Karmicads- your post was articulate, detailed, addressed specific points with clear lines of reasoning- and it would be absolutely wonderful if more people shared your values.
Thanks. If only I though you were sincere.
Then perhaps you'd then be able to encourage me to market those values. You know, some nice lighting and a modern display stand at eye level - 'cos eye level is 'buy' level. I could have them packaged up in cardboard and plastic bubble packs, adorned with images of sexy glamor and wealth, implying (by association) that this product is intrinsically associated with those things. I could get some glossy brochures printed, exclaiming my values to be the very thing your life is incomplete without and that your are tantamount to being a failure if you don't have them. By only associating myself with flawless physical beauty and appealing to the consumers greed and sense of inadequacy, they could be transformed into rich, attractive popula... er.. Hey wait! What was the product again?
I admire your faith in not just the intelligence of large groups of people acting in concert, but your confidence in their willingness to read deeply and educate themselves.
I wouldn't go overboard with the 'faith' rhetoric. Sometimes impulsive revulsion has a rational basis. In any case, I'm not sure what the extent of the damage is to be sure, but there is a gradient of attitudes from the purely superficial, needy, ego-paranoid hyper emotive power consumer, with no impulse control and all those easy to reach, ergonomically designed buttons, that you seem so keen to push, right up to the conscientious, compassionate, cosmopolitan citizen of the world, who needs less and contributes more. There is also a shifting 'zestiest' of public awareness, that despite the tenacious perils, of flagrant corporate marketing manipulation and coercive party political spin-doctory, is able to resiliently move forward towards a more enlightened and responsible mindset. I don't want to over estimate the potential, for a conscientious consumer market and proclaim that self-respect and responsible buying/spending will triumph. I don't want to even estimate the probability. What I am concerned with, is the seeming inevitability of this crass, consumer debt based, vortex of gluttony, to be a major catalyst in the demise of society as we know it. Great civilizations fall all the time if you look at history on the proper scale. The failure to plan is the surest plan to fail.
My argument is not one of naive optimism, but of sincere concern and extreme consternation. If anything, I am pessimistic that we will pull through, without first causing a shambolic catastrophe, the likes of which the human race has never witnessed. Our governance our economy and our environment, are on a collision course with reality. They are ALL unsustainable. There is a brake even point, beyond which there will be no hope of meeting our requisite capabilities, to turn things around. If we become too selfish, we may not care if society lasts another couple of generations. As long as we can use it and take from it and gorge our hedonistic desires, just for this lifetime. If we don't learn to quit living in delusional fantasies, we may convince ourselves that future generations will be fine. We can buy into all the spin-doctored, coercive political rhetoric from politicians and take the easy, hedonistic, self gratifying promises, bantered by power hungry politicians and leave anything that is not as glitzy or asks us to compromise, or use our brains, or get off our ass. We can be lazy, ignorant, selfish slobs that want everything done for us, to only eat delicious food, demand pretentious, media manufactured, cookie cutter stereotypes of beauty, that we have been programmed think of as objective and intrinsically valuable, while we crave and covet, over the endless spoils of status symbols and opulent luxury, that we now believe we deserve to own, before we have earned the price of them. All that, can not only be ours but by taking the easiest, self gratifying, no-brainer approach, this is how we can get incredibly wealthy, irresistibly attractive and be immensely popular at same time. It's true! The man behind the big corporate marketing machine told me. He must be honest, clever and nice because he wears an nice suit.
Our government models are coercive adversarial marketing machines deliberately plotting to manipulate us and fending of responsibility and fueling our imminent demise. The private corporate monster, of commercial consumer greed led by the fed is orders of magnitude, beyond all powers of accountability save for that which we muster by our own collective will. Our environment is a disgrace and the need to consume from borrowed spending, at ever escalating rates to prevent the catastrophe of economic collapse, precludes an environmentally sustainable, social infrastructure from being implemented. If that sounds like doom gloom and misery then wait till you can taste it, see it everywhere and feel it crumbling under your feet. It's not so much that I think we can depend upon "large groups of people acting in concert" and "their willingness to read deeply and educate themselves" but that we MUST. It's absolutely imperative as our only hope of climbing out of this hole we are in. Those who don't understand this will invariably ignore the true nature of the problem, and continue their quest to dig their way to prosperity and toil for the guy standing above the hole sifting gold nuggets out of our dirt pile. The future we are stealing belongs to us but to our of spring and yet we give it for a pittance, to the guy taking the gold.
