Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoiners,

I thought it is a good idea to bring many angles in this forum together, because many of them touch this question:

How to grow the Bitcoin idea and avoid that governments shut it down?

I would like to see some answers / opinions on how to make Bitcoins widespread and more and more valuable, but at the same time do it in a sensible way to avoid that it will be shut down.

Related to this, the founders must have thought about this question, so how did they address this question?

I was working on getting EFF to accept bitcoins and then work on other geek organization. The idea is that if bitcoin got attacked by annoying government people, there will be people who will speak and defend on our behalfs. It's all about uniting the tribe of geeks/hackers/singularists/technolibertarians into a united front for bitcoins.

That makes 100% sense.

Another territory is financial newsletters / analysts who have the same p.o.v. A great example is that Bitcoin was featured in Friday's Elliottwave.com Theorist by famous Rob Prechter.

We need more of that!

Help make sure well over 50% of the businesses using bitcoin are legitimate, tax-paying, regulation-complying business entities :)

Don't forget the obligatory unwritten 1% Satoshi tax that you should manually calculate.

To help it grow we should try not only the geek community as mentioned above, but the libertarian community as well. If we make a good number of libertarians realize that bitcoins are even better than gold as currency, they will support it.
If anyone here has any sort of contact with any libertarian think tank, please, talk to them about bitcoins!

Regarding avoiding governments to shut it down... well... if it ever gets sufficiently widespread to threat their monetary policies, you may be sure they will try to shut it down.
But... how do you shut down a P2P system?  :)

You aren't going to win many converts saying "Bitcoin is better than gold", but maybe try "Bitcoin is a great compliment to gold", which is true since it is very different, but still has the important features.

But it is better than gold. :) I am not saying that it is a better investment option right now, just that it is a better currency.
Any commodity is a potential currency. What made gold and silver excellent currencies are some inner features of such precious metals, that are not only shared by bitcoins, but improved.
If you have patience with automatic translations, I tried to explain it here: http://tinyurl.com/38llgfq

By labeling everyone who participates as a t3l2l2ol2ist and slapping them with fake charges to aid in prosecution.  Imagine: The LARGEST t3l2l2ol2ist network to have existed as of yet.

Word intentionally obfuscated.


But the masses can become afraid by instilling fear

p2p systems cannot be shutdown unless internet connection is barred !!

Well, they've been trying something similar against piracy, labeling people "thief" and all... so far the results haven't been that effective :)

If "they" have trouble keeping centralized websites like TPB down, how can they expect to shut down a massive P2P application? lol

I mostly agree. I think a widely used bitcoin would be way more practical and convenient than gold. It's just that right now something like buying a car would involve a lot of currency loss because of the thin (relative to the price of a car) markets. And the trouble of actually finding the car for sale. Later though, it will be hands down better imo.

If you wanted to keep bitcoin down with force you would go after the biggest bitcoin accepting businesses. It's bad PR to attack granny for sending birthday coins to Johnny.

But they can't stop murder, rape, theft, vandalism, etc... so whatever, good luck, guys.

Exactly. Spreading propaganda would be their only recourse.

They'd spread fear and panic on their traditional media about Bitcoin. Much like how they spread fear about the Internet right now. Only credit card thieves, kiddie porn dealers, and terrorists use the Internet, remember? :P

Hopefully independent media will outpace traditional media and they'll be screwed on that front as well. One could only hope. :)

Lots of people believe that the governments of the world will just turn the internet off. I don't believe that. It is relied on too heavily for commerce now. Why doesn't China just *completely* block the outside world? Same reason.

Exactly - and isn't that the point of all of this, really? You can't have it both ways, people.

The bitcoin escape velocity - the point at which governmental damage control is ultimately futile and that we will never ever go back to the USD or other nation-state controlled currency.

FreeMoney is right.  Unfortunately, hard-money Austrian-economic libertarians are immediately critical of bitcoin when they find out that it is backed by "nothing" :o!  I myself think bitcoin is superior currency to gold (since gold cost money to store, insure, is difficult to move around as most travel hubs such as airports will detect it, and is not safe carrying around in your pocket on dangerous city streets, etc.).  But you are better of trying to tell gold-bugs that bitcoin is a great *compliment* to gold, not a *replacement*, since bitcoin is great for trading online pseudonymously, but in the case of total war or any distastes that break internet connections, then gold (and general survival skills) are better long-term investments.  For sure, don't tell them they should move all their assets from gold into bitcoin :)

This is definitely true. I contacted Mises.org about publishing my Bitcoin article. Of course, they rejected it because they said it would "appear to be a promotion". I think they're worried about the legal ramifications of it.

