Bitcoin Forum

Have you got a stash of bitcoins and/or want to see it take off more quickly? I wrote a blog post on how I think that could happen:

http://www.bitrific.com/2011/05/inducing-bitcoin-growth-with-btc.html

Basically the idea is for anyone who promotes bitcoin to their twitter followers with a tweet (or two) gets bitcoin for doing so. Their followers who do the same also get bitcoin. A person can supply the bitcoin for their followers who also tweet, or it can be supplied by someone else, like a bitcoin early-entrant who has a lot of bitcoin and want to see it put to work. Once more people have it, a critical mass could be reached for people wanting to spend it on things.

People use Bitcoin because it works well, not because they have been bribed to use it.

Anyway, there are no "new signups" because you don't sign up.

The Bitcoin Faucet gives away free bitcoins to promote new users.

http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/

No one is being bribed to do anything. It's a matter of getting it into people's hands (if they want it, and they don't have to spend it)

Signups means people who signup to the site I propose... like bitcoin faucet had people enter a captcha... because they wanted to.

Bitcoin: not a ponzi scheme.

"It gets promoted by its users" is not a sufficient characteristic to classify something as a Ponzi scheme.

I like the idea... wouldn't want to give away money to a complete stranger, at least not "much" like 1+ BTC. But you should offer it to your friends first.

Another idea is to have a product/service a lot of people want, but which only accepts BitCoins as payment. A so called "Killer-App" for BitCoins :)

If you speculate on rising value of BitCoins you could offer services for 20% of the price a similar service would cost in fiat money. But the most important thing is to only accept BitCoin payments.

Hi guys,

I just saw this post and want to add my two cents. We have a new feature on http://www.youtipit.org (http://www.youtipit.org) that lets you tip any facebook user with bitcoins and the person can claim them using their facebook profile. Then the user can withdraw them to a client or use them for whatever they want. We call it an "Escrow Tipit".

If you want to spread bitcoins around to friends and family (or anyone else) this would be a good way of doing it.

If anyone would like to give it a try and give some feed back I would appreciate it. To create an Escrow tipit you will need to sign up to youtipit but it is very quick to do so (we use open id). We only just released it as a feature this week but it is working well though it needs to be refined.

Cheers,

Brian.

True. There are many people who are casually acquainted with it and think it's some kind of a ponzi scheme, or scam, or conspiracy, or whatever. Just giving out bitcoins for the sake of giving out bitcoins is nice, but the faucet already does that. If I'm understanding it correctly, OPs plan reinforces that ponzi thing - "Come get yer bitcoin! Get in on this thing, NOW!" without really demonstrating the utility of this kind of payment system.


Youtipit is awesome-er. Firstly, as an introduction to bitcoin it can immediately demonstrate the usefulness of the currency - get money anywhere at any time. Secondly, it can immediately demonstrate the power of the bitcoin - get money anywhere at any time and for any reasonl; quality posts are rewarded, and a much wider audience is reachable.

You dig me?

The idea is more about getting early entrants' masses of bitcoins into people's hands who can spend it on things like youtipit... it's about getting to critical mass.

Bitcoin faucet is a drip, this idea is a tsunami, and that's what's needed. There's tons of press about bitcoin now -- give the people what they want.

Giving away for free is nice to show how it works operationally and the faucet is good for that. But what will really be awesome is a mechanical turk for bitcoins. The work/bitcoin/buy things cycle will really get people going imo.

It does seem like the original idea from this thread is pyramid-like. (not Bitcoin itself.) However, it seems to me to be the inverse of a pyramid scheme: With a normal pyramid scheme, an exponentially-increasing number of people funnel money to an exponentially-increasing but always smaller number at the top of the pyramid. With this idea, he proposes an exponentially-increasing but small amount of people funneling money to an exponentially-increasing but large group of new people. (That was worded awkwardly, I know.)

So instead of having huge amounts of involved people generate money for a few people, it's a few people spending money in order to generate huge amounts of involved people.

The people at the top that are giving away their bitcoins aren't really losing cash by doing so, because they can't cash out those amounts anyhow. In the long run, what's left after they give away a certain proportion of their war chest will be worth more anyhow than if they didn't give away anything, because the number participants in the marketplace will be higher - more people wanting to spend, and more sellers coming in to meet that demand.