How to attract late adopter ?

[flaxindo]

I don't think attracting late adopters will be an issue. If Bitcoin survives it's early growth/volatility phase, the late adopters (who by definition are always late to the party) will get over the "it's new/scary/phony/scam" and start thinking "it's normal".

My point is that there should not be a party and there should not be late or early for this to be adopted by ordinary merchants.

I don't think "should/shouldn't" is relevant in a free market. Whatever is (outside of manipulation/intervention) is what is. The market [miners/investors/adopters] define what "should" be.

Any other way of looking at this leads to the possibility of legal tender laws where you force people to accept something they don't want. That is directly opposite of free market. The thinking and force behind those laws are proximately behind the situation leading us to be interested in bitcoins as an alternative to their fiat currency!

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[pjce]

Gresham's law only applies if the government forces the same value on the "good" and the "bad" money.

Hypothetical example: Gov't mints new coins for circulation with half the raw material value in it than the coin it replaces. People will start hoarding the old coin and take it out of circulation completely if the raw material value goes above the nominal value.

[MtRev]

I remember when PayPal was in beta stage.. . I loved the idea, but when I saw a website using it, I figured they were just a "newbie" company who just started a business or maybe even ran a business in their own home.

Many people were iffy about it, but look at it now. Just about every merchant is now using them and is widely accepted. It may be harder for some of us to accept "BitCoin", but the younger generation would easily adopt it as a normal currency.

My only question is why eGold never really for their name out as much as BitCoin. I found out about BitCoin yesterday while reading Bloomberg Businessweek" magzine (June 20-26 issue, page 41). Don't get me wrong, eGold was noted in the past, but only because their data center got robbed.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

If you've heard of Gold Partys (gold parties), maybe that idea could be taken to the next level: Bitcoins for Gold Party. My only suggestion would be is to offer the maximum possible for the gold (silver, copper, etc. works also) in exchange for the maximum possible bitcoins (current market price during party), and still recognize a fair profit. I would go as far as to show the exact profit made for full disclosure purposes. At that same time, everyone is introduced to bitcoins and their wallets are sent up. Now show them the sites where to spend their bitcoins (linked from your site with affiliate programs attached possibly). Of course they'll still have the option of only exchanging it for USD, at which point you offer them less but still more than they can get anywhere else.

[lateminer]

Be the entrepreneur you set out to be

[Jerle]

I think one of the biggest barriers to entry right now is that business don't feel comfortable accepting a currency that's so volatile and which they can't cash out immediately.  I'm a relative newcomer to bitcoin and own an online gaming business.  We're looking into bitcoin adoption, but one of the trickiest things is how to to do pricing when the value of bitcoin is still tied to the USD.  Until more places have stable bitcoin prices, merchants will be hesitant to set stable bitcoin prices.

A bit of chicken-and-egg, but there it is.

[lateminer]

I think one of the biggest barriers to entry right now is that business don't feel comfortable accepting a currency that's so volatile and which they can't cash out immediately.  I'm a relative newcomer to bitcoin and own an online gaming business.  We're looking into bitcoin adoption, but one of the trickiest things is how to to do pricing when the value of bitcoin is still tied to the USD.  Until more places have stable bitcoin prices, merchants will be hesitant to set stable bitcoin prices.

A bit of chicken-and-egg, but there it is.

I have to agree it fluctuates, aside from that the business needs to sell their bitcoin to pay the bills. Ahh good old days, running gameservers, voip, hosting. indeed good times.

[Hunterbunter]

I think one of the biggest barriers to entry right now is that business don't feel comfortable accepting a currency that's so volatile and which they can't cash out immediately.  I'm a relative newcomer to bitcoin and own an online gaming business.  We're looking into bitcoin adoption, but one of the trickiest things is how to to do pricing when the value of bitcoin is still tied to the USD.  Until more places have stable bitcoin prices, merchants will be hesitant to set stable bitcoin prices.

A bit of chicken-and-egg, but there it is.

Yah there it is...volatile, might be unable to reuse it, and who goes first. All the obstacles in a nutshell.

I think there are parallel operations that go on to make any payment method gain traction: People working on making transactions as easy as possible (comparable to easy hand over cash transactions), and people willing to take a risk in accepting them before they are widely accepted. As the second grows, volatility reduces as prices have something other than $$ to peg to.

[grau]

Gresham's law only applies if the government forces the same value on the "good" and the "bad" money.

I think it applies here too. Assume a shop sells a gadget for USD or BitCoin. What would you use to pay ?

In case you understood BitCoin's deflationary nature you would use USD and hoard BitCoin.
In case you did not understood BitCoin you would pay with USD since you have no BitCoins.

No matter you use USD. This is why I do not see BitCoin picking up for trade.

To encourage trade and discourage hoarding we might need to use either inflation or demurrage. We know and do not like inflation, rule that one out for now...

Demurrage means a block created yesterday would be accepted for less than a block created today. If parameters are chosen right block creators, who contribute to the function of the system would make up for this devaluation. Success rate of mining would have to be aligned with demurrage and total amount of money in circulation remains constant,  favors those who invest into the system, until they keep doing it, others are encouraged to spend it.

This would also end the disproportional reward for early adopter, foster trading and allow hoarding only if aligned with CPU power to keep up with demurrage, that is again common interest.

I assume above arguments are not unknown to some seniors here, please tell me if and why they were rejected at design ?

[Gabi]

How to attract late adopter?

Improving the bitcoin client would really help, adding options to manage the wallet and the blockchain (maybe something btter than adding things like -rescan in a textual way  )

[kgutteridge]

For me two things other than I am a programmer and this is interesting, foreign transaction fees and online poker

Being from the UK we regularly had to put up with currency swings on online poker sites, which have now really suffered. Foreign Exchange fees for heavily traded currencies such as the dollar, euro and sterling are in my view just a licence to print money for large banking institutes

[RogerR]

If we only got the Saudis to accept bitcoin payments for oil now...