I guess Mises is too academic anyway. Best to spread the word to other groups that would be more willing to endorse it.

Actually endorsement/smorshment... what we really need is killer apps for bitcoin. The facebook micro-payment idea really is one of the best things I've seen so far to drive users to Bitcoin, making our "stock" go up ;)

I concur that a killer app is necessary.  I personally have never paid any money for anything on facebook.  Is there a way for us to assess the market?  Are any facebook app developers out there actually profitable from their internal currencies? If so, who? 

I'd like to know how much USD is currently flowing through facebook applications.  If it's substantial we actually could have a very good value proposition for the developers, by decreasing their dependence on PayPal.

I totally agree. This is the exact argument that I use on my gold-bug friends.

Most gold-bugs believe that money should exist separate from government, and Bitcoin falls into that category. I usually use this argument as my proverbial 'foot in the door'. :)

Bitcoin will have to earn its place in the economy. If it's good, it will make it. If not, the best parts will find their way into something more appropriate.

Exactly like gold and silver.  >:(

We need to make they understand that...

Nice that you tried. Once I have some time I'll do the same. Maybe multiple people writing them might convince them to at least read something about it.

I tried with Brazilian Mises Institute as well, and they also rejected so far, apparently because it's money "backed by nothing", as said above. I'm waiting a little before trying to explain them the difference between bitcoins and fiat currencies, but I'll try.

Maybe you shouldn't have given them the impression that Bitcoin is money!

Maybe this deserves another thread. I'll start one and see what happens.

Not exactly. :)

As a commodity; gold and silver are backed by the labour/energy that has been expelled to mine and refine it. They also have inherent value because these metals are rare. (Well, rare for now. There are some situations that *could* change that.)

As a currency; gold and silver are backed by what others are willing to trade you for it.

Bitcoins are similar. As a commodity; electricity/energy is required to "mine" them virtually. They have inherent value because they are rare. (Only 21,000,000 will ever be mined.)

As a currency; they are backed by what others are willing to trade you for it. (Bitcoin is seriously lacking here. Sell more stuff, guys! *hint* *hint*)

Now, if the power/internet went out for an extensive period of time, and I needed to buy something, I'd rather have gold/silver. (Food and other supplies would be even better actually, but I'm trying to limit the scope of my post to gold/silver/bitcoins.)

For conducting transactions over long distances, I'd rather use Bitcoins. :)

As it was said before, they are complimentary to each other. :D

It is not really correct to say that.
First, there is no inherent value in anything (I explained that in another thread). The value of everything is subjective, it is not a characteristic of stuff... it's an opinion people have of stuff. But anyway, I understood what you meant.

And also, the labor/energy spent on the production of something does not determine the price of this something. That's by the way the labor-value theory used by Marx to justify his theory, which, obviously, is wrong. :)
Something may be worth less than what was spent to produce it (that's why many business have losses!). Actually, I think that the current value of bitcoins is below what we spend in energy to generate them, but I never tried to calculate it.


Ok, point taken, without computers/internet, no bitcoins. But if these things cease existing, bitcoins will be the least of our problems! ;D
(unless you meant like people who do not have access to these things... that is not a problem... I think that if bitcoins ever get enough popular, there will be physical means to exchange little amounts easily... )

 ???

But then what would be the point of my e-mail ?

The same. To introduce Bitcoin. But not describing it as money (see related thread).

Ok. Perhaps "inherent" is the wrong word to use. Things have value if there is demand. I made an assumption earlier that gold/silver/bitcoins have demand. :)


Ahh, but labour/energy itself is valuable. No one in their right mind would apply labour/energy to produce something that has no demand, for it would be a loss.

Nice talking to you. You know your stuff. :)

Didn't somebody show how bitcoin didn't violate the Mises' Regression Theorem?

