Losing Critical Mass and Call to Action

[chaord]

My strategy is not to find specific niches that would work for bitcoin really well but to create lot of mini sites for bitcoins. It can't hurt to have lot of miniservices by which users can spend their money on. This of course, contribute attraction for developers who might develop the right application that will be the viral niches that allow bitcoins to take off. Think of my strategy as a metastrategy for allowing your strategy to be viable.

Fair enough.  I would actually argue that both strategies are on the meta side.  I'm focusing on giving bitcoin an intrinsic value even if it's exchange value is limited.  You're focusing on giving bitcoin exchange value.

Maybe we should start a Bitcoin Network, LLC to drive adoption of bitcoin. You can be the chief extrinsic officer, and I'll be the chief intrinsic officer.   Truth be told, I'm quite serious.  I think if there is any way whatsoever that someone can make a full time living solely on bitcoin, I'm in.

[The Madhatter]

@kiba + chaord: I like your ideas.

I think that selling anything that people would want to buy anonymously (like VPNs, materials and content banned where they live, anonymous calling cards, etc) is a perfect fit for Bitcoin.

Without disclosing how much I've made from Bitcoin I'll say this: I've been living off of the proceeds of Bitcoin for 3 months now. Paying bills, mortgage, and buying food. So yes, it is possible.

[chaord]

@kiba + chaord: I like your ideas.

I think that selling anything that people would want to buy anonymously (like VPNs, materials and content banned where they live, anonymous calling cards, etc) is a perfect fit for Bitcoin.

Without disclosing how much I've made from Bitcoin I'll say this: I've been living off of the proceeds of Bitcoin for 3 months now. Paying bills, mortgage, and buying food. So yes, it is possible.

This is actually very comforting.  However, if all of us started operating reputable bitcoin4cash businesses, I wonder how many people would be able to pay bills, mortgages, food, etc.  Incidentally, have you asked your customers what they intend to buy with the bitcoins that you sell them?  I know that is a difficult question to broach in a privacy oriented business, but I only ask because it would be great to know how many people are puchasing bitcoins from you solely as a speculative buy and hold investment (commodity) versus those that intend to buy something from the marketplace.  My gut tells me that most of the exchanges taking place today are for speculative or investment purposes, not for the cash-->bitcoin-->marketplace cycle.  Of course this is nearly impossible to prove

That being said, I would consider offering a $20K USD bounty (and potentially more) for the development of a particular product/service for which bitcoin is the only viable solution/offering with the potential to go viral.  An example would be the paid-forum idea mentioned above.  I guess what I'm saying is that I personally am convicted enough that until a simple use-case for bitcoin is found that cannot be easily served by any other competing currency, it's going to be nearly impossible to get bitcoin to take off.  I am willing to fund, and find more funding (VC?), for such a use-case.  I know it's out there .

Goldsmiths probably never thought that they would become bankers, and that their raw input (gold) would become money for the world.  We are in the opposite boat.  We have the money that we want the world to use, are unwilling to use force to make it so, and are therefore relegated to finding the product/service whereby bitcoin is the only suitable raw input.

[The Madhatter]

This is actually very comforting.  However, if all of us started operating reputable bitcoin4cash businesses, I wonder how many people would be able to pay bills, mortgages, food, etc.

Probably not very many. I am profitable because I found a niche that sells. I'm sure that there are many other undiscovered and productive niches for Bitcoin out there.

Incidentally, have you asked your customers what they intend to buy with the bitcoins that you sell them?

Nope. I never ask. Some of my customers are rather poor at hiding their intentions, so I easily figured out what they were doing without snooping around. So far, I haven't seen anything illegal.

I know that is a difficult question to broach in a privacy oriented business, but I only ask because it would be great to know how many people are puchasing bitcoins from you solely as a speculative buy and hold investment (commodity) versus those that intend to buy something from the marketplace.  My gut tells me that most of the exchanges taking place today are for speculative or investment purposes, not for the cash-->bitcoin-->marketplace cycle.  Of course this is nearly impossible to prove

I know for a fact that some people were buying coins from me to buy something online with them. I can't discuss it for privacy reasons.

Also, link2voip used to publish their stats to this forum. I remember seeing that they were getting around 2 payments per day like clockwork. So there's a real example. Some of those payments are from me for my hosting! lol And I digress...

