I would put my hand up to be the marketeer for bitcoin, this is my argument:

Organised the bitcoin conference in Prague (with no budget) - had bitcoin being accepted at hardrock cafe
15 years experience in starting businesses and marketing them
Experience ranges from door to door sales of books to enterprise level software solutions (never had a marketing budget)
I use bitcoin and would like to see it succeed
Im not a developer
I talk to entrepreneurs and business people all over the world all day
I have no schedule
I have no idea about the technology that runs bitcoin, i just love the concept.
I would be prepared to spend some of my own money on it.
Is there someone with more experience than me prepared to work for free?

This is what id need from the community:
100 people to pledge support and volunteer hours per month to development.
If enough people indicate on this thread that they will support it then ill formalise the pledging process as ill need to know your skillset.

Here are some things i think about regularly:
bit-pay is great for merchants, by enabling the same security on the other side of the transaction (for the consumer)
this would remove any bitcoin risk to both parties.
Encourage bitcoin enthusiasts to meet and pool their spending power and target a place that everyone is willing to spend money.(a site to coordinate this would be the first thing i would develop)
if there are 5 people willing to spend btc in a shop then thats where adoption begins.  'Think globally act locally' has been used before but makes sense to this idea too.
Everyone has ideas, and their have been some great ideas mentioned earlier, but whats needed is someone to say - lets execute them.

So if we get 100 people to commit then I will volunteer to execute some of the ideas that get thrown around here.
If 100 people dont support the idea then everyone should support tony from bit-pay as he is doing a pretty good job already.

You should have told me "No" Transisto I was waiting to talk to you on Skype after the initial chat:) When you are not interested you should say no my friend and nobody minds it.And if it's a "MAYBE" we can talk and find solutions.

Phil why don't you add me on Skype (netzero1980) and we'll talk...there is a possibility to rent it 24/7.Somebody gave me 20 Ghash already since this thread but we are expanding and will 100% need more power.I have 36 Ghash rented at the moment and everybody is happy.

Here is my 2btc:

Berlin:
Seems to be a much stronger community, Germans outnumbered brits by 6 to 1 in Prague.  
Room77 is in berlin, I think holding a conference here would have lasting effects on the adoption of btc in the physical world particularly in this neighborhood .
Its much easier and cheaper (and cooler) for participants. (no offence to london)



London:
Financial hub, for a global currency its got a lot more credibility than Berlin. (no offence to berlin)
Speakers predominantly came from london which is a very big advantage.
Whoever turns out to be the guy footing the bill for the next one, paying for keynotes flights and accommodation was a significant cost.
Secret weapon is in london:  The last conference would have been impossible without Amirs input.  He is on btc fulltime and the fact he is in London would be enough to make the next one successful also.  

Participants was the hardest thing to get commitment from last time and there is overwhelming advantages of Berlin here.  As this is the 2nd time around maybe it will be easier.  The first piece of the puzzle is attracting speakers, London has a big advantage here.  

I dont think San Antonio dates need to be taken into account when organising this one but its probably too soon to clash with their dates anyway.

because our hashing client is compiled and designed for linux

Sorry.I am looking for 4ghash/s and above for one contract.

Hi,

I am looking to rent GPU power at 4$/Ghash/day.I need the rented rigs to have linux (32 or 64 bit),ATI drivers,SDK and ssh,vnc,or team viewer access.The rigs have to be ready for mining.Payment will be done in BTC.

Minimum power to rent from one owner: 4 Ghash/sec

The offer starts now.

My Skype ID is netzero1980.

Thanks to Gabriel who has made a transcript of the talk:

My point of view on how I and my partners see Bitcoin's position in the world right now, and the second one - I'll tell my ideas about what we can do about it.

So as you know, decentralization is the main point of Bitcoin. This is what makes Bitcoin to run and to run smoothly despite all the events that happen. And as we know, decentralization is also used in P2P-networks, and they proved themselves very well. So, this is a really good theory that was proven in real life.