We may even yet, come have no immediate impulse to care about anybody who is not yet born. They are just a subset, of those who we dont know and who cant give us our fix of ego flagellating reinforcement. It's sad that so many of us have desperate yearning for approval of those closest to us, and apathetic compassion fatigue for those with whom we are less familiar. This I think, is a relic of our tribal past. Large societies are less suited to primitive instincts, even though our best social skills (empathy and co-operation) were also nurtured there. Our desperate desire, to be wanted, liked and seek the approval of others, that tribal impulse of our collective egos, is as much a farcical tragedy, as it is, a bonding tool for social cohesion. It's not the first time we've discovered something that can make our world much better but also ultimately destroy us. We should be learning by now.
Try thinking of society as a 5 yr old child. Your child. If say, between the age of 3 and 5, you fail to teach your child any impulse control and cave into her slightest petulant demands for attention and toys, and treats and... well, whatever she wants; then what will she be like and how well behaved do you think she will be. I expect you will still be changing her diapers waking up in the middle of the night to her screaming demands, because she wants a drink and you should get it for her. You, will have to take her to the playground when she wants and she might refuse to go to school/kindergarten, because the teacher made her stand in the corner for throwing another child's lunch in the sand pit. You may find yourself chasing her down the road, screaming futile pleas for her to come back, as her chance of being hit by a car increases by the second. You get the picture? Society is like this poor child who honestly doesn't know any better, because her parents were irresponsible, selfish and avoided their responsibility. Instead of raising a well adjusted child, they made a rod for their own back. Those two years of Society's live, are analogous to the previous fifty years of the society we live in.
Yes I agree, businesses are mostly concerned with making money. Whether we still need their participation regardless is where our viewpoints differ.
I have nothing against business making money, and their participation is vital in the long run. It's how it is implemented and how as consumers, we are actively engaged in the process of reward for value proposition that needs to given the utmost consideration. It's not true that ANY business that comes along aught to be able to bilk our money after a sleazy coercive appeal to our compulsive, ego driven insecurities and our poor education about consumer resistance. The reason business is mostly concerned with making money, is because so many of us, do nothing to alter the value proposition by demanding they furnish products and services that are consistent with values that we should have had in the first place. Business would be interested in nothing, so much, as pandering to very detail of reasonable consumer needs and desires, and making money (even handsome profits), would be an inevitable outcome of it. It can be considered a by product of business. When satisfying needs comes last and wallet stuffing is the shamelessly lauded grail of virtue, while the modus operandi, obvious to any intelligent person, is to exploit peoples ignorance and make them want some shit that is near worthless.
Theres a point where it becomes obvious that many (far too many) consumers have been programed to accept that greed is good and still not see through the blatantly obvious crass, vulgar, and frankly insulting efforts, of so many businesses to make people want things and control their buying impulses to exploit them and use them as cash cows. If you don't think this is insidious evil born of pure greed, then you are a part of the problem and not the solution. Coercive greed driven marketing, anti-competitive maneuvers and monopolization are things that consumers can well do without. Actually for the health of society, they are forms of economic disease. There are things out there that are the economic analog to rape. White collar looting and pillaging for the digital. When people lay down and let it happen, or even seemingly even enjoy it, its more like a gang bang. That may be a fun theme for a consensual adult party (in the right company of course), but in social economics, its not a private party and everybody gets assaulted by the same cesspool of corporate filth. When theres nothing else to choose from and you cant say no, it simply blatant rape.