Since it is possible to detect majority of all nodes in the p2p network by visiting the bootstrapping irc channel, it seems fairly easy to determine where exactly all the nodes are in case any attempt to disconnect Internet, seize hardwares or some other action ever occurs.  Is this something to be concerned of?

For example, I can determine all the IP addresses of p2p nodes available
and then proceed from there.

Which is why I use TOR proxy.

All non-darknet P2P networks have public lists of participants. Tor publishes a list of all relays (except bridges) to the directory servers, I2P floodfill routers maintain RouterInfo data, Freenet has seednodes (in OpenNet mode), Gnutella has GWebCaches, etc. If an attacker wants to target every public user, nothing can stop them.

Every Bitcoin user could use Tor hidden services to communicate, but this would be even worse than the current situation, because then someone would have to destroy only the single Tor hidden service authority to bring down the network.

Generators will always need to be located in free countries. Clients can use Tor and/or connect to only a few generators.

There could be a big way to grow the use of Bitcoins massively: via a musicdowlnload site where users pay small fees for music tracks. this could be competing with Itunes, etc.

what do the experts here in the forum think about this one?

There are a couple other threads discussing this.  Overall though, I agree that bitcoin could make a great complement for file sharing/downloading.

Actaully, in another thread (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1286.0), we are talking about using OpenSwarm.  I think this OneSwam has great potential because (1) it allows customized privacy per-file and per-search, (2) has performance almost comparable to regular bittorrent, and (3) is compatible with regular bittorrents (so there is already a large base of files connected to the network from the get go).  Would be a great darcnet to use in conjucntion with bitcoin enabled p2p file sharing...

From http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu/index.html (http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu/index.html):

Greetings, 

I've been pondering BC for a month or so now and have been promoting it through the earth society blog.  Today I had a thought about Government's attacking BC and searched on the forum. . .I'm curious about the use of IP blocking software to limit potential intrusions. It seems to be an effective measure against recording industry attempts to discover 'illegal' down-loaders, could it be a useful tool for BC?

As for the Mises people and what to call BC, I think many mises peeps are heavy into heavy metal, so they don't want to hear that people can just run a program on their 'puter to get money.  No matter how noble the original intent of mises organisation or ANY organisation, they all build and grow and have self-interested people at their helm. I wouldn't expect that BC is going to get attention from that quarter, in fact I expect that, to paraphrase Ghandi, first they'll ignore it, then they'll attack it, then we'll win.

BC is money, but maybe we'd be better off referring to it as a 'trade regulation medium' (or something along those lines) - I think that'd really get their goat as they couldn't deny it.

Just my two BC's,

Cheers

No, it's mostly their fans who say that.

Yes, they can.  Because Bitcoin is not money, it's currency, and they do know the difference.  They may not think highly of it, but most at Mises.org can respect the attempt at a voluntary alternative currency.  Particularly one that solves the online commerce problems so elegantly.  Bitcoin just isn't mature enough to warrant attention from policy wonks.

Mises.org is a lost cause for BTC support IMO. They refuse to run Bitcoin articles because they don't want to "promote" it.

It's a fair concern.  Mises.org has a lot of sway with opinions that we might want to influence, but their support isn't magical.  If Mises.org started running favorable articles; Bitcoin would get many new people and more attention than just those who wish us well, and if Bitcoin can't succeed without Mises.org then it can't survive in the long run anyway.  If Bitcoin makes it, then Mises.org will run articles.

if I follow this great thread correctly, it seems that misis could be very useful.

meybe we should approach it on a personal level, isn't there anyone in the forum who has some personal contacts with key stakeholders at mises?

If we want to get the word out we might have to advertise. I suggest an advertising campaign on one of the large libertarian shows such as free talk live. I actually heard one of the saturday co-hosts mention bitcoin live on air not long ago think it was 26 sep . A script would need to be agreed on that explains bitcoin to the masses .

Advertisement is for corn syrup and diet pills. We need someone who is knowledgeable and can speak well get an interview on freedomainradio or another liberty podcast.

It's too narrow a topic, and dull.  A thirty second spot late on Fox Business would be big, but that costs money.  And if anyone does something like this, I'm going to need to have more bitcoin to sell on Mtgox.

