Next Thursday I will have 20 minutes to present bitcoin to 150 businessmen/women

[Vince Torres]

Governments will have to ask permission the next time they want tax money from them

Oh yeah what a great point for a currency. Helps you avoid paying taxes! Hell why we're at it, we can avoid gambling regulation and buy drugs too!

[franky1]

Edit: i didnt read most of the posts, just seen the topic so feel free to take on any idea's i have or ignore any

Don't highlight about mining as a way of gaining wealth. due to ASICS(future tense) and FPGA's making it not worthy of people mining with their standard computer. They don't want to get excited about the thought of free money creation, to then have their first try of it as .. "2 pennies a day, what a scam"

treat it as the benefits of money transmission, without borders or ATM's or bank managers involvement. show them the map of how many locations of people nearby are happily buying and selling coins. and a list of merchants accepting bitcoin.

memory dealers(bitcoin store)
cupcakes
alpaca socks
wordpress
web hosting
(find only legit businesses to promote. steer away from mentioning SR)

i know many here see's SR as the niche market that brought life into bitcoin and made it the success of value it is. but merchants dont want to hear about that. the media does that all on its own, so no reason to keep highlighting SR.

just stick to a simple thing of "dollars are used by people on street corners, so is bitcoin. its ease of use, straight forward transactions makes it great for anyone, good or bad"


put about $36 of your own money to the conference (1.5BTC @ $24BTC spot)

print out 150 business cards all with a QR code relating to a private key containing a small amount of BTC on it. (0.01btc)

then during the talk you can either say "if u look under your seats you will find....." or "after the talk if you want to try it out with a small amount of free bitcoin, come take one of these cards".

spend a couple minutes on how they can 'upload' / 'import' the funds into a webclient to then send it to a friend or another person in the audience. or by playing the offline game below trading it in real life using the paper wallet (business cards).

tell them its worth 10c each and you wil happily buy it back off them for 10c each or they can sell it to a more interested person in the audience for 10c each.

and it might have a benefit to mention what do all of these:


have in common that bitcoin does not. they are all reliant on a bank

[marcus_of_augustus]

Governments will have to ask permission the next time they want tax money from them

Oh yeah what a great point for a currency. Helps you avoid paying taxes! Hell why we're at it, we can avoid gambling regulation and buy drugs too!

Sounds like you understand a good monetary technology when you see one.

Attempting to endow monetary information technologies with moralistic, subjective judgement hooks, triggers and data-mining functionality clauses merely serves to compromise them and create inferior products that the market will discount and ultimately reject outright.

[QuantumQrack]

I would not get into the technical aspects of bitcoin, I would really concentrate on keeping it it very simple, and speak to them from the viewpoint of how it can benefit them and their businesses.  I suppose you can also throw out that it is decentralized, non-governmental, etc.... But most people don't have a damn clue of fiat money policies propagated by world governments.

[mrvision]

It would be cool if you sell bitcoins in front of them via mtgox, to show how easy is to turn your bitcoins into local currency

[Gabi]

Tons of nice suggestions.

I'll add mine: if they want to try bitcoin do not tell them to use the qt client. Otherwise they will have to face a software wich takes 3 days to download almost 6GB of stuff with a fail interface. Give the Multibit, or electrum or blockchain.info

[Mushoz]

If your still looking for some good information for your speech, you might be interested in reading this: http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/7/5/a-business-primer-on-the-bitcoin-ecosystem-erik-voorhees.html

Good luck

[IveBeenBit]

You have a difficult job to explain Bitcoin in 20 minutes. Your best strategy is not to try and "educate" them on Bitcoin, but to intrigue them enough that a half dozen or so go home and research more on their own (maybe provide some links to take home).

I like cypherdoc's suggestions.