Like any guest at an adult party, the business that we might use our better judgment in favor of as consumers, would be invited to attend and not be accepted for gate crashing. Lying manipulation and coercive bullshit is an insult to our intellect and if we don't posses enough of that, we need education to help us understand the value of consumer resistance, healthy competition and living within our means. I think many people do know that they have been played for a sucker at times. They may be reluctant to acknowledge it though, because they have emotional investment in their "choice". They wont want to admit that they were coerced and so they own the choice, they wont like being burned so they find some justification that their purchase was satisfactory. Again, ego gets in the way of reason. I can admit it. I have been ripped off before in my time. It's easier to resent the business that riped you off, than admit it was your own poor choice. But at least if you admit, that you were burned you can learn. If nobody (or hardly anybody) even does this, then you can learn about smart spending till you have an advanced doctorate degree in it, but it wont make a tinkers damn of difference. If people wont learn to think for themselves, then somebody will exploit not only them, but all of us.
The importance of the whole community ethos of bitcoin as well as the diversity of forums, is that it represents much more than just a piece of software. It's more than just a currency or even a P2P currency. It is a solution to a much more pervasive social dilemma. The convince of P2P transactions is a pittance of the benefit. The wisdom the coin supply decreasing to a finite limit and the practical implications alone are profound. Bitcoin is simply, the definitive solution, to never ending debt, unsustainable deflation and catastrophic economic collapse. That plenty of reason to use bitcoin right there. Liberation from economic failure should be the MAIN reason that every day people want to use it. As individuals, they are automatically able to transact with each other, and thats better than having to use PoxPal or anything else. Even if there were NO business using bitcoin, the individual using it as P2P cash represent a user base. Business, will follow the opportunity to open their doors to the consumers that are using bitcoin. Bitcoin needs to belong to the whole community and the business should have the intelligence to cater to the community (if they want access to consumers) and understand the ethical principal that under pin the new economy. Bitcoin is not a tool for commerce to manipulate and control consumers with. It's a tool for individuals to transact with and if business owners can find consumers amongst them, then they should be grateful and respect the community that owes them nothing.
If you think the community should be remodeled to pander to the dictates of business and that a corporate facade should be erected to present the main bitcoin website, so business will be pleased with what THEY want customers to see and if they think those consumers should be spared from exposure to the libertarian values of the community, then I think they can got to hell. That clearly demonstrates their ethical imperative. A minimal test of business ethics would be their willingness to satisfy a libertarian consumer base and community and to become a part of it, without throwing their weight around as if they deserved to be here without satisfying consumers, answering their needs and earning community respect. That's the whole problem with the traditional corporate model of economics introduced by government handing currency control over to corporate banking. Business needs consumers not the other way around. What consumers in turn need, is education and a sense of community, one which they don't have to fabricate with material status symbols, bought with their addiction to debt that can never be repaid. They also need the sense of belonging to a community which maintains a positive cash flow and that their little chunk of the currency pie, is guilt free and not contributing to international debt and poverty.
Only by ACCEPTING the new currency as based on a positive cash flow supply, spread throughout the community, as the rightful distribution of wealth, while consumer satisfaction, acts as a sort of psychological currency moving in the opposite direction, which pulls bitcoin through the economy (rather like the Kanban on demand component delivery systems in many factories), only then will business be so deserving as to assume respect =< 0. Value is added to bitcoin by business, for the PRIVELEDGE of competing in a lucrative market, and by providing a products and/or services that may prove to be valued by virtue of ordinary market demand. The more discerning the consumer can be, the healthier the overall economy. Letting greedy pigs, blurt bullshit in your face, to convince you that if you buy their shampoo, sexy girls will want to run their fingers through your hair, or that you will be just like that sexy girl, and since she is on a beautiful yacht, mored in a pristine tropical shore line and of course using this emulsified, scented chemical muck, is much easier than working and saving for a yacht. It might be owned by a guy (conveniently absent) but they are easier to get than yachts too, at least if you use this shampoo, which makes your hair a shine in such a way, that your whole body looks like that of a a swim wear model. The bonus is that nobody who uses this shampoo ever seems to have a double chin, buck teeth, a hair lip, acne or even looks older than 25yo. So the benefits are obvious.
