Bitcoin Forum

Hypothetically speaking, if a Bitcoin nerd managed to acquire commercial property (like a former restaurant or phone store) in order to make a bitcoin community center for a city or a town, what would you want in there? Would it focus on bitcoin education? Providing bitcoin services? Or would it just be a specialized internet cafe? What would you do?

Nightly Bitcoin training and exchange.

Interesting
Could you elaborate what kind of training would go on? Maybe like a projector or perhaps everyone brings their own laptops and can follow along or something like that?

Which town are you speaking of? Personally, I would invade a libertarian town.

I am actually 100% serious about the 'hypothetical part'. Ideally, you would want at least one center in every major city.

Everyone bringing their own laptops would certainly be helpful.

The training would basically be...how to set up a Bitcoin wallet and get some bitcoins (the exchange part being useful for them getting their first Bitcoins).

From there you could show people some websites of places that they can spend their bitcoins.

You could have a separate training session for Bitcoin merchants, showing them how to set up Bitcoin payments on their webpage or using bit-pay for POS transactions or other ways of accepting BTC.

If they bring their laptops, they can set up their wallet securely right there. Or you could have a computer there and show them how to create a wallet and put it on disk or thumb drive, then let them keep the disk (letting them know that they should transfer the BTC to a new wallet when they get home).

You could also show the basic steps on how to get BTC through MtGox or Bitinstant or others.

There is much to learn, most likely the basics will be a good start.

The exchange would be key. It could also help with funding.

There is a useful precedent for your Bitcoin community centre.

Starting in 1652 coffee houses started opening in London and soon became THE place to do business:
http://www.history.co.uk/explore-history/history-of-london/coffee-houses-london-s-penny-universities.html (http://www.history.co.uk/explore-history/history-of-london/coffee-houses-london-s-penny-universities.html).

For instance that is how Lloyds of London started.

Ok a gestation period of 360 years is a little long. But in the year 2372 they will look back and say:

"The first Bitcoin community centre started right here."

I guess I would consider bitcoin a failure if community centers were needed everywhere. Isn't the goal to make it super easy and user friendly? And if that is achieved, why would there be need for community centers?

I think quite the opposite, if there was enough demand to keep bitcoin community centers afloat I think that would only help bitcoin be successful.

Another idea I'm thinking about is community centers could help local merchants accept bitcoins, and possibly provide physical bitcoins and credit union/ATM services.

They could (and would need to) sell something like coffee and drinks to pay the bills. Accepting cash and credit at the register would be wise so that people who really don't care about Bitcoin could buy coffee and support the existence of the space. There could be a neon sign hanging in the window advertising the fact that coffee is sold there, but the larger sign above the store-front could say Bitcoin Community Center.

You could run it as an internet cafe plus sell mobile phones and other things for bitcoins and dollars.

They could do training classes for advanced topics too
* Paper wallets & cold storage
* Alternate clients
* Your first mining rig
* p2pool

Activities for related software
* GnuPG key signing events
* Internet privacy for dummies

That would be fun! :-D

Sound much like hackerspace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackerspace). Maybe it make sense to visit your closest one and see if that idea made rounds there alredy?

And the first ones where that might start happening are in regions where electricity is cheap.  In those regions there is an advantageous economic incentive available to those who mine bitcoins.  The hackerspace might be where mining newbies can get guidance as to what to purchase and how to get set up.

Those mining then have bitcoins that could be spent locally.  With sufficient numbers of customers who would pay for purchases with bitcoins, merchants would be able to justify the additional steps to adding bitcoin as a payment method.  Exchanging at the hackerspace would begin to occur and gain in variety and frequency.  From there, bitcoin adoption spreads into and throughout the community.  The hackerspace is the focal point where Bitcoin-related community, education, and commerce occurs.

 - http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces

I think that you could also sell pre-built mining/gaming rigs to help pay the bills. You could also contact Casascius to find out if you could become a retailer of his coins. Even if this is not possible you should at least offer to buy Casascius coins, bitbills, and any other reputable physical bitcoins at market value. In my opinion you also need to provide more advanced privacy sessions, covering topics such as TOR, VPN's and proxies. You should also sell chips from ButterFried Labs (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=94389.0).