What are some interesting ways you've introduced bitcoin to your friends?

[c_atlas]

Note to those of you who struggle with reading comprehension: I'm asking how HAVE you done this. Not how DO/CAN you do it. Stick to your personal experience, we're not giving advice, we're telling stories 

I like giving out OpenDime bearer instruments like pic related:


My technical friends love it, I tell them the funds are theirs if they can move the sats from the stick to their phone, although some of them prefer to keep it on the USB because it gives off a cyberpunk vibe.

I've also brought friends to bitcoin ATMs around my city to show them how easy it is to exchange fiat for BTC, they tend to like that too because it attracts attention to the fact that we're doing something that might seem technically challenging and unusual.

Looking forward to reading about what you guys have done 

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[_Miracle]

When I was mining and bitcoin was much cheaper I would give fractional (Like a 1/10) paper wallet some with short notes on how much it was worth (including the date) and where they could spend it or how to save it. I also framed a few wallets with other money lessons *One Hundred Trillion Dollar notes, silver pieces from when they were worth a dollar---and a dollar.

I have also given many 10$ wallets away.

My daughter watched me mine---(  got her gaming interrupted on occasion when I was messing around with the machines  ) she also got to purchase steam points from time to time with bitcoin.
She has my old car which has a stealthy black matte bitcoin symbol, she gets asked about it... it's not her thing at all.

She bought me a physical Dogecoin for mothers day one year and it's one of the few bits of crypto memorabilia I've kept

[aoluain]

I have a number of friends who I have introduced Bitcoin to and explained in a very basic
way "what it is", "how it works" and "how to get it". None have pulled the trigger and committed...

until last week when one of them came into a small bit of financial difficulty, he asked me
about Bitcoin and I asked him if he remembered last April [2020] when I first explained to
him, he said he did and I told him how much of a gain he would have realised since then,
he was shocked! I re-introduced Bitcoin to him.

Because of the bit of difficulty he finds himself in he is liquidating his redundant pension to
solve the issue and putting what is left into Bitcoin!

Sometimes some people need to experience first hand what they have missed out on,
they see risk and are too quick to close the door on a potential opportunity, its never too late though!

[GreatArkansas]

From my own experience, I haven't really tried giving out some physical things. More on virtual and learnings for them.
I introduced Bitcoin to my friends by having to educate them and sharing my knowledge, what all I know about Bitcoin and how it works, setting up their first Bitcoin wallet, and how to send Bitcoin to another Bitcoin wallet.

[cabron]

Your friends will always be reminded of you when they hear some news or people talk about Bitcoin. Even if they already heard of Bitcoin somewhere before but if you introduce it to them differently like giving sats, it sticks to their mind as I did to one of my friend, I rarely see him since we are high school friends but when he was in trouble while I was there in our home town, I gave him some funds to buy him a car tire. I asked him to download a wallet app for the funds. A year later I came back, he always sees me as the techie guy to which I'm not.

[TravelMug]

From my own experience, I haven't really tried giving out some physical things. More on virtual and learnings for them.
I introduced Bitcoin to my friends by having to educate them and sharing my knowledge, what all I know about Bitcoin and how it works, setting up their first Bitcoin wallet, and how to send Bitcoin to another Bitcoin wallet.

Same here, I haven't gifted anyone with bitcoin yet to my friends and families. But they know that I'm into bitcoin, so sometimes they will approach me and ask something about it and I'm readily willing to give them information and explain it that they will understand.

But I'm thinking of giving them as a gift this Christmas, maybe in a form of paper wallet and will give instructions on how to protect them.

[franky1]

one person i told 'i quit my job and started trading international currencies'.. the conversation got more detailed where i said the currency is bitcoin. and it led on from there. i gave him some just as free play funds to give it a try

one person was arguing that its not real..  i bought pizza with it. to show it can be used.
and during the 25minute chat showing how its not some lame database but a distributed ledger locking in the data to be unedited. the pizza arrived.
we then chatted more while eating pizza about how secure it is. mining, chaining of blocks, transactions analogy of cheques. mining analogy of cheque clearing houses.. and so on

a relative seen stuff said on facebook. so i gave them the usual warnings that although bitcoin is a real asset, most of the facebook adverts are advertising fake services pretending to manage bitcoin. so i just gave him some.. cash-in-hand to avoid the scam sites offering services

at a few conferences and meetups i said a few basic stuff..
intro to what is bitcoin and blockchains
done the usual Q&A  and had envelopes with paperwallets with small amounts on. and handed them out

best naive analogy to give to the non-technical people is the cheque and batch validation clearing house analogy. where the clearing houses are not centralised
(ofcourse i said it in more detail and more graphics and style, but i wont waffle it all here)

[mk4]

This is definitely NOT the best way, and that I definitely wouldn't recommend this to anyone, but me and my mates are huge eSports enthusiasts, and we like betting small amounts of money on tournaments just for fun. So, what's a good use case? Bitcoin for gambling, of course! Gambling being bad aside, this is the way they understood that Bitcoin is pretty much unstoppable money.

[bittraffic]

Making money will almost make everyone interested. You will sound like a scammer to them if you will introduce them and then ask them to invest in but if you tell them stories like the price of the BTC started from zero to $30k, it should be a good introduction for them to make money. Its easy to introduce Bitcoin to people who would like to make money online.