The problem with this, is not primarily the understandably coercive feel good imagery, or the the company's competitive motivation for trying to present an appealing psychological association for viewers to be drawn into (albeit a blatant mind game). After all, their competitors will be trying to do the same thing or something similar. Their scammy conartistry, may be about microscopic gena-lust-rious micro-gell vitalizing particles. Which is technical terminology for 'meaningless, fabricated pseudo-science marketing piffle'. They might as well tell you that pixies know you've used it, and it makes them more likely to trust you and come out to dance in your garden. If they thought it would sell more product, I have no doubt they would be happy to feed us the most deplorable, crass bunch of monkey snot, possible, if only they could find a tiny percentage of gain to be made on the desperate effort to trample any minuscule vestige of integrity they may have left, along with the respect they have, for the intelligence of the less gullible viewer. This is not just a concern for attitude of contempt it elicits, but more so the fact that. first of all, it actually works. Ie. They do find a profitable margin to gain somehow, by taking their brazen, mind bending con artistry to these levels and worse. Second, whatever gains they can squeeze, from such blatant, infantile pandering, to such insecure, helpless people (who must be pitiable to say the very least, if they are impressed enough to be influenced), is somehow not swamped, by the negative backlash of people who I would think, should be reviled by any company with such arrogant contempt, for not just the obvious disgrace, of trying to con people and fleece them by any means possible, but for expecting the viewer to be so gullible and to insult the intelligence of what should be a much larger mass of the market. It says a lot for how gulible some people are. It say even more about how much unadulterated cynical, insulting, contempt, many more people will turn a blind eye to, and complacently allow the companies to hunt for gullible suckers in full few.
This is why it's futile blaming the companies for trying it on. If nobody cares and nobody drops the offending company, for daring to suck people in and just make money by throwing it into crass, insulting advertising, that takes advantage of people who have little presence of mind to avoid being used. Isn't there a duty of care we have for our fellow traveler? Anybody who is prone to being influenced, by much of the advertising content we see, deserves pity and support. Whereas the company deserves to suddenly see their sales drop to the floor and find they have to scramble about and pick up the scraps. They need to be made to have some respect for people and earn their market share by showing us a fair deal and an honest effort to face a much more stringent gauntlet of educated consumers, who expect to actually be given GOOD reasons to choose one company over another. It's not as if these advertising campaigns don't cost anything. Nor are they of any intrinsic value to the product or service being flogged. Does anybody realize or care that the cost is an overhead that companies have to factor in and that has to be passed on to the consumer.
The only good reasons we have to tolerate advertising at all, it that it may be diligently used, to bring a deserving product or service to our attention. An intelligent society wouldn't tolerate the arrogant temerity, of a company, squandering inordinate sums of money, which they will expect customers to reimburse in their profits, for the opportunity, to capture our attention and squander our time, yet give us no useful information, but instead, get in our faces, with a cynical plot, to test the lower extremes of our intellect, in pursuit of a bounty collected by making the unwitting victim pay, for a something they were manipulated to want.
Coercion, brainwashing, pseudo-science and outright bullshit, is the typical modus operandi and it's underlying motive is greed. Stupidity has become a commodity and harvesting its dividends is the forte of the advertising profession. It's our visible evidence of just how insane, greedy, lazy, petty, superficial, selfish and apathetic, our hapless societies have become. How can we expect the typical citizen, to contribute more conscientiously, to their community and to responsibly make vital decisions, about how we can collectively mandate a more reliable democratic process and regain some semblance of mutual democratic power? We are clearly required to be the guardians of our society and lay down the mandates for government and Industry to follow. A task we have selfishly squandered, to our escalating detriment. Expecting people to think about the things of substance, that make the economy, the government and society as a whole, work (or fail as the case may be) effectively, is something of a perilous mystery; especially if they cant be trusted to buy shampoo, without being manipulated by the most trivial and transparent, ego pandering, coercive ploy; or, if per chance, they can see right through this pretentious farce and somehow don't give a toss that those who might be prone to the seduction, are little more than pitiful victims, how could they have a hope against the might of the banking world, which plunders their very future and sells them money that never existed, for money that they pay back over time with interest.
