Bitcoin Forum

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If only somebody would create a really nice animated video (http://www.weusecoins.com/) explaining what bitcoin is....

That's my thread!  :D

I look at it this way, most [H]'ers fall into one or more of these categories: minor/teen/early 20's (didn't we all know it all then?), unemployed, live at home, no world experience, etc.  I don't really hold their skepticism against them; they know not of what they speak. 

I'm pretty sure that people who are interested in improving the current monetary system, will eventually learn about bitcoin, and adopt it.  It's not difficult to search about digital money on internet and find out about bitcoin on wikipedia for instance.

IMO it's useless to try to get the average Joe to be interested in bitcoins.  Those guys will not accept this currency until it is talked about on national TV.

eideteker:  Can you ask the skeptics what we, the Bitcoin Community, could do to be less "smelly" or "sketchy" ?

I find people are much more sympathetic if instead of saying "What's your problem?" you instead ask "What am I doing wrong, and how can I fix it?"

And then you can get all jujitsu on them and praise their great ideas and gently suggest that you'd only screw up whatever it is they are suggesting (and you're busy doing other stuff already) so maybe they should just go ahead and do it...

Can we get this video to the bitcoin.org frontpage? Maybe along with your talk?

I agree with grondilu. Please let’s focus on people who Bitcoin appeals to at its current stage: Libertarians, programmers, investors, certain entrepeneurs, some artists, early adopters. Don’t waste your energy on anyone you cannot possibly convince.

Every single thread I've read that ends in people ridiculing bitcoin starts with "computers generate coins".  Computers do not generate coins.  This is why people think bitcoin is ridiculous.  Coins are an agreement between people who value coins, offer and accept them in exchange for goods and services, and treat them as fungible--just like every other kind of money.  If people are curious about mining, then they're quite welcome to know that miners process transactions for the network, create its security, and are in turn rewarded with a portion of the essentially pre-existing coins from a set total.  But really, that point is kind of like describing the printing process to someone when telling them about bills.

It's like if I travelled back to the middle ages and told people, "okay, printing presses generate bills.  then I give them to you, and you give me goods and services."  They would think I was a complete ass.  It's the restricted supply, security against counterfeiting, market support, and the fact that they're more useful than carrying around cows and sheep and gold, that makes them work as a currency.  It's not their method of introduction into the economy.  Please get this into your minds people!  Computers do not generate coins.  /rant

there are always cries of "nothing backing it"
what backs gold? nothing? must be worthless then  ::)

at least no one in that thread thought cash was backed by gold.

I wouldn't be so sure about that...

This can't help...

https://i.imgur.com/ddQzj.jpg

Why?  Maybe it's a fake bitcoin app that has been detected by the software.

It's not conclusive at all, but I have the official bitcoin client installed on this laptop and I just ran Malwarebytes.  It was not detected as a threat.

I'm not surprised by the responses from a forum of such nature. Just because they have interest in computing and gaming hardware, doesn't mean they will have the capacity to appreciate and understand what Bitcoin could become. If anything this is almost exactly as expected. Nothing really is getting discussed other than the possibility of making some free money.

I am consistently amazed that people assume the work being done by miners is being sold to a company.  It is open source software, this claim is easily proven false.

It might be a good idea to have two explanations of what bitcoin is on the homepage(links to the explanations).

One technical, which talks about mining etc.
Two, non-technical which talks about the advantages of using bitcoin, or what bitcoin can be used for etc.

I have found when presenting a new idea it's good to completely leave out the technical side of things, you don't even need to briefly explain why it's secure, just make the assumption that it is all those things in your non-technical explanation, leave the explaining to the technical side.

When I was giving a business presentation about starting an opensource outsourcing company, the first time I gave it I went into a lot of detail.

OpenOffice.org replaces MS Office, Linux replaces Windows etc. Then most of the questions were on where OpenOffice even worked or problems with using Linux etc. People were worrying about the details.

The second time I made the presentation I made the assumtion that these things just worked, didn't mention a single piece of software we would use. Only covered the business benefits and totally avoided any technical details. The result was that we won the round (beat 6 other groups), with the listeners focusing on whether the business side was viable.

We could do the same for bitcoin I think.

I agree, which is why I thought 'WeUseCoins' should receive the full bounty for their non-technical video.