I consider myself a bitcoin intellectual, and I`m always wondering how can I help the bitcoin economy with my ideas, which I got plenty of. So I was thinking 2 days about why bitcoin (or for that matter other altcoins) is not mainstream yet, and what issues it needs to overcome to be able to grow faster. Some issues that I discovered are practical, while others need the entire community's support in order to work.
So here are the issues I discovered with bitcoin, it's economy, why it is not mainstream yet:
1﴿ MARKETING: Lack of organized promotion campaignsBitcoin Foundation, the Developers, or even this forum could organized promotion/marketing campaigns for it. They already receive donations, or we can do a crowdfunding, and with the money we collect, we can spend it on billboards, flyers, google adsense, youtube ads, facebook ads, twitter ads, or any other type of advertising systems.
Bitcoin lacks members, and I bet most people still didn't heard about bitcoin or don't understand what bitcoin is yet.
I believe bitcoin only has the "tech" side in for now, but more people are potentially interested, they just dont know about bitcoin, or are too lazy to research it deeply (without a lot of stimulus from ads) and just shrugged it off by default.
We got already the nerds, geeks, and other technical people in our community, now we need to bring in the
"work at home" ,
"make money online" ,
the gamers (gaming is a 180b $ industry), the
stay at home new-moms, the
unemployed 20-30 year olds, and the
high-school teens into bitcoin.
So far we got only 2 communities, so we need to expand it more, while I'd focus personally more on the gamers (MMO gamers & mobile phone app gamers) and on the "earn money online" type of people, which brings me to the 2nd. point
2﴿ PUBLIC OPINION: Lack of a PR team to improve bitcoin's public opinionPublic relation's is important to manage negative publicity and cast positive light to bitcoin in front of the eyes of the mainstream. Bitcoin has a lot of negative publicity: scammers, thieves, and other criminals putting a bad reputation to bitcoin, and the media spins this and demonizes bitcoin further.
We need a positive PR team who organizes festivals, campaigns, conferences, or any other types of events that can boost Bitcoin's public opinion, and explain to the public that bitcoin is good.
Some sort of charity organization or fundraisers could really boost bitcoin's PO and show the mainstream that bitcoin can be used for Good too!We really need this because many people just disregard bitcoin by default, because they heard that bitcoin is used by criminals (yes a small fraction), but what about the honest people that use bitcoin, we need to find positive things in bitcoin and put them forward for the public to see the bitcoin is a wonderful thing after all.
3﴿ INCOME: Lack of earning bitcoin methods & bitcoin jobsBitcoin's economy is still new and fragile, we already got a base in how to spend your bitcoins, 100,000 merchants already accept bitcoin, but we barely got any ways to earn bitcoin, currently these are the most common methods to earn bitcoin by starting from 0 BTC:
-Faucets & task sites
-Sig campaigns
-Few Services & Selling Products
Which is too little, i suspect that most newbies come here to earn bitcoin, and they will be very dissapointed when they see that without any good understanding they will only earn a few 10,000 of satoshis.
Bitcoin needs more methods to earn them, because the "make money online" type of people would really want to join our community, but because there are not many methods to earn bitcoin now starting from 0, they will be disappointed.
So we need more entrepreneurs, finding good solutions and offering more jobs & minijobs to bitcoin newbies
4﴿ EDUCATION: Lack of a good guide to newbiesThis forum is great to learn bitcoin, but i still feel that the information about bitcoin is too scattered, and people are lazy to learn it all in pieces.
ex:
newbies still asking how to mine bitcoin with laptop (which tells us that they dont have the knowledge, nor a source of knowledge available to them to learn the basics)
We either need a solid e-book/normal book, or a more summarized site (perhaps a good promotion of the
en.bitcoin.it wiki site), because I find the bitcoin.org site a little bit hard to understand.
I think a professional website building team needs to look at the
bitcoin.org site and make it much easier to understand and go through it, and perhaps it can be expanded better with more information about well established sites
5﴿ DATABASE: Lack of a bitcoin search engineThis is a good idea I have, is that if bitcoin is to be a real global currency, it needs a search engine, perhaps not like google, but in a form of encyclopedia with all the bitcoin related websites and services in it.