What needs to be done is a mountain of diligent hard work to show people how important it is to take a little interest in things. If not politics then at least a little economics, along with a much more diligent commitment to consumer responsibility. That's an absolute vital must. I don't see how this could be any less than URGENT! Dependence on strong community and allegiance to the fundamental principals that made our economic revolution possible. The coming days will present many challenges, as we can expect covert attacks on the community, attempting to usurp the libertarian stronghold, have it relegated to obscurity, or just disrupt the cohesion of the community by instigation of contentious divisions, and mud-raking to incriminate community members of higher profile and foster resentment for things that might have come to nothing.
I'm sure all of the political statements are well reasoned and sound- the issue is venue. I am not well read enough to comment on much of the political discussion so I keep my fingers off the keyboard in reference to them.
The politics section here is of critical importance IMHO. The people who come here as new to bitcoin, need to have every opportunity to notice and take part, in the vital philosophical backbone of this movement. The act of using bitcoin is to experience the practical outcomes of libertarian values at their finest. There is no requisite to adopt any political allegiance and of course you may forfeit entering into the politics section. The link on the forum, has been carefully created with this in mind. You can either click on it and go in there OR (and this is the clever bit) if you DON'T click on it it works in the other mode, by which it doesn't direct you to the politics section at all. It may be considered somewhat unfair that the zero click option is given precedence and those who wish go there have to 'opt-in', but that's a negligible compromise. The is NOTHING to be gained from splitting this forum and consequently the community, by dividing the politics section of into another forum on another site. The newcomers who come here are far less likely to pursue other external sites, if they are not important enough to be given pride of place here. the community would clearly be divided along these lines so that it would break ranks and become two weaker groups with diverging agendas and communities. If I were determined to drive a wedge that would divide this community and weaken the whole movement, that is precisely where I would drive it in. A malicious attempt to undermine this project would also do well, to cut out the heart which might really be considered as philosophy of libertarianism, more so than politics, but that does tend to be the impetus of the politics forum.
The importance of communicating the political and social implications of bitcoin, just cant be stressed enough. The freedom of autonomy and restructuring of monetary power bases that, if this currency were to become widespread, would put people back in control and send pigs back to their swill troughs. That will not happen without some turmoil, so people need a strong and cohesive, supportive community for the battle of ideologies ahead of us. Education, for which we have such a very long way to go, is to bitcoin, like nutrition is to our bodies. The difference with nutrition, is that you can get enough of it, without having to discuss it and think about it all the time. Education and the skills that will be required to foster a community, that can handle to responsibility which it has the potential to create, cant survive without strong lines of communication, as the philosophical and political consequences come to pass. That will require that the social ethos and ideological basis of bitcoin, needs to stand front and center in the landscape of of the project. This is the exact opposite, to relegation of politics, to an off-site forum, completely segregated from the first port of call where newcomers will come to learn more.
Suggesting that the superficial, cosmetic vanity, of business people who come by, with no commitment to the community or the ethos of the golden gift they are given freely, is tantamount to treason. While they may expect every thing to palatable to their patronizing, 'marketed at the peasants', corporate image and facade of 'glam coated greed' design philosophy. They have earned nothing and clearly want to establish the same power structure they are used to seeing in the conventional economy, where it is the norm to harvest profit without cultivating prosperity and to tell people what they want and expect them to be pleased. Catering to customers rather than profit, may be new to them. I suggest they get used to it. Wanting to be involved with the community and it's ethos rooted in liberties and freedom for our mutual benefit, would be the best way to show they even deserve the opportunity to cultivate the respect they should wait to be granted. Otherwise it's clear who they are and what they stand for. So I say, they can get back to the swill trough, until they learn some manners.