Goldsmiths probably never thought that they would become bankers, and that their raw input (gold) would become money for the world.  We are in the opposite boat.  We have the money that we want the world to use, are unwilling to use force to make it so, and are therefore relegated to finding the product/service whereby bitcoin is the only suitable raw input.

Maybe people will adopt Bitcoin after the dollar collapses..

Well, there are a lot of smart people hanging around on this forum. Someone is bound to figure out a niche to make Bitcoin go viral.

[TTBit]

Well, there are a lot of smart people hanging around on this forum. Someone is bound to figure out a niche to make Bitcoin go viral.

This.

Bitcoin is a solution in search of a problem. It will find it eventually.

[Anonymous]

@kiba + chaord: I like your ideas.

I think that selling anything that people would want to buy anonymously (like VPNs, materials and content banned where they live, anonymous calling cards, etc) is a perfect fit for Bitcoin.

Without disclosing how much I've made from Bitcoin I'll say this: I've been living off of the proceeds of Bitcoin for 3 months now. Paying bills, mortgage, and buying food. So yes, it is possible.

This is actually very comforting.  However, if all of us started operating reputable bitcoin4cash businesses, I wonder how many people would be able to pay bills, mortgages, food, etc.  Incidentally, have you asked your customers what they intend to buy with the bitcoins that you sell them?  I know that is a difficult question to broach in a privacy oriented business, but I only ask because it would be great to know how many people are puchasing bitcoins from you solely as a speculative buy and hold investment (commodity) versus those that intend to buy something from the marketplace.  My gut tells me that most of the exchanges taking place today are for speculative or investment purposes, not for the cash-->bitcoin-->marketplace cycle.  Of course this is nearly impossible to prove

That being said, I would consider offering a $20K USD bounty (and potentially more) for the development of a particular product/service for which bitcoin is the only viable solution/offering with the potential to go viral.  An example would be the paid-forum idea mentioned above.  I guess what I'm saying is that I personally am convicted enough that until a simple use-case for bitcoin is found that cannot be easily served by any other competing currency, it's going to be nearly impossible to get bitcoin to take off.  I am willing to fund, and find more funding (VC?), for such a use-case.  I know it's out there .

Goldsmiths probably never thought that they would become bankers, and that their raw input (gold) would become money for the world.  We are in the opposite boat.  We have the money that we want the world to use, are unwilling to use force to make it so, and are therefore relegated to finding the product/service whereby bitcoin is the only suitable raw input.

Well if you solve spam people will come. Millions of people......just sayin'  


twitter spam
email spam
forum spam

all dealt with by small btc microtransactions. Viagra emails wont be sent if it costs the spammers a bitcoin to contact you.All bitcoin has to do is sit in the middle between the spammers and the end users and automatic filtration occurs. You dont even have to tell the end user that it is btc you are using to do this. They make a 20 dollar cc payment and it makes their spam go away. Im sure the more geeky would find out if they dug but there would be no need to scare the non technical user away. Once btc kills all the spam on the internet the mainstream will love it. FFFUUUUU Nigerian email scams!


This can be done because you cant make .001 cc or paypal  payments because of the fees but you sure can with bitcoin and spammers cant fake bitcoin payments. If someone makes their first million using this idea I hope you give me a cut - in bitcoins of course!

[BioMike]

Spam is not a technological problem. And you will be unable to solve it with a technical fix.

This idea is the same as email stamps.

[FreeMoney]

How hard would it be to set up an email system with payments attached? If you have that then you just make emails with <.1 BTC or whatever you set attached invisible. You make a "refund" button to send it back on legit emails, or even a refund all from this person, or refund all from everyone button to make it easy.

If your mother refuses to ship your BTC back, just don't write for a while. This works nicely with the celebrity mail idea from before. Celebs just don't send back and everyone knows it. Busy/important people could check their 50+ BTC mail frequently and their 1+ BTC mail when they have extra down time.

[FreeMoney]

Yeah, those are probably the same coins over and over. And it's rarely at 90k, I often see it in the 20-40k range. I mean sometimes I buy 2k on BCM and then send it to MtGox inside of a few hours, and that makes me over 10% of the 24hr traffic. Also if you look in the blocks there are lots of 50BTC transfers, I assume these are people sending recently generated blocks from slave machines to their main, not actual commerce.

