.

But this can be done better. Like keeping half of the private key / seed very easy to be seen in the expected spot and the rest is in the place that announced the contest. Then the people will not have to act suspiciously, hence won't attract hostile reaction.

OP can you elaborate a bit more on what it is you exactly mean? Lots of replies to your topic here but I'm not sure anyone actually knows what you mean...are you planning to give away free bitcoin yourself? How would this even work, who's going to want to give away free money? I'm lost..

This would be a fun idea if I understood what you are trying to point out, OP.

So what I thought about this topic is like regular treasure hunting but only with Bitcoin. Someone would “plant” a QR code of some sort that requires you to be there, hence the geotagging, then unlocking it by scanning as well.

Could it be close to that?

There are many ways to do this, not limited to mobile apps. If there's demand for something like Bitcoin geotagging, developers and webmasters will provide the require infrastructure to make this a reality. I think that wealthy people willing to give some Bitcoin to the world, can find this tool useful. Something like using AR (Augmented Reality) to locate Bitcoin in the real world, will certainly boost its adoption. By "tagging" specific locations on the map, people can simply go there using a GPS and their phone to claim their reward. It'll be like a great treasure hunt that will even encourage kids to dive into the world of crypto.

My guess is that if Bitcoin geotagging becomes possible, the Lightning Network will be used for placing small fractions of a Bitcoin on the map. It wouldn't be feasible to place satoshis on the main Bitcoin blockchain after all. At least, the ideas are there. Making them a reality, is another thing. If someone would develop a mobile app for Bitcoin geotagging, mainstream adoption for the pioneer cryptocurrency will increase like never before. For now, we'd just have to wait until there's enough interest to make this happen. Just my opinion :)



I'm not planning to give away some Bitcoin to the general public, though. Only been planning to do this with my friends in order to motivate them into cryptocurrency. You'll simply interact in the real world with your smartphone in order to hunt for Bitcoins. For instance, if I'm on KFC and want to "tag" that place on the map for anyone to claim their Bitcoin, I can do so by providing coordinates or using a mobile app specifically for that. Of course, the Bitcoin will not be present there in physical form. What the user will get is the private key to access the Bitcoins upon arriving at the predetermined location on the map. It's more like a treasure hunt game. If you look on Google all about "geocaching", you'll see what I mean. ;)



Yes sort of. The only thing is that the Bitcoin will not be present physically at the location marked on the map. Instead, users will receive a private key once they arrive at the predetermined location by the issuer. It could greatly motivate anyone to get into cryptocurrency right away. :)

What if it was a trap or something? It's quite scary to think about that but at the same time, you could get to know people who are in the same space as you. You just have to trust that "drop" or something related to that. Is it going to be like Pokemon Go? Lol

Good point. I guess that the developer could implement a reputation system on the app which tells users if a person giving away the Bitcoin is trustworthy or not. There could be many ways to prevent falling right into the trap. All devs need is to use their imagination in order to make "geotagging" Bitcoins practical for the mainstream world. If we get to experience something like this in the future, I'd bet that Bitcoin's adoption will be in its All-time-high. Similar to the game you've mentioned, people could use their phone's GPS navigation system to travel where the coins are. Using Augmented Reality (AR) could prove to be a game changer here.

Nonetheless, there are far more important things to focus than just providing a way for people to collect "free coins" on the go. First, scalability and volatility issues need to be resolved in order to make Bitcoin useful for the world. Once that's done, we could talk about new applications that will boost the adoption of the pioneer cryptocurrency in the mainstream world. For now, we could just publish the coordinates of the "stashed" Bitcoin for anyone else to find it. This process is not as convenient as using a mobile app with the phone's GPS to claim the Bitcoin, but at least it's a workaround. Just my opinion :)