Bitcoin Forum

An excellent article about where the digital economy is going.

If bitcoin ever stands a chance to succeed, it needs to carve itself a niche in that shitstorm coming from emerging markets.

If it fails to do that, it'll be irrelevant in two years.

http://www.slideshare.net/yiibu/the-emerging-global-web (http://www.slideshare.net/yiibu/the-emerging-global-web)

Bitcoin is already a success (just the price doesn't really reflect that) and bitcoin already is there on quite a lot of emerging markets.


What bitcoin needs (especially for its price) is to increase the awareness everywhere on earth, because even if it's there, not many actually know about it, what it is and what can it do.

said the random kid with 35 posts and a donation address

I would like to politely disagree.

Bitcoin is currently a success in the same way Linux is/was a success: in a very tiny niche (geeks, sysadmins, tech-savvy folks, etc ...). Unfortunately, Linux never came out of that niche. It's still in there 15+ years later

In the same way, Bitcoin has most certainly not reached the mainstream, and especially not in emerging markets where most people only have old "feature" phones and close to nil in terms of technical skills.

To do so would require a order of magnitude improvement in ease of use, speed of confirming transactions and number of transactions per second the network can handle.

This is a giant missed opportunity: the next 4 billion people who are going to come online are from emerging markets, and bitcoin is simply to hard/too slow for them to use as compared to the alternatives outlined in that presentation (especially towards the end).


What bitcoin needs is to become *way* simpler, and *way* faster. And it also needs a client on older phones (non-smartphone).
If it does this, awareness will just be a byproduct.

Says the bozo who registered in 2013 and thinks that makes him an old-timer.

Never said that, just not keen to take btc advice from a n00b

Bitcoin needs killer apps, things that are only now possible due to Bitcoin. Open Bazaar might be one. ChangeTip type things another.

So, news like this is what excites me:
http://siliconangle.com/blog/2014/11/21/bitcoin-tipping-sees-giant-growth-changetip-exceeds-10000-tips-in-one-day/

And from the presentation in OP, half of these "emerging markets" are using standard websites like instagram, facebook... They don't need special tools, they use the same things us in the "developed" world use.

Competing with the PayPals (or Chinese equivalent) is not really useful. Those apps are good! Instead you need to go where they cannot go.

And with Bitcoin any kid can make the next big financial or money using app. It's just a matter of time.

I guess that we have a different perception of what success means. As technology, it is proven to work, it is copied by a lot of other coins and it starts to be known (or heard of) by the masses.


These are only steps to gain awareness, imo.

Bitcoin will not go faster. If you want "faster", find another coin (DOGE?). Don't get me wrong, I would like to see a solution to speed it up, but I don't think there's any.

Making it work with non-smartphones sounds strange to me. Would you like that the bank pays for a product from your credit card money just from a phonecall from your number without checking anything? I guess not. Bitcoin is not just money. It's SAFE/SECURE money. And the software to use bitcoin has to comply, else it will be a loss on the long time. However, if you think otherwise, start a business that handles bitcoin only from something as simple as a phonecall, maybe I'm wrong and you'll have success.

And fyi: emerging countries have cheaper phones with more features than yours, just may not have well-known brand names, that's all ;)

I am not a Linux fan, but when I see an Android phone or a MacBook Pro running OS X I see Linux powered devices. Those are hardly niche products.

https://i.imgur.com/rAP3rHm.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/eaE0tVD.png

Bitcoin is a success. Its widely used, almost anything you can now buy with Bitcoin. Adoption is increasing and it will keep getting easier to use Bitcoin as a payment method.

Goldsilver.com just began accepting bitcoin today. There is a demand for bitcoin and merchants are listening. Bitcoin is obviously successful. Just look around

just wanted to write that too.


@btctrader22
good analyse  ;)

I'd get into the habit of taking a look at the time someone registered their account before calling them a noob. I bought my coins at $5. I guess that makes me a noob compared to some. But perhaps not compared to others.

Wholeheartedly agreed. A good example of that is being able to pay in places where traditional payment methods create a privacy concern. For example in some european country, being able to pay via NFC as your board a train (swipe and go) was abandoned because it was deemed illegal - would allow to track who goes where fine grained. Had they used bitcoin, problem solved.

*BUT*, and that's exactly the point I'm trying to make, unless we go and compete head to head with the easier payment methods out there, such as the chinese equivalents of paypals and paypal itself (who's sorely in need of stiff competition to start offering better services), we are never going to leave that niche where only bitcoin can live. And the problem is : that niche is *small*.


This is cool indeed.


This is where I disagree with you. The one thing that Facebook should have taught anyone working in the digital economy, it's that once something has mushroomed to getting more than 90% of the market, they damn near undisplaceable (even if they're not a particularly brilliant product - fb never was). I'm worried that by the time this bitcoin killer app comes about, it will face an enormous barrier to entry. Whereas if bitcoin tries to move to the emerging market space first, its natural advantages will make it a damn sure winner.

