I would like to correct myself. There could be some instant reaction and that would be evident in the global hash rate. It is easy enough for someone to download GUIMiner and join a pool so this could happen during or shortly after the show. They might not have an ideal graphics card or may only try cpu mining but some people will probably try it out cuz of the show if there is enough detail on it.
I must disagree. I think this is probably one of the most commonly underestimated barriers to Bitcoin acceptance. People are simply not as computer-competent as you think they are. Even if they CAN figure out how to set up everything, the sheer amount of time it takes to really know what you're doing for the first time is FUCKING ANNOYING.
I consider myself to be fairly proficient with computers. I built my first computer from scratch about 6 months ago and I wrote a simple RPG program in Q-basic when I was 12. I've also done some basic HTML stuff. When I first tried getting involved in Bitcoin,
it took me over 10 hours before I had anything in my wallet, and that was only what I got from the faucet. And that didn't even include the hours I spent researching nearly every aspect of Bitcoin to decide whether or not it was worth investing in, let alone the time spent trying to rationalize whether or not it was even ethical/legal to do so.
About half of these 10 hours were spent researching the most efficient means to acquire Bitcoins and figuring out what the hell I would do with them if I had some. The other half was spent figuring out my miner and customizing it (e.g. WTF are flags? Try explaining flags to a newb). Solo mining also took some time ("problems connecting to RPC something-or-other" came up a lot).
Granted, it all seems pretty easy once you've done it a few times, but that's irrelevant to a newb.
If you think its easy for someone with only general computer knowledge to:
1) Download client
2) Figure out that their client needs to synchronize with the network before they can really do anything with any amount of Bitcoins (not initially obvious).
3) Download GUIminer
4) Register with pool
5) Set up your miner
6) Start mining
7) Realize that their awesome NVidia graphics card sucks (perhaps they have ATI but have not downloaded the stream SDK...oops...here come another few hours figuring out why GUIminer won't detect my GPU).
8.) Jump through hoops to join an exchange. Don't want to pay wire transfer fees? Well, then you might as well open up a suicide-support website in another browser tab while simultaneously trying to set up your Dwolla or Paxum account. At this point, sharp things start to look very appealing.
9) Figure out how to safely secure their wallet.dat and all their passwords (multiple backups, linux, ubuntu, and boot-from-USB operating systems? Yeah right. These are people who use Windows and their only knowledge of backing up anything corresponds to "save as").
My mother has an IQ tested over 130. She doesn't even understand text messaging -- well, she understands it, but its very complicated to her. She'd need a 3-month course just to feel confident enough that she
might not lose every penny of her investment.
If you want mass Bitcoin acceptance, you need a client/miner/exchange-account all wrapped into one. Do you know how nice it would've been to install my client and have instant access to trading and mining?
