Bitcoin research project - Brainstorm session

[Ivanhoe]

Hello Bitcoin community,

Since it is vacation for me and I’m not the type of guy to do nothing. Yesterday I was thinking about doing something good for the Bitcoin community. So I was thinking; there are a lot of new Bitcoin start-ups that would like some basic information about their clients or/and potential clients. So I searched the web for a research regarding global opinion about Bitcoin, I couldn’t find one however. This is a big miss of precious information for Bicoin merchants.

The preparation

What kind of information do we need? Well that’s all up to you…. What do you want to know about people and their thoughts about Bitcoin? Let’s brainstorm all along with each other in this thread.

For example some questions that I think are interesting:

-Have you ever heard of Bitcoin?
-Do you trust Bitcoin?
-What is your opinion about digital currencies?
-Do you think you will be able in the future to store your wealth online?
-How many people do you know that know about  Bitcoin?

I was thinking about publishing the survey on a website to make it easy and quick to fill in for people. I could design the survey in such a way that you get different questions dependent of the answers you gave in previous questions.

The respondents

Who will be the respondents and how am I going to reach them? I alone of course can’t reach enough people to make this research representable for the whole world. Therefore I need your help. It is going to be a research for the community from the community anyone can participate in delivering data and brainstorming about the project.

The results

The results will be completely free to look into and I will publish them on a website (www.bitcoinresearchproject.com). I will add a tip jar for the people who would like to donate some.

 
I know it looks all at bit cheap and unprofessional right now, but this is the very start of the project. We( you and me) are just in the brainstorm session right now.  Let’s do it together!

Regards,
Ivanhoe

[goldenmoss]

Hi,

I would like to help.  It would be of tremendous value to the project to start producing some solid, reliable information.

I am very new to Bitcoin but I have a lot of experience of constructing questionnaires.  The existing fragments of (alleged) market research are completely unreliable. E.g. I saw an article yesterday claiming that something like 20% of BTC purchases go on clothing, and I don't believe that for a moment.

I would like to raise two initial questions:

(1) How to ensure data integrity?
It will be important to develop a dataset that can actually be used to model the world with.  I worry that there could be large numbers of Bitcoin enthusiasts/rampers/speculators going into the survey and feeding in propaganda, e.g. that they use BTC daily for all kinds of ordinary purchases.  And then we would just end up with a load of pointless hype.  Of course, in the long term it would be of huge value even for speculators if there was some reliable data on global opinion.  But for sure it would be foolish to assume that most speculators are going to take a long term perspective.

(2) How to segment the universe?  You write "clients or/and potential clients" - so this is already on your mind.  Whatever the final choice, I think it could be useful to have a special segment for people who like the concept but are deterred e.g. by concerns about security or complexity.

[goldenmoss]

A couple more thoughts:

(1) It would be good to include a couple of logic traps, where frivolous participants can be identified by the inconsistency in their answers.
(2) Most of the clients / potential clients for Bitcoin businesses are themselves businesses.  So the idea is that a survey of this kind will enable Bitcoin businesses to go to potential clients and say "Look, the data shows that such-and-such kinds of people are keen to use bitcoins in your kind of business as long as *what I can do for you* is done."  Do I have your idea right?

My vacation starts in a week's time and I hope to get busy on this then!
   

[jimbursch]

This is a great idea, and I would like to offer the MyMindshare platform as a vehicle for this research.

A surveying system is built into the platform, and the platform addresses many of the issues you will be confronting -- data integrity, user identity, etc.

I am the developer of MyMindshare and I can easily adapt it to your needs.

Feel free to contact me -- jim at mymindshare.com