Bitcoin Forum

All of the writing seems to be on the wall.

Bitcoin now has PayPal integration and dedicated global banking to go along with its natty logo. Regulators are taking notice of it, and noted retailers are accepting it.

If you think bitcoin is mainstream, though, think again. According to an analysis earlier this year, there were only 1.2 million bitcoin addresses holding anything other than dust as of February.

Even its advocates admit that it has a long way to go. Curtis Fenimore's attempt to promote bitcoin to the masses has stalled. Bitcoin Bigfoot, his grassroots effort to get posters and other materials promoting bitcoin out into the community, "hasn't been all that active or relevant lately," he admitted.

Fenimore raised all of the bitcoins for his public awareness effort when the price was over $700. Then, he spent the funds on Bitcoin Bigfoot after the price fell under $700. It was just the luck of the draw.

In the meantime, many people are still blissfully unaware of bitcoin. "We still have a very long way to go in absolute terms," he suggested.

The perception problem may have more to do with depth than breadth. Bitcoin entrepreneur Erik Voorhees argued that around half the people he spoke to are aware of bitcoin, but only a small fraction understand it. via Coindesk

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I think we need to shave it's goatee, shear off it's dreads, buy it contact lenses and take it shopping at Abercrombie and Fitch.

Bitcoin is a hipster?

The market will place bitcoin - Really, all we need to do is use it. 
The rest will happen naturally.

use it, ask for it, create a demand

Only in an un-mainstream sense,

True hipster, Templar Letter of Credit, be like "I was cryptocurrency before it was cool"
http://thefinanser.co.uk/.a/6a01053620481c970b014e8a865f2a970d-500wi

reference... http://thefinanser.co.uk/fsclub/2011/08/we-are-knights-of-the-banking-table.html

This man knows how marketing works.

Also there needs to be a BIG buy with BTC button in the ebay articles.

Pretty much this. We can't make bitcoin mainstream any other way other than using it and promoting it. The mainstream will hopefully catch on eventually.

Though we've got a figurehead designed by a committee at the moment, a beard for the hipsters, a suit for the suits and glasses for the nerds. 3 way appeal :D

its banking without the banks

it will do what email did to the post office,

the post office is now mainly parcel delivery not information delivery

banks will try to reinvent themselves and end up in Billions of dollars

debt like the posts offices and get government bailouts

you cannot fire hundreds of thousands of people overnight

they are unionized and need massive payouts to be sacked

and people are still paying bank fees and using fiat for the time

being, its catching on like wildfire especially with younger people

it will be the most classical switch even more so than the

day where everybody was using fb or getting online or using

a mobile phone

Bitcoin will hopefully take itself mainstream, but we can help by telling as many people about it as possible. Explain the benefits and potential for investment. If they don't like the political ramifications of it, tell them about how they can make money off it and that should pique their interest.

Just keep using and spreading the message.

We find more merchant adoption and create a larger user-base.

We need the US Dollar to tank and the flaws of the fiat system to be seen by everyone; we need Bitcoin in Hollywood movies too

things dont happen overnight. bitcoin is on the right track and better than ever before.

It is better than ever before and the fiat system in the US is still holding up but for how long?

Change tip is our first killer app I think.  Its a great showcase for the technology.

I agree. Came here to post this. The best intro into bitcoin is to have some. That way you can send it back and forth and understand the speed, confirmation and whatnot. It also triggers hope and curiosity. Otherwise its all just some abstract jargin that doesn't mean anything. Like "the cloud". Tip bot is the way to go. After that we need a solid floor. Nobody wants to buy and watch their stacks value crumble.

1st, end PoW mining. Because mainstream doesn't like being charged a 10% tax on their entire Bitcoin holding every year.

Honestly I haven't understood yet why you insist so much to make Bitcoin going mainstream... maybe you think that for its deflationary model the price of Bitcoin will rise if more people will use it, but the price has been demonstrated to be influenced by many other factors.
Anyway, isn't it cool if Bitcoin is used only by a restricted elite?  8)

True. In the future everyone might use bitcoin without even knowing it. There might not even be a need to package and sell it to them. We just need it to replace our current infrastructure. That being said I doubt that would happen though. Bitcoin technology sure, but bitcoin the coin, no way. I know its early days but its too volatile and imagine if 100 years from now everyone in the world was on bitcoin. And some grandson of a neckbeard who has 20,000btc cheats on his wife and she dumps all his coins just for the luls. Entire countries in chaos because some dude screwed his secretary and got caught.

No thanks.