As any coin, Bitcoin has two sides, and I would call them a light side and a dark side. So the light side is that the community believes in Bitcoin. And that's really great. People invest their resources, they invest their money, they invest their trust. They create services, they are trying to do new things. And that's really wonderful and very good. And we're all here today. That's also the light side. The light part.
And then, there is, as usually, there's also a dark side. Like someone in the background, in black clothes, and so on. And those guys are political forces, financial institutions and regular people, they're not enemies of Bitcoin, but they just don't know about it. So this is also an issue we'll have to deal with.

And the problem I see here is the problem of trust. And I would say that it has several levels. And I can call it the stack of trust. The topmost level is the trust of politicians. As you I think understand, political guys - they don't know about Bitcoin; those guys that know about it, don't trust it and probably there's a variety they do because Bitcoin can destroy political institutions. So the same about the financial institutions. Like, banks and bitcoins, this is something I don't see fit together. And enterpreneurs, they're probably one of the next adopters of Bitcoin. But it's not enough for entrepreneurs just to accept Bitcoin. We need the regular people who will pay with it. And this is the point where I think we should start.

So, talking about regular people, what do they need? They need simplicity. They need, like, simple window, they need simple button "Pay", and they need to click on it and pay. And they don't have to worry about how do they live by bitcoins, where to change them and whatever.

And one of the solutions for this is to create as much exchange points, exchange services and whatever, as much as we can. And what I propose is to spread the idea of decentralization to any bitcoin service or to anyone who is willing to deal with it. Right now, bitcoin is not that really decentralized because most of the units are exchanged at a few exchanges, as you all know. And there's also some services that collect bitcoins and that keep them all together. And that's the real problem, because initially, by design, Bitcoin was supposed to distribute the different wallets all across the world. And right now, they are accumulated in different services and this happens because I think sometimes it is more profitable to pay with service than with your own wallet. And so what we need I think is more exchange spots.

And besides that, I think that decentralization in itself is not enough for success. If we look back to two to thirty months ago, we can see a lot of different events happening: services come, they do some things, they collect people's bitcoins and then they disappear. And this is where I think that anonimity is misunderstood. Anonimity of Bitcoin is a really good thing, but this is not exactly needed by regular people. As I said, they need simplicity, they need usability. And also, right now, Bitcoin is somewhere between the ground and the sky, if we talk about the legislation. It's, like, stuck in the middle. And that's I think is also a real problem, because right now, governments don't really care about Bitcoin, since it's small. But as soon as it grows up, they definitely will pay attention and I don't think that it will do any good to Bitcoin. And besides, there are no mechanisms of trust inside the Bitcoin network. As I said about anonimity, services appear, they do go
 od things, they collect money, but then they disappear, and we don't know if we can trust a new service or if we can't. That's what we've actually met with when opening the IMCEX.com. People asked, can we trust you? And all I could say was "You should try". We're not hiding; we're not as very open as we would like to be, but we're not hiding. People always talk to us and ask us any things. But that brought me to the idea that of a network of trust, that I will talk about later.
So if we look at all these points, do they look scary? I think they do, for regular people. So, do we need someone from outside to regulate it, like government? I don't think so. That's not good. Regulation doesn't really bring anything good to anyone. But I think that the Bitcoin community could have used some preparation and self-regulation.

I'll stop on cooperation. Initially, when I was preparing this presentation, like, a month ago, I was going to address this issue to other bitcoin exchanges, because I thought that it was a really good idea. But yesterday, after talking with some people, I understood that actual businesses were trying to deal with bitcoins. This might be useful to them, too. So I'll try to explain this in brief. If you accept bitcoins IRL, sometimes you need to exchange them quickly to money. Sometimes you need to exchange them to currencies that we don't use IRL, like paying to other service providers abroad, and so on. And I think that those different spots of the Bitcoin community could make some conversation, like, a web. And they could deal with each other. And when they connect with each other, we'll get that decentralized exchange that right now, Bitcoin is lacking.