Quality over quantity, am I right??

No, by faster, I don't mean some lame-ass altcoin where the only "innovation" they created was changing 5 characters in the source code to change the block production rate.

Something like a rock-solid implementation of side-chains or off-chain transactions is what I'm thinking about.


I am not talking about watering down bitcoin's security.

Non-smartphone are called feature phones. They're used by more than half of the people on the planet. They look like this:

http://mobilerji.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/cell-pile.jpg (http://mobilerji.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/cell-pile.jpg)

They have a CPU, and one can code tiny apps for them. Building a simple lightweight bitcoin client is possible.

The *demand* for a simple mobile payment solution on feature phone is huge.
See here if you don't believe me : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa)



China and India may.
Africa certainly does not.

Fair enough about Android.

Not so about OSX which is built on top of BSD

In both cases, much of the original spirit of Linux (openness & freedom) has been watered down to the extreme.

I'm not sure I'd be happy if making bitcoin successful meant curtailing its key attribute to the extent android and OSX have ravaged the original attributes of Linux and BSD. On an Android phone, half of the things you can do with a desktop are impossible unless you root your phone. The phone isn't really yours anymore.

I am with you in the wishful thinking department. I truly want to see bitcoin succeed.

But I'm sorry you have to be realistic: what you say is simply not true. Buying a house or a car, or getting paid by your employer, or paying your taxes with BTC is simply not possible in 2014 in 99.99% of the cases.

Tackling the ~4 billion unbanked and underbanked with bridges  like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi5JBzTzoiA

https://www.bitpesa.co/

Just like someone else said above, it depends on your definition of successful.

Adoption is growing yes. But is it growing fast enough ? This is not your grandma's world anymore, this is the age of internet : anything that's not growing exponentially has a strong likelihood to die out.

Also, yes, I do look around. I note that I still can't go buy my coffee at startbucks with btc. That I can't pay my taxes with BTC. That if I try to pay someone in my friend & families with BTC, they look at me like I'm some kind of weirdo.

And I'm saying, the whole point of the OP in fact, that if we don't get our asses in gear, BTC will get the living daylight beaten out of it by simpler, faster (yes potentially weaker and less safe solutions - but then who cares about that shit when you buy a cup of coffee ?) coming from the fastest growing parts of the internet: China, Brazil, Indonesia, India, Africa

We are taking a step too far. Ok to start off what we need is basically an auction site (a legal one of course) where you can buy a product and that particular store will pay people the extra privilege for using bitcoin. Or a store or auction sites that accept only bitcoin. Nobody is goin to exchange usd to btc just to buy something they can get straight away using usd. And that is a fact. Or Something like a discount when you purchase with btc. Maybe you are asking me what store.... the answer is i don't know but if we are going to start on something that will take us somewhere....this is what i would say we definitely need

hmm. I tend to believe/hope Bitcoin's natural advantages will cause it to be adopted. Plus the incredible innovation that can occur around such an open system.

but sure, marketing to emerging markets is good....

I'm pretty sure there have been attempts at bitcoin on feature phones. SMS payments and stuff.

I think most things you suggest will and are happening, but slowly...

So what else is there to do, crowdfund Bitcoin evangelists in emerging markets? Bitcoin tends to create its own evangelists anyway when somebody fully understands it..

You do know that 80% of the internet is run on Linux machines, right? This very website is probably sitting on a RedHat server or at least something Debian or Ubuntu based. And it's the most widely used OS on mobile (Android) world-wide. Add to that every game console uses a Linux kernel (If I'm not mistaken even XBox does). In regards to desktops/laptops, yes, small market share.

Is this a promotion post? I am confused.

The Bitcoin community should boycott any BTC accepting merchant that doesn't also offer their employees a bitcoin payment option.

Good idea , but a little premature to be making those demands this early.

This is a "unless we get our asses in gear and pay attention to what's happening out there, the thing we care about is going to become irrelevant in a New York minute" post.

Yes, I am aware. And the Android part was discussed earlier in this topic. I didn't know that XBox was linux powered (I do in fact find it surprising). And if indeed someone managed to pull off with Bitcoin what Android did pull off with Linux, that is wrapping something completely unusable by normal people into a foolproof and useful thing, that would exactly address my concern. But there is major amounts of work before we get there.

Linux dominates, smart phones, tablets, servers, scientific computing ,
and many embedded systems. Open source software dominates everything but desktops and laptops.
 
Bitcoin is just a protocol like HTTP/TCP-IP/TELNET. People use these protocols everyday and have almost no knowledge they even exist . There are many developers working hard right now creating apps to interact with this protocol. Money is just one app or use of bitcoin. Your grandmother will soon be using it without even knowing she is doing so.

This would pretty much be all businesses that accept bitcoin, and would result in the companies to stop accepting bitcoin (they wouldn't be getting any bitcoin sales) and other companies not wanting to accept bitcoin

Bitcoin has been partially successful. Many well-known companies to accept it.