I think that we need to do a lot to make Bitcoin mainstream but it will eventually happen and it is not to long away. With the adoption of Bitcoin by new people everyday and it has already hit the eyes of the government and banks, it is only a matter of time till they see that this is something that is not going to be stopped and they need to hitch a ride. In my opinion once the banks start to accept it as a normal currency then it will become something that everyone buys and uses. Just wait it out and it will happen.

Bitcoins are the ways to prevent Illuminati.

Unless bitcoin was created by the Illuminati and the NSA. Then we're basically hyping and supporting the devil.

Make sure anytime you buy something from a company using Bitcoin, that their competitor knows.

Can someone in NYC go make a presentation to this group please?

http://www.nycfoodtrucks.org/

Bitcoin's government still own a bunch of Bitcoins but they may sell them before the price goes up if they get a judge to forfeit them the coins.
Private American citizens probably have most the coins in circulation so Bitcoin will help  the States when the Dollar will fall.

How can we make it mains? Tell your mum and your gran about it  ;D. Spread the word and keep promoting it to people and businesses and it'll soon get adopted by the general public and the masses.

Insight on technology adoption...

http://www.slideshare.net/louadi/07-technology-adoption-life-cycle-2014

and..

http://www.lenvlahos.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/AdoptionCurve-crop.jpg


I'm not sure we're even into the "early adopter" phase yet really.

Thinking of all the tech I've witnessed adoption of over the last 3 decades, what comes closest to bitcoin, seems to me to be MP3s, and forget napster and iTunes for a moment, they are not the be-all and end-all of MP3 history....

I can't find particularly good references for this, going on what I remember. Geeks invented mp3 compression of audio circa 1995ish and saw that it was good. Storage and bandwidth was highly expensive, or less obtanium, and MP3s allowed a somewhere around twentyfold reduction in time required to download or space required to store audio. At first it was almost a pure geek thing, you had to find a player, spend hours on slowass Pentium MMX or so CPUs ripping and converting, or use search-foo skills on the internet (no google yet) to find any. Then as geeks found out how "good" this format was in terms of being able to put hundreds of songs on a HDD and have them play instantly, in whatever order you wanted, and not having to mess about with a stack of CDs, word began to spread and the more hip tech aware people were into this too.

Now the music industry were the incumbents here, the proverbial 800lb gorilla, and they were fully invested in physical media. By '97 or '98 the geeks and hip to tech were petitioning them, "Look how great this shit is, sell your stuff like this." and got a big fat "No way in hell, and by the way stop stealing our shit, we'll sue you if you so much as back up your own CDs." in return, no acknowlegment even that at the time it was equivalent to personal use mix tapes or anything, they just flat out denied the tech and started working to get it banned completely. By this time, the format was really starting to gain traction and a handful of the first hardware mp3 players were produced, I think that newly available cheaper lower power flash memory synergized with this, but it was doable, so it was done.

This is about where we've got to with bitcoin I think, banks are saying "No way, no how, should be illegal" and we've got the first crop of hardware wallets appearing whereas in the past you had to have a specialist program on your computer.

AFTER the above, the filesharing movement took off, practically in response to and in direct defiance of music industry stance on MP3s, it was a case of "Well fuck you then, we'll get them another way, we'll distribute them ourselves" piracy had always been around,, but now it was a more mainstream endeavor, there was a better value product than the music industry was offering, you could do more with it, it was more portable, you could transfer it faster. Here entereth Napster, who industrialised file sharing. Then the music industry began to fight seriously, they were not going to stand for this upstart. Napster was taken down finally, but 3 more filesharing systems had sprung up in the meantime, along with the decentralised bittorrent gaining popularity. Finally they began getting a clue that this might be a fight that they would have to give ground on somewhere... this laid the ground for the partnership with Apple and iTunes, (Others were Zune etc)

Anyway, in terms of how that analogy to bitcoin works, I think we are still pre-Napster right now, we've got that fight to come, then when we win that, the real mass adoption "iTunes" phase.

By using it the way it was meant I guess, to buy stuff, and also request from our stores that we want to use it to buy stuff!

Telling your kids, nephews and grand children will work better ;)

I think the best think is to keep on taking on small, innovative projects that fill the tech and knowledge gaps. Keep up the good work everyone :)!

paypal can do the job for us if they can bothered to add bitcoin to customer wallets, after they do that its "mainstream", we are done, case closed.

End the IMF and Federal reserve!

Bitcoin would only be used by merchants who would find it worthwhile to accept the currency, they would not be obliged to accept it, hence the currency might not become mainstream. Same thing would happen if Amazon were to accept bitcoin payments. Only merchants willing to take it as payment would accept it, not everyone.