Imo, the very beginning was the hardest bridge to cross. There is still a long way to go, but I'm pretty confident.

[hugolp]

I have pretty good skills in Drupal module development. What;s about bounty for it? =) Do someone have real project to use this module?

Not that I know right now, but I having a bitcoin module in the drupal module directory would give bitcoin some publicity. Some peope might give it a try on their shops just for the sake of it.

[BioMike]

I'm just back from the Software Freedom Day party here in The Hague and I was able to talk with Bits of Freedom (Dutch privacy organisation) and the president of the Free Software Foundation Europe about Bitcoin. Both were really interested. The person of BoF knew bitcoin already, but hadn't used it for over a year or so and said that it was not interesting at that time, but he would look into it again and discuss with other people within the organisation about it.

About the FSFE, the president asked me to send a mail with the details, so I just send him this mail:

Hello ******,

I hope you had a good trip back to Germany. We just had a talk together
about Bitcoin. So, like I said Bitcoin is a p2p, open source
cryptocurrency and it would be nice if FSFE would allow options to use
it as a donation option.

The website of bitcoin is http://www.bitcoin.org/ (surprise!)
Although the system allows for generation of coins, chances to get them
through this method are very slim (cryptographic target has becoming
more difficult recently because more people started using it). I've
used myself the exchange at https://www.bitcoinexchange.com/ (Finnish
exchange) to get bitcoins. But it would also work in reverse (so
change bitcoins in euros).
To test how it works, you can get some free bicoin(cent)s at
https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/
I don't know if you know the people of http://www.torservers.net/, but
they are also using bitcoin to accept donations, so you could also ask
them about their experience.

I hope this gives you enough information to get started on it and
hopefully you will discuss it with the other people at the fsfe to put a
bitcoin address on your site.

Best regards,

***** [Biomike]

I've blanked out the names.

So lets see where this goes.

[mizerydearia]

Hello ******,

I've blanked out the names.

Karsten Gerloff?  ^_^

[BioMike]

Hello ******,

I've blanked out the names.

Karsten Gerloff?  ^_^

Yeah, easy to find.

[Bimmerhead]

I have pretty good skills in Drupal module development. What;s about bounty for it? =) Do someone have real project to use this module?

Not that I know right now, but I having a bitcoin module in the drupal module directory would give bitcoin some publicity. Some peope might give it a try on their shops just for the sake of it.

This is a good idea.  I would add a few others:

WordPress
vBulletin
phpBB
SMF
Joomla

[mizerydearia]

Maybe when gavin's mime type implementation is useable, someone could write an SMF plugin and then this forum should be the first SMF forum to use it.

[Anonymous]

The community should "adopt" one of the large tech related podcasts and support it to help get bitcoin mentioned.

For instance

Security Now/This Week in Tech
Geek News Central
Chris Pirillo
Buzz Out Loud
 etc.....

[hippich]

I have pretty good skills in Drupal module development. What;s about bounty for it? =) Do someone have real project to use this module?

Not that I know right now, but I having a bitcoin module in the drupal module directory would give bitcoin some publicity. Some peope might give it a try on their shops just for the sake of it.

well. from my practice doing something and not knowing exactly why is not really good way to do things. Once someone will need such module for Drupal - let me know. my email is pavel@yepcorp.com

offtopic: how to make this forum to send notifications to my answers? I think I clicked everything and it still doesn't send 'em.

[mizerydearia]

well. from my practice doing something and not knowing exactly why is not really good way to do things. Once someone will need such module for Drupal - let me know. my email is pavel@yepcorp.com

O RLY?  Kinda liek Bitcoin, eh? ^_^

[Bimmerhead]

How about we organize a Facebook Bomb like Mises did: http://blog.mises.org/10552/facebook-bomb/

We set a day where we all agree to promote Bitcoin to our Facebook friends by:
1) setting our status to something like "The Future of Money: http://www.bitcoin.org"
2) join the Bitcoin Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bitcoin-P2P-Cryptocurrency/134466763256650
3) invite our friends to also join the page

There must be 100 bitcoin users on Facebook.  If we each average 120 friends (which seems like a low estimate) that would get the message out to 12,000 people...for free.

Any takers?

[LZ]

Okay, when will be "Bitcoin Facebook Day?"