I find it frustrating that every site in scattered in the internet, there are so many good bitcoin related sites, that due to promotion are barely known, for example like this ones:
http://bitcoinclock.com/http://www.bitlisten.comSo either an encyclopedia with categories (that should be included in bitcoin.org so that everyone would know it) or a new search engine that only searches for bitcoin related sites.
6﴿ GLOBAL ECONOMY: Lack of a major global financial-economic crisisUnfortunately I believe this is the most needed in order for bitcoin to be really adopted. Fortunately or Unfortunately this will happen soon due to the fiat money's ponzi nature, but if we are not prepared until then then
bitcoin might miss this golden window of opportunity!
So bitcoin really needs to have an established merchant network, tons of ways to spend it, and more importantly ways to earn bitcoin before the crisis happens. We dont just want bitcoin to be only a savings currency, but also a spendable real currency for goods & services.
7﴿ SOCIAL ASPECT: Lack of a more integrated & united communitySo far bitcoiners are only obsessed with their own money, and how to earn more bitcoin and how to scam people. This needs to stop, or atleast partially, and we need to focus more on common goals. The community has to be more integrated and more united in common goal plans such as 1) & 2) . They should be for-profit, I`m not saying that this should be a free venture, but I belive we need more cooperation between members to let more projects be born.
For example a brainstorm session can be easily integrated in this forum too, and then an entrepreneur would pickup those ideas and realize them.
So: participation, integration, cooperation, and unity is the key to this community to survive in the long term!8﴿ LEADERSHIP: Lack of social Idols promoting/endorsing/using their influence to help bitcoinSocial idols: popstars, musical bads, trendy people, dancers, tv celebrities, movie stars ; are like magnets in a society. People look up to them regardless of what they teach. Social idols have a charisma that attracts people up to the point that they can influence huge masses.
Bitcoin lacks social Idols, or atleast it has few of them , I know of only Mike Tyson.
You know all the advertisements having celebrities in it endorsing all types of products and services. We need this too with bitcoin.
Now obviously an advertisement contract with a celebrity would cost millions of dollars, so it's probably too expensive for our community (but hey if an angel investor wants to try it , it is doable).
But I think a better approach is Myke Tyson's approach. So he found a business with bitcoin where he will make money, and he is promoting his bitcoin business , and by that he is also promoting bitcoin.
I think this is the correct way to approach celebrities, we need somebody to contact them, make them build a bitcoin business, and then via their influence, they can get tons of new people into bitcoin.
Celebrities have influence, and need money. Bitcoin has money opportunity, but needs needs influential people to promote it. It's a win-win situation.9﴿ CAPITAL EXPANSION: Lack of a stable lending systemLending is crucial to any economy, and here we are talking about lending from capital (not printed money), so we need a lending system that protects lenders from scammers. Currently we have some lending services, where people could lend, but they are full of scammers. Even if you have the scammer's personal info, you cannot sue them for 50-100$ because the legal fees would be too high. So even if the scammers scam people out of 50-100$, they get away with it, so it gives a bad reputation to bitcoin lending.
We need a more strict lending system, and a better reputation system for lending. If we get this then bitcoin lending will be one of the biggest international industries out there.
Lending generates income for the lenders (who can use it as a good source of interest income), and the loan takers are also better off since they can get loans internationally, without capital controls, and without any other fees involved.
This can increase the bitcoin economy enormously: the bitcoin businesses, the bitcoin membership (people would be interested in bitcoin savings accounts or bitcoin international loans), and the bitcoin market cap.
Alright these are my ideas,suggestions, opinions about bitcoin, and if you really want bitcoin to take off, then I believe these issues should be addressed seriously.
Thanks for reading it through, if you liked my ideas feel free to tip me at:
http://realbitcoin.tip.meI like your suggestions. But I honestly like Bitcoin the way it is right now more... It's growth may be slow, but it's organic, if that makes any sense. Less fluff, less 'ads' is better imho. Bitcoin is a social movement after all.