I would avoid spening too much time on it being fraud-proof, as the risk of a merchant losing money due to fraud and chargebacks is actually very small, even for businesses that take credit cards. One merchant came on these boards asking how and why to start taking bitcoins and the replies coming in kept harping on the "no chargebacks" issue. The merchant said that in 3 or 4 years of business (a B&M with online presence), he had had 1 chargeback that cost him $30. Also, bitpay charges 2%. Credit cards are around 4%.

The fact is, for someone who is not a visionary or idealogue, there is very little reason to care about Bitcoin today.

Don't mention cheating on taxes as a selling point, as a lot of people still think that dodging taxes is morally reprehensible. Mention the anonymity and no threat of confiscation and those in the audience interested in tax issues will figure it out on their own.

The one thing that almost everyone agrees on is that the banking system and Washington are corrupt. You may want to approach your talk in the following format:

"These are the problems and consequences of our current monetary system. (use a bunch of graphs that cypherdoc listed) And this is how a group of people are trying to solve it." So you show problem, solution (bitcoin). Don't try to "sell" them on using Bitcoin, just explain why OTHER people are using it, and how it will continue to be successful as long as the rate of adoption continues to increase.

[DoomDumas]

I find the best way to introduce it to new businesses is as a new payment network.

The Bitcoin network is one that provides secure transactions anywhere in the world with (virtually) no chargeback risk. It is revolutionary because it allows anyone to create an application, wallet or tool within the network. That will in turn work with anything else in the Bitcoin network without any restriction. It uses digital tokens called Bitcoins which can't be counterfeited and get their value from their scarcity.

Another big advantage is the built in identity protection. When you are making payments through traditional payment networks the act of making payment exposes you to the risk of fraud. If I was to display my credit card number it would most certainly be compromised and my identity could be stolen. Bitcoin addresses are secured with banking level security (don't bother explaining SHA-256 unless they ask) so they can be displayed with zero risk of being compromised.

Why should they care about some digital token payment network they might wonder? The best part is they don't have to because companies such as WalletBit provide seamless integration into their business. We for example provide automatic risk free conversion to local currency for as low as 2.75%. It doesn't cost them anything to get started and they don't need any special equipment (think credit card machines, etc).

That is at least the general approach I take.

Beware, WalletBit will also take a 0.89% fee for a simple deposit of BTC in a wallet hosted on their server !

I would NOT recommend doing business with them


.

[notig]

You have a difficult job to explain Bitcoin in 20 minutes. Your best strategy is not to try and "educate" them on Bitcoin, but to intrigue them enough that a half dozen or so go home and research more on their own (maybe provide some links to take home).

I like cypherdoc's suggestions.

I would avoid spening too much time on it being fraud-proof, as the risk of a merchant losing money due to fraud and chargebacks is actually very small, even for businesses that take credit cards. One merchant came on these boards asking how and why to start taking bitcoins and the replies coming in kept harping on the "no chargebacks" issue. The merchant said that in 3 or 4 years of business (a B&M with online presence), he had had 1 chargeback that cost him $30. Also, bitpay charges 2%. Credit cards are around 4%.

The fact is, for someone who is not a visionary or idealogue, there is very little reason to care about Bitcoin today.

Don't mention cheating on taxes as a selling point, as a lot of people still think that dodging taxes is morally reprehensible. Mention the anonymity and no threat of confiscation and those in the audience interested in tax issues will figure it out on their own.

The one thing that almost everyone agrees on is that the banking system and Washington are corrupt. You may want to approach your talk in the following format:

"These are the problems and consequences of our current monetary system. (use a bunch of graphs that cypherdoc listed) And this is how a group of people are trying to solve it." So you show problem, solution (bitcoin). Don't try to "sell" them on using Bitcoin, just explain why OTHER people are using it, and how it will continue to be successful as long as the rate of adoption continues to increase.

wise +1

[yoyoceramic]

Guys - thanks for the influx of new suggestions.  There is some great stuff here, I particularly like the selling btc in front of them.  I will have to think of that one some more.  So far I've been messaged by a few Vegas guys.  Do you all go to Julian's lunch mobs that he has on Wednesdays?  He also runs this site: http://bitcoinsinvegas.com/

[johnyj]

Bourne need to hide his money in a swiss bank account, but you only need to hide your asset in a mini private key, and even better a brain wallet password  

Bourne would've just memorized the whole private key (they're not that long, anyways).