So, the use cases. Exchange services could try to use this communication network or interexchange protocol to serve customer requests that they can't handle themselves. Like, we're a small exchange. We have very low volumes right now. And if a customer comes and he says, I'd like to buy, like, 10.000 BTCs, we can't handle this. We don't have that much to offer. So we either need to go to another big exchange or we have to search for someone else who can sell that amount for us. And that's not really good. What I would like to have, is then opportunity to quickly make a request to, like, 10 or 15 other services, like, saying that I need 10.000 BTCs given to me. And they could give me quota for how much time, what price, what conditions, that they could have done this.
And speaking of the businesses, this is probably a good use case when you urgently need to convert bitcoins to other currencies and so on. It's not always that useful to do that at the exchange, because sometimes it takes time, sometimes it takes fees, and so on.

So, to look at this step by step quickly, this is how it could possibly work. The customer places an order that we're not comfortable with. As I said, like, 10.000 BTCs that we need to exchange, or something. So we poll other parties, can you exchange?, can you exchange?, can you exchange? And they respond and we choose the offer and so we set up the payment process later.
And this is a win-win-win situation for everyone; for the customer, for me, for another exchange, because we're exchanging the liquidity that we won't do in another situation. And new players can join such network.

The last thing I would like to talk about is [] I'm short on time.
So, I would like to say on the web of trust: such network requires some stability. And stability can only be provided if you have, like, when you have a track and record of everyone. There is no need to keep a track and record, but you can have some kind of trustrank for every other member of such network. And if every member of the network has got a set of trustranks for every other network member. So we've also built a decentralized trust network, trust rank. And depending on how fast, how comfortable it is to work with another party, you can correct your own evaluation of anyone else.
And such big number of ranks will actually result in something very stable. Something very close to life. This is how it works in real life.
Like torrent networks, businesses and people communities. We know something about each person and this is how we relate him and so on. So each network member maintains his own list of trust ranks, interexchange communication and such web of trust will provide faster feedback, better community and generally better liquidity of money and operations. And it is also open to new members, because new members can earn their own trust from others.

So this is what I wanted to talk about, and we will try to prepare some simple open-source software to try. I think it will be rated by []. So if you're interested, please subscribe at our page and we'll definitely send you an email. Thank you!

nice!

please excuse my ignorance but how do you find this information from this:1VayNert3x1KzbpzMGt2qdqrAThiRovi8

Tony is a big asset to what we are all trying to achieve.
A real entrepreneur in bitcoin creating practical applications for businesses to adopt bitcoin.

He helped fund the conference, he helped fund Max and his (small) entourage and now we have a real profile involved in pushing bitcoin to the masses.

It's hard to coordinate everyone to focus on a goal from what ive seen but i think tonys idea of going for a million bitcoin users is something the whole community should get behind.

Thanks to moleccular for posting some tasters of the conference, ive set aside time tomorrow to get some production done.

unfortunately ive been a bit snowed under, hopefully today i should be able to get 1 done.

Everyone seems to be missing the main point here, what do we already have?

Enthusiasts wanting to use bitcoins ie buying power. 

So thats where you need to start, there is no point getting a shop to accept bitcoins if nobody goes into the shop to ask to pay with them.

Start by gathering together everyone in your area that uses or is willing to use bitcoins (sell some coins to your friends with android phones).  Target a place you are all happy to spend money, ie the local coffee shop or whatever it is.  Once you pick your target, start spending.

I was discussing with Tony from Bit Pay about a website that could coordinate these things, have a directory, each shop is given a red/green/yellow light to indicate its progress.

Join together, that's got to be the first step.

I dont think its the right place to start, but its an example of how it could work.
If there were greater numbers of bitcoin people in one place it would work, the most i heard of was Berlin and they have 4-8 people at each meetup.