The proposal to banish those conversations of substance, regarding the essential ethos and social value of this project, to make way for the vulgar ploys of shallow, pretentious, manipulative, con artists, who only know how to profit from exploitation and coercive deception, is an INSULT to the integrity of this community, of selfless developers and community builders, who toiled without reward or any guarantee of gaining anything from their experiment. A nascent market appears and suddenly the pushy show ponies turn up, to tell us they...:
'don't want to hear about the libertarian values of the project or anything like that, but hey! You sure can cut me a slice of that yummy turnover. Now let's make the place look a bit more sleazy. how about if we hide the stuff that would allow my customers realize that they are the ones with the consumer power and that I am required to please them. Screw this community crap and all of it's ethical ideologies. Screw the talk of something better than our good ole loving government. You'll have people thinking they have a mind of their own before long. Let's start making some appeal oriented props, for the puppet show and glamorize the whole thing with a superficial marketing facade, so they can jump into the coercive trap, because this is how it's done. You need to tell people what they want and need, and make them feel inadequate without the 'product'. Now! Slogans and sound bites. What have we got to make it seem too good to be true? How about some subtle implicit lies?'I do know what is marketable, what it palatable, how small changes in presentation and language can make a massive difference in adoption.
That must make you very proud, to know that you have given so much of yourself, for the tireless efforts to make something of value and give it all back, by seeing if there is a more efficient way of appealing to peoples unconscious impulses and manipulating the important things that make the world a better place.
"The largest brand in the world provides brown sugar water- and even if your brown sugar water is Open-Source, tastes better and will free the masses from the tyrannical price fixing of Coca-Cola- you still can't call it brown sugar water when you want people to drink it."
There's an old saying: People who only know how to use a hammer, tend to go around treating everything like a nail. That gets to be a problem when you're helping out in a store full of fine antiques and china hammer gurl. Coke is a fine example of mass enslavement of the minds of so many unwitting innocent minds, who were unprepared for the massive corporate machine about to engulf them and turn their brains into a malleable putty, to be prodded and stretched, kneaded and squeezed. The success you tout, is lauded from the perspective of greedy corporate tyrants who only had, knew, and cared about hammers and themselves. Bitcoin is 'the taste of a new generation'. Bitcoin is not brown sugar and water. It's made of emancipation and mutual voluntary co-operation. It's not a product or a corporate brand and if you treat it as such, you are going to be left out of the value equation, like the piece of lettuce from the baguette, that fell in the dirt. Nobody will use something they don't want or need, unless you sell it to them. Bitcoin isn't something unneeded or unwanted.
The power of this technology, to liberate people from being treated like sheep, being herded and enslaved by the greedy, ruthless tyrants, is unprecedented. You may market that as if it only had the intrinsic value of sugar and water if you like. Trivializing bitcoin as something like soft drink that relies almost exclusively on image and coercive appeal value, is the preferred strategy of those skull f**ks that screwed everybody, so they could to make nearly worthless liquid an expensive commodity, at profits in the hundreds of percent, so they could afford to pump their ill-gotten gains, into the most extravagant advertising assault, and harvest those inadequate, needy feelings, as a prime commodity to exploit the people who knew no better. Its the kind of sad, reprehensible exploitation, that bitcoin (in particular the community and the libertarian roots) has the power to overcome. You're trying to sell an open source project and its power of freedom
from corporate exploitation, as if it were a product
of corporate exploitation. You are applauding the very model of economics, that bitcoin has the potential to undermine. Needless to say you are missing the whole point.
Bitcoin is free and doesn't need coercive manipulation to get it to market. You hear about it, you download it. Simple. From there the main selling point is that you can learn to liberate yourself from greed of banks and connect with a community who offers a growing compendium of online services and products, that will accept bitcoin. You can have friends install bitcoin so you can transact with them, like when you call up a friend and say 'I'll send you half the cost of the pizza and you order it. I'll see you in 20 mins'. The cost of transactions is zero and so for non-comercial P2P there is already an obvious niche. You then get to know the community online and explore the many exciting developments and soon learn that the thing you have is sooooo much more than a convenient transacting system. The business people will have to learn that they cant be manipulators and make bitcoin a herding tool for gullible sheep. The currency doesn't support their traditional dependence credit based currency. They may sell their own stuff that way but bitcoin has no need to 'guild the Lilly'. The main selling points, are all in the components that are totally free. The way the software works and the access to a community of intelligent conscientious people, who are fed up with the coercive manipulation of greedy pigs. The buck stops here where the bitcoin begins.