Well, if the person could also talk about agorism and the internet and p2p stuff it could be a good interview. It doesn't have to be a whole show, but it could certainly be more than 30 seconds. It took me a week to get my wife to understand the basics. Heh, maybe that just means I shouldn't do it.

Maybe it just shows that our wives don't actually listen to us anymore.

Get an interview on Glenn Beck's show. He recently mentioned a libertarian book (F.A. Hayek) on there and it went to number 1 on the amazon bestseller list. Other shows are John Stossel or Judge Napolitano.


My wife rolls her eyes when I mention bitcoin.....

Your wife is kyuuute: http://i53.tinypic.com/34dg35y.jpg

If my better half looked like that bitcoin would be the last thing on my mind  :P

Who is that?  She looks like she is half Asian.  Is she some model, or was this picture taken by some boyfriend showing off?

You mean because you'd be taking her to the optometrist?

maybe our wives listen to us, but think that bitcoin is just another game (very obscure game) for beloved husbands...  :)

And I like that game. :D

I love Free Talk Live, I used to listed to them daily.

Anyway, my advice when calling FTL is to always be ready to respond to questions asked by the show hosts, so think about how to respond to the common questions.

Also, it would be really cool if FTL started using bitcoin as part of their AMP program.  They currently use paypal, which charges lots of transaction fees, which is a waste considering they have a stream of small donations.

Maybe we (bitcoin forumn community) could offer a monthly donation that we pay in bitcoin instead of paypal?  If we do some high monly dobation, then the name of the donator (call him "bitcoin") is listed on their website.  Or maybe we can purchase and advertising package from them in bitcoin?

Mark one of the cohosts of ftl does an interview segment after many of the shows. Maybe this could be better.

 :D  I actually emailed Ian about setting up a bitcoin donation as I am also a monthly donator to ftl. He said he didnt understand how bitcoin works. Maybe if other people contact him about setting it up it might peak his interest. I know they often auction ad banners on the site.

Im surprised they complain considering the amount of time they spend on farmville  :D

http://www.prweb.com/ (http://www.prweb.com/)

We could submit bitcoin here as a press release. I nominate the bitcoin blogger to write it!

Yes, I think everyone is on the right track here by asking organizations we love and respect to accept witcoins.  I just sent a message to the ACLU asking them
if they had an address:
Hi,
  I would like to make a donation to ACLU for all of the great things that it does to protect our liberties.  I use Bitcoin to send money over the internet but I don't see a Bitcoin address to use on your "Make Additional Gift" page.  Do you have a Bitcoin address I could use?

Thanks,
   --Darrell

If others continue to ask they'll take notice and put an address up, and then others who also want to support the ACLU or whichever organization it is will see this and want to learn more about Bitcoins.

The best way to grow Bitcoin is to offer more goods and services for Bitcoins - not just on Bitcoin sites, but other sites like Craigslist.

I think asking businesses and organizations to accept it is like the cart pulling the horse. Businesses should want to accept Bitcoin because of the things they can buy with it. Being freely exchangeable with USD is nice, but the business will just ask itself,


 "If I can't pay the rent, or buy my kids food and clothes with it, I'll have to exchange it for USD. Why don't I just stick with USD then?"

I suppose one alternative market for BTC is "American refugee's" these people tend to be older Americans with strong Republican leanings, politically right wing with somewhat extremist views, they are also often gun nuts and they don't want the socialist Obama Govt to know what there doing...i tend to bump into them on alternative retirement forums (Panama and the Philippines) don't know how they would take the anarchist thing though?  :-\ these guys tend not to be too tolerant and accepting.

Maybe Bitcoin needs a spokes person or 2 to do promotional (forum) work?

It seems to me that Bitcoin has passed the point where it needs promotion. It is now growing from its own momentum. Enjoy the ride!

I agree BC has momentum, but big picture its still very much a non event....a going concern worth around 5 mill USD is almost nothing...its like 6 nice houses in Sydney.

We're still in the early days of growth. For example, the forum achieved a sustained posting rate of 700ish for 4 days. That never happened before.

Somebody who is good on the phone could call in to The Peter Schiff Show on http://www.schiffradio.com/ (http://www.schiffradio.com/).