If we 100 people from 1 country, all prepared to get a mobile phone / internet / insurance or electricity that would be a much better place to start.

thats a good example, also very simple place to start
Im imagining the best place to start would be one company that services all of europe or one company that services all of the states.
Would these rail passes be for s pecific country in Europe only?

That would be excellent i'd definitely go there, its all about buying power.  After prague im addicted to spending money in bitcoins, enough to make me want to go to room 77 in Berlin.

Hi community,

Since I first discovered bitcoin in July, ive been searching for a potential entry into some kind of business.
After the conference in Prague I was quite surprised just how many developers are in the community that are passionate about bitcoin and are trying to set up some kind of business.  The environment im used to is the opposite, its the entrepreneurs trying to convince a good cto to be passionate about their idea.  Im very surprised more entrepreneurs aren't flocking in.

So here is an idea, (feel free to steal it as long as you tell me where to find it):

If we started a group buying club and targeted an area like:
electricity
fuel card
Telecoms
Hosting
starbucks? (its just an idea)
credit cards
Insurance

Something we all use and spend fiat money on every month.

Set up a group account like a corporate account with these companies. Allow members to pay in bitcoin and pay the bills in fiat.  Profits could be taken from commissions from the service provider and everyone could use hundreds bitcoin every month on living expenses.

Im guessing the states would be the obvious choice due to the numbers as i feel you would need do it country by country.  If you know of any services we all use that dont relate to country then im listening.

If you are a developer and see some issues with the idea, or would like to be involved I would need a few to come in on an equity only deal.

When i was 21 i negotiated a mobile phone deal with a company in Sydney, the prices i negotiated were about half that of regular retailers.  The deal was about to get over the line but i was a bit cocky with my marketing rhetoric and the legal team had an issue with it at the 11th hour and cut me off.  I had hundreds of people registering every day.....My marketing message was something like;
 "lets control these corporate phone companies by joining our buying power together".

Of course once you have everyone on one account, you have stronger negotiating skills to move the account elsewhere and secure bigger discounts, Since then ive been thinking about it for over a decade, and i think this might be the right group of people to make something work.  If its a stupid / good idea then please make some comment. 

I would suggest electricity is a good place to start, as you cant tell the difference between electricity form company A and company B.  But i have knocked on their door before and they arent so easy to get to.  This could be expanded to food and other products, although you would have to support a big chain.

I dont think it would be advertised as bitcoin buying group either, just a regular buying group that accepts bitcoins but maybe not even advertised on the site.  Here is an example of a buying group: http://www.buyinggroups.co.uk/mercia.html

Who's interested? Whos' got feedback?

Mitch

Sure, well my head is still hurting from the conference organising.
Let me know if you need any help, we learnt a lot this time.

Thanks for sponsoring our event guys.

I was curious how you are going to pay for the convention room with payments of 12 btc for a table.  How many tables do you need to sell to pay for the room?
This was a problem we ran into that nobody paid until the last fortnight but we had to pay the room a month in advance, we had no idea how many people would turn up.

The photo of the convention centre looks like many thousands of dollars a day, how many bitcoin businesses are there?

Hopefully you have all this under control, good luck with your event.

Here's a clip of the venue, Friday Night Cocktail party.  For a restaurant like this to accept bitcoin, even just for a few hours was great.  Next time we will get them to provide decent internet too .  This is after the party had finished, there were a few bitcoin people mingling around.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbZs4WtzdLE

Hi molecular

Feel free to post some teasers/outtakes etc, would appreciate if you left any full talks to us.
I should be able to put some material up tomorrow too.

Thanks again for the extra video, im sure it will make a lot of difference.

I would choose the license that allows anyone to reuse the content.


Thanks for the feedback, hopefully we can get a whole lot more by the time the next one comes around.  I wont reply to each point individually, ill take the suggestions on board.

Thanks for turning up.