I think this post belongs in the economics sections but I'm a newb so have to post it here for the trolls.
The following is a simple idea to promote bitcoin acceptance.
It is based on the premise that widespread bitcoin acceptance will be driven by the relationship between consumers and merchants in such a way that, as the BTC economy grows so does the incentive for merchants to accept BTC. As more merchants begin to accept BTC, consumers will be more inclined to convert some of their central bank issued inflationary paper slave money into BTC. Simply because the things they want to buy can be purchased with BTC. A feedback loop.
Has anyone considered creating a Bitcoin Consumer Group? According to the bitcointalk.com members section there are over 51,000 members on bitcointalk.com. So if every member of bitcointalk.com were to contribute an average of 1 BTC we would have approx. $250,000 worth of purchasing power.
Next we would need to find some person or business entity that would like an extra $250,000 in revenue, and had a product that the "Bitcoin Consumer Group" would like to purchase.
Case Study:
A comedian by the name of Louis CK recently wrote and produced his own comedy DVD "Louis CK - Live at the Beacon Theater"
https://buy.louisck.net/and sold it on his own website for $5 through PayPal
He was very successful
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/15/louis-ck-500000-profit-live-at-beacon-theatre-special_n_1152506.html Whats really interesting though is that he did it all independently. So presumably, if he wanted to he could have also sold it for BTC without having to ask any distribution executives for permission.
I think a public consensus could be created easily on twitter for this kind of stuff, that would send a strong message to vendors.
If anyone has any thoughts on how to create a Bitcoin Consumer Group with the financial influence to to persuade vendors to accept BTC I would be very interested to here it.
Thanks
I can also be reached on twitter @JoeBitcoin