I've been around here for about 5 or 6 days and can see what's happening, the forum numbers are impressive...i found this site via a contrarian investment commentary blog (cant remember which one now) so there is some somewhat "mainstream" interest....problem is that from a fundamentalist investment viewpoint the BC economy is almost non existent....the only market worth trading is LR(USD)/BTC and even that is very suspect.

And i get the feeling that the Anarchist community don't like currency speculators...again fundamentally this could cause some problems down the road as i suspect that the bulk of the hoarders are anarchists?

It's only the weird oddballs that hate currency speculators.

True, Peter Schiff could be a great supporter! The harder thing would be to make him understand how reliable bitcoins are.

And I wouldn't be much surprised if he just fails to understand it. Take for example the Mises institute. As far as I know, they haven't yet published anything on bitcoins, although bitcoin is practically a grass-root manifestation of everything they defend in terms of money. That's just because they don't get the fact that particular numbers may be a scarce commodity themselves, and not only a representation of something else. So they keep asking "but it's not backed by anything?", without realizing that gold itself is not backed by anything either.

Anyway, all I'm saying is that sometimes it's hard to convince non-geek gold-worshipers of the advantages of bitcoins.

I don't want to side track this thread but Gold is rare and peak gold production was in 2001/2003...world production is in decline despite world record prices = good fundamentals.

I think he would get it if given enough information. I think he bites his tongue on a lot of things due to regulations.

I think you just described my leanings, so I'll respond ;).  I look at Bitcoin to be a well controlled currency (unlike the printing press crazy USD, or the jacked out CHN yuan), that happens to be "government free" rather than "anarchist" (which to me, is two separate situations).  The possibility of easy conversion to local currency is what really attracts me, besides being a life long geek who has been processing on distributed.net for years.

To push Bitcoin, I propose looking at what the third parties to facebook do: make scan cards that can be filled up at store registers and push Bitcoin as the choice for purchasing virtual goods.

Government free and anarchy aren't necessarily different ;)

I used to think that as well, but after some reading on the subject I've come over to the Anarcho-Capitalist side of things.

So don't discredit it offhand, do some reading! I'll be posting a paper within a few months that will give a mostly economic and historic look at Anarcho-Capitalism, might be worth your time.

And I think that your idea is good if we can get the technical limitations fixed - though as long as you have a trusted corporation running the business, no problem, it would work similarly to most other cards.

Yes this seems to be a big problem.  It seems any person you are talking to has to have an extraordinarily open mind or they won't 'get' bitcoin unless they are a geek libertarian who spent their formative years with Napster.

Perhaps it would be useful information if we had a demographic breakdown of the current members of this forum.  Data like:
-age
-gender (are there any females on here yet?)
-interests
-profession
-political views
-geography
-education

Once we know who already supports bitcoin, then we can formulate a plan to go after the rest of the planet who are just like us.

A rule of thumb floating around out there is that a Facebook app user is worth $1/year.  I've had a few apps  and those that we tried to monetize actually peaked at $1/user/MONTH.  Too bad we didn't have more users.

So yes, there is huge money in Facebook apps.  That's why Zynga is a $5 billion company.  By these metrics Farmville alone is taking in $50 million/year, I'd bet they're monetizing at better than average.

I remember when My Aquarium launched in summer 2007 (one of the first apps), it was grossing $3000/day.  For a virtual fish tank.  Go figure.

For me a good way to popularize the bitcoin system would be to donate a substantial amount to either:

• Application developers
• Influential social network users or bloggers

Imagine that we post on reddit (or some other social site) something among the lines of "We (the bitcoin community) will give 100$ in bitcoins to the best 30 developers / users with more than 15000 karma who request it". It would probably hit the front page very quickly (free money!!!), but appart from the advertising inpact, giving bitcoins to highly influential people would probably have a lot of repercussions.

Of course that may seem like a lot of money, but for the few early adopters of bitcoin that have a lot, it would probably be a wise investment.

That said, letting the bitcoin economy grow naturally instead of trying to inflate it at all costs is not a bad idea either.

A small thing: put www.bitcoin.org in your signature at other forums you participate in

Just made it the website to my twitter profile.  ;D

God damn sons-a-bitch speculators, grrrr!  >:(

Maybe we could somehow get involved with this guy's project? http://www.insideoutproject.net/ (http://www.insideoutproject.net/)

Don't take it personally, but this is something I get a little tired of.  The forum statistics (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats) say clearly that one third of registered users here are female.  The problem is not getting female users online, it is getting rid of the idea that they already aren't.  For example, what gender am I?  If you stop to think about it, you assumed I was male, didn't you?

