Public relations for the Bitcoin project

[humble]

It's time that Bitcoin upped its game in promoting itself to the public and policy-makers. With this in mind I have requested the creation of a new forum in the Bitcoin project forums and created a new sub-reddit devoted to the subject. To comment on the creation of the new forum please chime up in the thread. Please join in if this interests you.

[bitcoindude]

You are dead on!

PR game is critical now. The wiki should have a PR section addressing main issues as they evolve. Twitter is full of garbage and ignorance. We need a PR team.

[humble]

You are dead on!

PR game is critical now. The wiki should have a PR section addressing main issues as they evolve. Twitter is full of garbage and ignorance. We need a PR team.

Wiki page for top issues - good idea. Would you mind taking first crack at that? I'm also going to create a #bitcoin-PR freenode channel.

[Shinobi]

What are you going to say? "buy Bitcoin! We have only one real exchange, and it was hacked twice! We have no actual goods market so the value of our currency is only driven from the speculation on this exchange and is otherwise illiquid! But, don't forget, we are decentralized so you can feel like you are sticking it to the man as you watch your money being lost from the weekly fiasco every weekend!"

 

[Shinobi]

Guaranteed that the volume of transactions on a daily basis of all those goods combined are less than that of one midsized brick and mortar general store. Don't kid yourself that the interest in Bitcoin is for its purchasing power. People are here to day-trade, with essentially no effort to actually build a real goods and services market. Tell me, how many vendors in their right mind would accept a currency that floats this wildly?

[walidzohair]

What are you going to say? "buy Bitcoin! We have only one real exchange, and it was hacked twice! We have no actual goods market so the value of our currency is only driven from the speculation on this exchange and is otherwise illiquid! But, don't forget, we are decentralized so you can feel like you are sticking it to the man as you watch your money being lost from the weekly fiasco every weekend!"

 

Guys like you are the exact reason we need a PR .

I am IN!

[imperi]

Guaranteed that the volume of transactions on a daily basis of all those goods combined are less than that of one midsized brick and mortar general store. Don't kid yourself that the interest in Bitcoin is for its purchasing power. People are here to day-trade, with essentially no effort to actually build a real goods and services market. Tell me, how many vendors in their right mind would accept a currency that floats this wildly?

Why do you come here every day just to badmouth Bitcoin? I think you need a new hobby.

[paulie_w]

Guaranteed that the volume of transactions on a daily basis of all those goods combined are less than that of one midsized brick and mortar general store. Don't kid yourself that the interest in Bitcoin is for its purchasing power. People are here to day-trade, with essentially no effort to actually build a real goods and services market. Tell me, how many vendors in their right mind would accept a currency that floats this wildly?

the thing is, i think a lot of people here would really like to use btc as a medium of exchange. it's a great way to move money!

the pr idea is awesome; we need more of that. it would be helpful for information to not come only from mouthpiece-fanatics like bruce wagner (bless him).

[walidzohair]

BTC need some time to settle up and it will replace things like BTCPAL 

[saqwe]

BTC need some time to settle up and it will replace things like BTCPAL 

yeah clearcoin is on hiatus
and the btc-consultancy is not very active...

we need a new bounty like weusecoins ...

[qualia8]

Guaranteed that the volume of transactions on a daily basis of all those goods combined are less than that of one midsized brick and mortar general store. Don't kid yourself that the interest in Bitcoin is for its purchasing power. People are here to day-trade, with essentially no effort to actually build a real goods and services market. Tell me, how many vendors in their right mind would accept a currency that floats this wildly?

Why don't we change that?  How about a forum / subreddit for vendors and creating some tools, support, and promotion for them?  Maybe we should focus on advancing the real bitcoin economy. 

Not that PR shouldn't happen too, but lots of new money coming in isn't *necessarily* a good thing.  Slow organic growth co-evolving with attendant mechanisms > volatile speculative influx of short-term cash with no interest in actual bitcoin commerce.

[spruce]

I would think about making the wallet security more user-friendly before launching into a PR crusade. I am not computer-illiterate but I am certainly not confident about securing wallet.dat. It's fine to say RTFM you moron, but I've read lots of TFM about it, and understand the *theory* of shutting down bitcoin.exe, backing up wallet.dat and encrypting it with 7zip (easier or at least less scary than the idea of using Truecrypt), saving the encrypted file to a thumb drive or emailing it to my gmail account, then deleting the in-clear version. But I'm not so confident about being able to get it all back again — or traces of the in-clear wallet.dat being recoverable from my hard-drive afterwards by some malware — as I've read stories of people screwing it up and losing their coins.

I'm not asking for help with wallet security, just pointing out that it isn't user-friendly for the average guy who uses a computer. And this is a big no-no if you're asking someone to put more than some spare change into it.

Similarly, what's with the indiscriminate addresses used for sending a payment, thereby possibly compromising your pseudo-anonymity? I saw a post yesterday about someone who had written a patch allowing you to choose which address to fund a payment from. Of course this should be included in the main client and not left as a patch.

I can't code, so can't help fix this. I understand the developers have their own priorities and will get around to things like this when they get around to it, and that's fine. But Bitcoins are nowhere near ready for prime time yet.