[DapanasFruit]

Many years ago when I got involved with some dubious programs (I have to admit that they were then really like more into ponzi type), the easier way to enter is the use of cryptocurrency and so when I promoted the programs in the social media those who are interested got the option to use Bitcoin and many of them started to get involved with Bitcoin and admittedly not in the good way and contributing to the perception of some that Bitcoin equals scam. I them moved on from those bad programs and got involved with investing in new projects which unfortunately many also were just frauds though some made it to be good platforms. I know that my story is not unique as there can be many who got introduced to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency because they got attracted to passive programs that eventually just evaporated.

[pooya87]

It seems like giving away paper wallets is a popular method, I too have done it in the past with small amounts to those very close to me.

However I always believe that the best way to introduce bitcoin to others is to help them understand what bitcoin is and help fix the misconceptions they have about bitcoin. This too is what I have been trying to do. Basically letting them know that bitcoin is a currency not a get rich quick scheme. For example I used to talk about bitcoin price but for a couple of years now I always avoid mentioning the price.
Having some small technical understanding of how bitcoin works helps a lot too. They are usually confused about mining or how they should store bitcoin, you'd be surprised to see how many think they should store it with some third party like they do with PayPal for example!

[Kiley33]

When friends swipe bitcoin information on their phones, they will talk to me and ask when is the best time to buy them. Sometimes I also share some interesting videos on my phone for my friends to watch. Now they have tried to buy goods with Bitcoin, and the experience is not bad.

[xmonkeyx]

There are many ways, but one of the most effective is to provide evidence that there are many advantages and conveniences that can be obtained with Bitcoin, whether trading it for a long or short period of time.
if they already know about the advantages they will surely learn without having to introduce us in much more detail. as I have done to my friend.

[SFR10]

Case #1 ^[2016-17]
I remember dragging an old friend of mine into a park, then we discussed in regards to how he could and should store it and some of the earning methods. Guess what happened next? I never saw him after that
^{- I admit, it probably had to do with the way I introduced it [perhaps I sounded like I was doing something illegally].}

Case #2 ^{[late 2019]}
One of my friends wanted to start a business together, so I came up with the idea of importing mining rigs ^{[half of them for ourselves and sell the rest for some profits]}... We planned everything for a couple of months ^{[the introduction part was included in here]} and almost went with my idea but at the last minute, we ditched it and went with another business idea that eventually led to a significant financial loss ^{[FYI, what happened it was out of our hands]}.
Thankfully, I no longer have to approach them because they're approaching me instead ^{[less pressure for me, and technically I'm just pushing them in the right direction as opposed to introducing it completely from scratch]}.

[pixie85]

I told a friend that I had some bitcoins in 2017 and he bought just a bit. It was maybe $1000 worth of coins. It was maybe 0.3 btc back then and now that's worth almost 10000 USD. He is still holding and is quite happy because it's that money that is going to help him get his own apartment. Since that day he bought even more and got some of his friends into bitcoin, telling them that buying in 2017 was one of the best decisions he made in life.

[Wexnident]

Gambling! Not really the best way, but hey. It started when I had a campaign that paid on their crypto site accounts, I started trying out some games with the paid amount since I was too lazy to pull it out, not to mention that I was met with a few games when I entered, had to try it no? Stayed for a few weeks then when my cash ran out, invited a few of my friends to try out crypto casinos and went ahead to put more funds into play.

There was also a case (this time it was me who got introduced into it) where my school mate was using the school's library to run some type of mining machine. Was never sure what coin it mined exactly since I only heard tidbits from the friend of this person, so I got curious.

[Renampun]

I have lots of friends but some few friends just know something about cryptocurrencies but most of the friends interesting to invest in cryptocurrencies market. Firstly I introduced themselves with Binance exchange and some altcoins like Ethereum and dogecoin.

is it not risky if you introduce dogecoin to your friends because this is a meme coin...

btw, I've been deterred from introducing Bitcoin and Altcoins to my friends because of the severe losses that occurred in 2018 and then many of my friends cut losses and blamed me for inviting them to invest in Bitcoin. I will not teach Bitcoin to them anymore, if they want to learn then they must be prepared with Bitcoin price volatility.

[pinggoki]

The first interesting way that my friends introduced to me the bitcoin is that you can earn money here by just participating in some bounty campaigns and also signature campaigns as what many people are doing right now. They are participating in signature campaign in order to get paid by just promoting the signature that they are wearing. There are a lot of people here who is doing the same thing as mine.

[noorman0]

Unfortunately I can't really prove the benefits of bitcoin as an alternative means of payment to close people even though most of them have heard a lot that bitcoin is profitable. My friends who are mostly businessmen and farmers are very difficult to teach them technical things. While they would be interested in using bitcoin, they are likely to be more interested in using a more user-friendly and multi-featured third-party (decentralized) platform instead of a private wallet.

[worle1bm]

My first explanation of Bitcoin was to one of my facebook friend living in remote area and working on some project and was keen to know about new developments and crypto and btc were not quite popular then and I just came to know about btc and read the whitepaper and some other technical working and was amazed to see it and then I told him about the same and as expected he didn't believe in it at first that how come a decentalized currency which have no central authority could use for transaction and who decides its value and how does all the network works? But gradually we both make progress and now we discuss what improvement can be made to btc to improve scalability and fees issue and both are btc holders.So this is how time and our mind changes regarding bitcoin.