How to boost the bitcoin market:

[vssa]

What if some retail shop will launch a sale campaign where he would sell all his merchandise at 30% discount if paying with bitcoins.
Why it can be a good idea to sell with lost in fiat terms ?
Because bitcoin is deflationary commodity and the bitcoin price will raise over time in fiat terms,the merchant who sold with lost of 30% on his merchandise will gain at least 50% profit on bitcoins price over time and if this business approach will become popular it will push the BTC/USD price even higher.
I know that it is sounds very risky and even stupid(what if bitcoin price will be lower in the next 6 month),but i think that it can be a real opportunity to make good profit and in the same time release all this bitcoin idea to the masses.

Maybe to spread the risk ,the first capital to buy merchandise will be raise from the bitcoin users who are willing to take the risk and use this opportunity to make good profit and in the same time boost bitcoin popularity.

 

[markm]

One of the easiest places to start is with virtual goods that sell for far far more than what producing them actually cost. However even there you run into the nagging question "why not buy bitcoins with fiat you sell goods or services for instead of giving large discounts to those who pay in bitcoins?"

Another possibility might be very large ticket items. For example if you are selling a fifty million dollar estate or island or something on that kind of scale, how many bitcoins could you charge and how many dollars would that look like to a purchaser who simply looks at recent MtGox rates to figure out how much a bitcoin is?

-MarkM-

[vssa]

"why not buy bitcoins with fiat you sell goods or services for instead of giving large discounts to those who pay in bitcoins?"

-MarkM-

Yes that way you can buy more bitcoins, but in the long run what will happened is that people will get the idea that they need to buy bitcoins in order to buy cheaper so the demand/price for bitcoins will go up and at the same time the prices of the merchandise in BTC will go down or stay the same so it will always be cheaper to buy  with BTC and the BTC you are getting will keep going up in fiat terms.
If it is just you who are buying bitcoins with the profit from selling goods or services it will not really affect the BTC/USD price but if it more and more people who are buying bitcoins it is a trend.

The state/bankers are in power not because they sell goods or services for high price but because you use their inflationary notes
if you start using deflationary commodity as a mean of exchange you get the power.

[markm]

Okay well here is another way of looking at it. Bitcoins are insanely, ridiculously undervalued, which makes it ridiculously hard to get reasonable fiat prices for goods priced in bitcoin, due to people being able to look up some insanely, ridiculously low price they can buy bitcoins for somewhere.

Thus when they see you offering goods priced at, say, one bitcoin, they imagine the item you are selling for only one bitcoin is presumably only worth about seven dollars, instead of realising that being able to buy bitcoins for only seven dollars is crazy. The proper price of the item in dollars should be an entire actual bitcoin fergoshsakes, not some pathetic piece of fiat paper!

So yeah, refuse to accept their stupid fiat, tell them if they think they can buy bitcons for less than a hundred or thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand or whatever dollars they should please go do so right away while they can still do so, then come buy your item with an actual real bitcoin.

-MarkM-

[Elwar]

It would only boost the bitcoin market if the retailer were large enough. My wife's shop offering 30% off for using Bitcoins would get 1, maybe 2 people to buy with Bitcoins based on such a sale.

The key to such a strategy would be knowing that there would be an influx of consumers by doing such a promotion. This is currently not the case.


If you were to get a pool of Bitcoin users to start pledging a certain amount of BTC, then once they have accumulated enough BTC pledged then certain retailers may bid to be the retailer of choice. Then those pledged spenders spend their pledged money at that retailer.

If you could get a couple thousand BTC pledged and spend it all at one place, then it could make some headlines.

[TheButterZone]

That is already being facilitated by BTC->gift card sites like spendbitcoins.com, but more piecemeal. With Amazon, you can store your gift credit in your account (even better than a pledge because it's effectively a 0% interest loan to them), so it's way more secure than holding it in an exchange or shared wallet. However, you can see how much trouble Amazon's been giving Jeremy, suspending his account and putting gift cards on hold over and over and over again.