You forgot that Bourne lost his memory during that accident, so he might not be able to remember anything if he do not have a paper wallet


I still suggest OP to advertise BTC as a high-end secure investment vehicle, not some virtual mint used to buy kid's game online. Just show a price history chart in log format after asking

"Tell me what thing in the world has increased its value by 100 times (10,000%) during last 2 years"

[Melbustus]

So far I've been messaged by a few Vegas guys.  Do you all go to Julian's lunch mobs that he has on Wednesdays?  He also runs this site: http://bitcoinsinvegas.com/

Was not aware of the lunch mobs. I'll certainly go to some now, though... Thanks for the heads-up.

[Puppet]

Start by asking how many of them know anything about bitcoin. Probably very few or even no one.
Then show them what they have been missing out on:

https://blockchain.info/nl/charts/market-cap

And explain that still  no one has heard of it, let alone uses it.
So far. Then make your case for why thats going to change.

[Jutarul]

Also a semi-technical point about bitcoin is that the generation of bitcoins and transaction processing is competitive and expensive in terms of upkeep. Thus, in the long term the profit margin for providing the computational infrastructure for bitcoin converges against zero. However, having control over a significant portion of the computational infrastructure has currency-political implications, such as gatekeeping over which transactions to process.

(business folks love gatekeeping)

[notig]

could you start with a huge map in the background? a map of something bitcoin related. Maybe bitcoin worldwide usage? just to see how global it is. Maybe some projections to it's growth as well?

[World]

very nice presentation from Meni Rosenfeld
https://bitcoil.co.il/Bitcoin_Meni.pdf
https://bitcoil.co.il/What%20is%20mining.pdf
https://bitcoil.co.il/Bitcoin%20Haifux.pdf

[Lethn]

Governments will have to ask permission the next time they want tax money from them

Oh yeah what a great point for a currency. Helps you avoid paying taxes! Hell why we're at it, we can avoid gambling regulation and buy drugs too!

I think so too! ^_^ wouldn't it be great if you had the choice of only paying taxes for useful things like healthcare instead of just bombing civilians?

[cdnbcguy]

i usually start by giving the example of how Netscape's doors got kicked in and servers seized.

Perhaps you meant Napster..... I loved Napster and miss it.

[Anon136]

1) build up a little bit of credability for the bitcoin network. Tell them about the market cap, the estimated number of users, number of transactions per day ect...

2) Explain how accepting bitcoin will open them up to new a markets, a markets that is currently being ignored by everyone in the audience despite the fact that this market has plenty of real money that it would like to spend at their businesses. Explain how they are at this very moment turning away real customers who want to buy their products but are unable and that turning away customers is not so great for business.

3) Ok so next they are going to say, thats all good and well but the last thing i need right now is the government up my ass. So segway into talking about services like bitpay that mitigate legal risk by transferring the bitcoins into USD before it ever arrives at the company. This way for the purposes of running their business and for the purposes of the companies records bitcoin transactions appear indistinguishable from other forms of payment. Basically if the government asks any questions all the company has to say is, product x and y were bought by this bitpay company for z dollars.

3) Next they are going to say, well thats all good and well but it would cost me more to update my systems to accept bitcoin than i would ever generate in revenue of this niche market. So then explain to them how simple it can be to add a bitpay payment mechanism to their website and explain that the costs would be relatively insignificant. With bitpay consulting it wouldn't take the companies IT guy more than an afternoon to get everything set up and ready to go.

a word to the wise avoid anything even REMOTELY technical. Dont explain where coins come from or how they are sent or how we know the network is secure... ect. They dont care about what bitcoin is, all they care about is what bitcoin can do for them.