The one thing open source software does not need, is to be sold with coercion. That's a deal breaker. because developers produce code that people choose to use, not because they were manipulated or bullshited too. Selling is for products of business that have a price.
Branding- how something is presented, it's message and narrative- beats the better product nearly every time.
What other product? You know of a P2P online crypto-currency, that is capable of free micro transactions, has a finite absolute quantity to prevent devaluation, is open source and secure, requires no central authority or server, and is immune from physical intervention by authorities? Of course the community that you might like to undermine, is also apart of the bigger picture. Liberating people from the mindset of ignorant sheeple that require 'branding' after muster is going to become an matter of contempt and resentment sooner or latter.
Even if you think there is no correlation to Bitcoin, look at what the
De beers marketing campaign did to diamond prices starting in 1939.
I knew about De Beers and I didn't need to read past the smoking gun line "diamonds had little intrinsic value". That is the crux of the issue you don't (or pretend not to) understand. You seem to think that the value of the bitcoin network, and it's burgeoning community, is the equivalent of an unlimited supply of worthless industrial rock, or even worse, brown-sugar water. When you are selling worthless bullshit, the only way to make people want it is to make up sound bites of bullshit coercion, or glossy, hype filled, brochure making their inadequacies pale into insignificance, with the illustrious dreams of the marvel they can only get from CompanyX (hurry while stocks last). The only people you can really use this method on is the sadly impressionable folk, who will be far worse off, for having the misfortune of walking into your house of smoke and mirrors. It's nothing to be proud of or enthusiastic about, that you like pulling the wool over peoples eyes and getting their emotional state into the best condition, to exploit their least controllable impulses.
It seems your capacity to comprehend the true nature of bitcoin, is clouded by superficiality and greed. You don't apparently understand the fixed supply and inflation factor, nor that the value of bitcoin, is not a commercial enterprise that needs to swindle and con people with cheap coercive stunts, to manipulate them into believing a sales pitch, or even an 'angle' for them. You want to 'get the foot in the door' then 'close the sale' *shudder*. Bitcoin is not a plastic packaged toy for screwing people over with and making them want to buy worthless shit. It's a REAL, intrinsically valuable, one of a kind crypto-currency that has no parralell and is designed so that bitcoins will become more valuable than De Beers diamonds, in the event that every person who has a diamond wants some bitcoin. There's no digging more up and no oversupply.
I understand you think that the masses instantly will see that Bitcoin is not a brand, not a competitor to Paypal- lets hope that’s the case. Because if it is perceived as a brand, it's pitch- while factual, is far from persuasive.
Well it's NOT a brand. You think everybody has the attention span and the cognitive capacity, you seem to think is required to get over this? YOU are the only one I've seen with such a difficulty in comprehending that bitcoin is not a brand. "competitor to Paypal" You see, you cant help yourself with the corporate terminology. bitcoin is an ALTERNATIVE to PoxPal not a 'competitor'. Bitcoin doesn't loose money if PoxPal earns more, nor does it 'win' more if it gains participants (although the demand for bitcoins may may increase). There is no corporate body, no turnover no bottom line and no shareholders. Most people get that bitcoin is not a brand fairly easily, as most computer users by now at least, have a basic comprehension of what open source software is and understand that it's just like the community group in your neighborhood, but that it makes software, it lives on-line and may have thousands of participants. Most people get that you can go to any community group for it's "COMMUNITY" of people, and a support network. They would also usually be very uncomfortable with a community group doing a 'RA RA RA' high pressure sales pitch, using voguish corporatism, whether it be cheesy gimmicks, or artsy stylized pomp. Designing a logo and having an attractive, consistent website theme, is about enough for the grass roots project. Destroying the community, by amputating the heat an soul of it and relocating to a different address would make for a sad day.
No offense Jesse, but you're either a corporate/government shill, or a general all round pain in the ass.