There do exist systemic forces that cause a gender disparity in highly technical or theoretical fields, but women are already online.  If they don't feel comfortable posting or identifying themselves, maybe it's not something with regards to them that has to be done.


/rant

Your forum statistics are not reliable because of the large number of spam accounts that are on here.

I'm sorry if I offended you.  My remark was based on being a frequent visitor to this forum and only having one self-identified woman post in all that time.  And she came on here specifically to bash something someone else had said, not because she was a supporter of bitcoin.
Also, I was referring to gender on this forum, not online as you seem to have interpreted it.  As to why some people don't feel comfortable posting, I have no way of knowing why they wouldn't do this.  And I don't appreciate the implication that it is the fault of other people on this forum that they won't do so.  If you have some concrete allegations to make, please put them out there (in the appropriate thread).

The larger point I was making is it might be helpful to know who we are, so that we can more intelligently reach out to people who haven't heard of bitcoin.

That was a straight up rant--nothing against you, just a personal pet peeve.  Comments like (are there any females on here yet?) set a tone that, unsurprisingly, is frustrating to many women.  Yours is not the first by any stretch that I've seen on the bitcoin forums (to which I was specifically referring), merely the colloquial straw.  But it is a real issue.

Your larger point is of course, unlike mine, on-topic.

 I wonder how many people under the age of 18 are on here.

Probably quite a few people under 18 but I'm guessing.  Going back to how to promote bitcoin, I know they are kinda on the fringe, but how about things like Coast to Coast AM and Alex Jones. I mean, like I say they are kinda on the fringe, but they have a fairly large listening audience, and I get the feeling a lot of them are the type that tend to do things like hoard gold now.  I listen to coast to coast, I don't hoard gold but I don't have the money for that, plus I expect the govt will simply make trading gold illegal when the dollar crash comes.  FDR did it before after all.  I also think Judge Napolitano and Glenn Beck weren't stupid ideas, although I sincerely doubt glenn beck would understand the technical aspects of bitcoin, he would understand that it's about getting away from the Fed and the market manipulation that goes along with it.  A lot of people on the far right are very worried about the state of the FRN right now (justifiably IMHO), and we might be able to get acceptance through this. 
On a completely different note, but also in line with getting more people to use bitcoin, there are a lot of business models that are completely legal, but extremely difficult to find a CC processor for.  Things like online tobacco sales, online ammunition sales, private firearms sales (would only be legal in US if you held an FFL or only did business in your state), and even "adult content".  Also, bitcoin could have a role as an in game payment currency for mobile and social network games.  I realize that long term micropayments aren't a very good thing for the network, but what some of the mobile apps are referring to as micropayments aren't micro at all.  Also, maybe an android app store run using bitcoin, the overlap between developers that opt to use a linux based mobile platform and libertarian minded hackers might be all that would be needed to gain acceptance.

I tried to flog bitcoin to Alex Jones this week but couldn't find an email address to connect to him.  He'd be a good one I reckon.  Must be somebody on here with a connection to him, given the political inclinations of this crowd.

Of course we could also try the 4Chan/Justin Bieber approach:

Not only Alex Jones , try contacting some of his guests. Gerald Celente for one. Max Keiser is another who has already done a show about bitcoin.

All it would take is for one of them to mention bitcoin on his show or to Alex himself. If he starts hearing it from a few different guests he might investigate. But then again he might think bitcoin is a conspiracy and that we will all end up with bitcoin addresses tattooed on our foreheads....

 :D

If Charlie Sheen was our spokesman, Alex Jones would definitely hear about it. :D

I think they wouldn't even bother trying on the technical side. They'd probably just 'outlaw' the use of bitcoin for commerce and suddenly no legitimate business would think about accepting it :/

Or is there something that stops them from 'forbidding a currency' in general?

Private currencies are not illegal.

If they ban bitcoin they also have to ban cash for the exact same reasons.

Im certain the feds would probably setup a child porn or  drugs for bitcoin honeypot .