The meetup in New Hampshire (The Free State) is about 3 weeks old and going very well. It meets weekly on saturdays, and has 8-12 people show up, with 1-3 new people each time.

Conversation tends to split between one group teaching the newbs about Bitcoin, and another group discussing more advanced matters and community happenings, etc. The meetup serves as a place for exchange (USD or silver for BTC) as well.

The New Hampshire Free State Project is a unique environment in which to foster Bitcoin enthusiasts. I run the Free State Bitcoin Consortium group on facebook which has over 100 members, 90% of whom are in NH. I think there are at least 200 Free Staters who are at least mildly into Bitcoin and use it in agorist activities frequently. I believe in a year there will be at least 500 Free Staters who own and at least casually use Bitcoin.

The meetup will not fit all these people

Hello Casascius,

I want to suggest an optional field with 'expiry date'.

The reason is to make it easy for non-tech-users to prevent accidental double spending and at the same time prevent accidental 'bitcoin loss'. If the bitcoins have not been redeemed before the expiry date, the issuer of the note is allowed to transfer the bitcoins from the address to a new address. This can be easily handled automatically in a client which is used to print the note.

Longer explanation see here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43616.msg1041420#msg1041420

It would be nice to see the expiry date (and an accompanying text) in a matching style to the artwork.

Cool, I pay you 1BTC per 1000hr coding work. OK? No? Why? Oh, exchange rate again.

Ok.  Say I don't have any bitcoins.  I also don't want to mine for them.  How can I get them?  I suggest that there is no way to answer this question that doesn't imply a BTC to USD (or EUR, etc.) exchange rate.

Since the beginning of our local Bitcoin group here in Vienna, "Bitcoin Austria", we had a total of 12 meetings with about 8-15 people each. The core group meets more often to work on various projects and although we don't do much advertising, we continuously have an influx of new people: about 1-2 new people show up on every meeting.
Over time the knowledge gap within the audience widened and it became somewhat difficult to keep it interesting for everybody. We are now trying to split the meetings in two parts and start with an introductory talk about Bitcoin which is actively advertised to newcomers and the main part where more advanced discussions are planned.

One of our major task is to reach out to other people, groups or organizations, which might be interested in Bitcoin (banking reformers, alternative currency advocates, media artists,...). It is surprising to see how appealing Bitcoin is to many different groups for very different reasons. Of course, some hope for Bitcoin to become something it inherently cannot achieve, but still.

The fact that (much like this very forum) there seems to be a constant stream of new people becoming aware of and interested in Bitcoin makes me optimistic about the state of the community. We would love to hear from other local groups - how are you doing, what are your topics, how do you deal with newcomers, do you do advertising?

Every asset has an exchange rate with every other asset. It is impossible to prevent this phenomenon.

Let's assume nobody traded BTC for USD. We'd still have an exchange rate between BTC and a loaf of bread. Perhaps 1btc = 3 loaves of bread. Of course, we also know that 1 loaf of bread = $3.50.  And then POOF there is now, automatically, an exchange rate between BTC and USD, even though we didn't start with one. The exchange rate in this case becomes 0.33 btc = $3.50

So the reason BTC is commonly priced in terms of USD, is because USD is the most purchased commodity with BTC. This should be expected, since both are money, and monies are those things which are the most commonly purchased goods in a society.

tl;dr- It's impossible to prevent an exchange rate from occuring between any two goods on earth.

I am consistently inspired by the brilliance of many people working in this community. It is humbling and an honor to be part of this with you. The time, dedication, and mental acumen invested in this project is not less than epic.

Sincere gratitude to you all.

-Erik

It is more likely that they send predators to "take care" of every single person on this forum, than they voluntary lose the power of printing nations money.

NEW AND IMPROVED



Please let me know if this doesn't meet requirements. Constructive criticism appreciated. Do you think I should add an amount box? It would go above the left QR code.

The full resolution, which when printed at 300 PPI should match the dimensions of a US dollar, and the PSD file if you would like to make edits (there are some other spirographs you can put behind Mr Turing's head) are available at:
http://dropcanvas.com/jfp75

Also I'm not sure exactly what the QR codes are supposed to be, but if you print out the full resolution at 300 ppi the larger should be 30mm square and the smaller should be 25mm square per spec. I guess the larger is a Bitcoin address, and the smaller is the (possibly encrypted) private key for that address?

Thanks :]