Customers cannot reverse payments which is a great functionality for merchants. Transactions are cheap and fast, you get to really own your money.

get more people use it and create a market

Promotion is required, there are many things that can be done.  Perhaps someone could write a really good "guide to bitcoin" ebook, although I think less emphasis should be placed on the mining aspect.  Existing material moves too quickly into the technical details, most people wouldn't know whether their Bank use Windows or Solaris for their infrastructure, it is likely that an explanation of the differences between SHA and Scrypt would be uninteresting and confusing to most.  Consumers want to know what the technology can do for them, not how it works.  This can be seen with mobile phones, the average consumer wouldn't know how they work on the inside, and don't want to know.  All they are interested in are features and benefits.

Both absolutely correct, I've written a concept that does the above, please check out my BackBit thread!

I feel like I'm hitting my head on a brick wall here  ;D

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=860868.0

agree..!! awareness is needed to help it become mainstream!!! Hope it becomes mainstream soon! I'd love to use my BTC to buy some beers n burgers :)

Simple answer really. For it to go mainstream the mainstream needs to use it. It'll come eventually be adoption will be slow for a while at least.

What is PoW mining?

Literally everywhere you go, ask the people behind the desk if they accept Bitcoin *YET* ... make them feel like they're behind the times.

I admit I don't do this 90% of the time, but I'm a timid fellow, and im going to start.  Today.

-B-

Get 10 Million people using a bitcoin casino

Or get 100 Million people using a cheap bitcoin music download service

The wallets to service these numbers will push btc to

10M users 5K

100M users 50K

Should be easy if you all put your heads together

The one that works  ;)

indeed, this is the best way
keep asking them all the time
or maybe better: ask it and when they say no be disappointed and just leave without buying it  :D

and make 10000 paper wallets of 0.1 mbtc (1 btc in total) and just strew them all over the world.
and keep the bitcoin public keys yourself, so u can check if they are found already and used

Heyyyyy, do a helium balloon release!

Hell no, if a Kardashian or Jersey Shore dick starts tweeting about bitcoin, I'm dumping.

BTCikinis

Thats a smart idea :D

But those people don't have any inputs regarding the company operations. Those in charge will eventually join the Bitcoin revolution when they see their competitors accepting it.

Half the world would start dumping.  ;D
Kardashian has some history in the payment industry. 

http://www.paymentssource.com/news/interchange/kim-kardashians-lessons-for-the-bitcoin-card-industry-3019708-1.html

Good idea. The Bitcoin foundation could air TV adds or maybe someone could create an addy to get donations to make adds on TV or elsewhere

Just buy more BTC.

If there is more buying power, the price will rise and people will want to get in to make easy profits.

Aside from whether or not this is a desirable outcome, what is required to make bitcoin mainstream in our opinion is two things; regulation and access.  With all the question marks around taxation, licensing and financial regulation, it is difficult to adopt bitcoin into the mainstream, both in terms of practicality and public image.  Secondly, if all merchants accepted bitcoin and all fiat currencies were easily traded with bitcoin, it would be a totally different discussion that we are having here.

Time will tell. Continue to promote coin existence. Target group is definitely those who frequently make cross border transactions. Although I can't say there are many stores accepting bitcoin payment but who cares whether you spend it or not? Put bitcoin as form of investment. I'm sure people would take notice of that. But as I've said....still a long way to go

I have been in Bitcoin for a year now. Its too technical and ricky. Honestly I think Gems Social Messenger can do it. A simple messenger like Whatsapp but encrypted and the users get paid Gems which have a real value for advertising. www.getgems.org
I dont think of this as an altcoin. I think of this as an app with real potential. I own 0 altcoins. I invest in some cool projects that will help btc.

They are crowdfunding the project right now and have raised almost 1000 btc in a few days. They are going through Koinify which I think can finally bring order to the scene. Bitcoin itself is not going mainstream without the help of something like Gems.

Here is a link the the crowdfunding signup. /1FPcBbs]http://[Suspicious link removed]/1FPcBbs (http://[Suspicious link removed) Gems has to hit their milestones or money is returned to the investors. Pretty cool deal in my opinion.

* disclaimer I did just buy a few BTC worth of Gems ;D

By accepting it, using it and making people use it!

Show them the advantages and how to overcome disadvantages.

mobile payments + gambling + drug

talking talking and talking about it on forums, social networks - facebook, twitter..  about its great advantages

I think the time has come to keep it quiet. Stop talking about it. Cloak it in a shroud of mystery. Make scathing references to muggle money and when questioned say you can't say anything about bitcoin to muggles. :D