Kris, what are your thoughts on the abandonment of the Bitcoin Bowl?
My thoughts are it's totally thrown a monkey wrench into my marketing plan! I thought it was an April Fool's joke at first. It really was one of the main reasons I moved here because I thought I'd have 2 more years of the Bitcoin Bowl to build a marketing campaign around. But, all is not lost. I mean the merchants are still here accepting Bitcoin. I'll just have to adjust.
I talked to Gabe who leads one of the main Bitcoin meetup groups last night and who runs cryptoedgesolutions.com. He worked with Bitpay recruiting quite a bit of the merchants last year. He is actually holding a Bitcoin meetup this Saturday night that I'm attending. So I'll have more info after that. Who knows what their gameplan is for growth.
The good thing is it's still Florida, there's still a growing amount of merchants, it's vacationland, it's St. Pete and Tampa. We lose that one big, killer event that you could use to sell to a merchant as in "you have to accept Bitcoin for this event if you want their money!" So, now the trick is to see what other events can you work with? I think that my ideas are still doable, just less sellable. But we will adjust and see what happens.
Another good thing is, while this was needed to raise some money to fund the first project, it's not mandatory. I still am interested in finding ways to market Bitcoin merchants and use token control access. However, the main project to make OCTO valuable and useable really had nothing to do with that. That marketing idea was just a tool to raise some money. We can find other ways to do that.
As for now, I'm still planning to do this marketing thing. I think the best way to raise money is to promote Bitcoin biz with a video blog, sell advertising on the page and try to set up a cheap advertising took in the form of a token controlled access portion of the site that will connect merchants to potential customers. I think we only need a few thousand dollars to build the bare bones site and host it to get started to where we can market that in a crowd sale to build an actual site.
But for now it's kinda wait and see. Plus, I'm still job hunting for a second job or a full time job. I am using all my extra hours this week to interview for jobs and to interview for OCTO devs. Once I go to the Bitcoin meetup and see what type of reception we have as well as if any of them want to help out with that marketing site, I will know more.
We may also start having monthly google hangouts as a community following the FoldingCoin hangout so we can start discussing these things as a community. The only reason that has not started is because the job issue. I have to make sure I can survive monthly bills before May. But I think we will see some growth and interest over the summer. If I can get some help from devs we can actually begin planning the first working model to see what the time frame will be and the cost of renting a server, domain name and some coding/web design. This first initial version doesn't have to be the best or pretty, it just has to show that it works and has potential so investors will buy OCTO and other tokens in the crowd sale to fund the final product. The good thing is, if we get the payment processor working, there are ways to price the games where if you have to pay a fee in OCTO to play, the user doesn't care how much OCTO costs, he only cares that he has to have enough dollars or bitcoins worth of OCTO to play the game and use the Counterparty token of the groups choice to play the game. It'll be something that we have to play with and adjust.
The plan is to issue a OCTOBURN tokens to all the burners and allow you guys to be the test dummies. You will be able to use the OCTOBURN tokens to play the game and the OCTO token will be the fee. Then we will see how that affects the price when we set up the playing fees different ways. But we also want to be sure that since it's testing you aren't losing OCTO or other Counterparty tokens. So the OCTOBURN token is worthless except you get the chance to test the game. However, I suspect many may sell some of the OCTOBURN tokens to others on DEX to others which would allow non burners to test, which would be fine if it stays low. This is all theoretical. Until we hire some devs and we know exactly how much the servers cost and how the code will work with a website, and what all we can build with the code, it's all theoretical. But I think it's doable and that there are many different ways to accomplish this type of system. It's figuring out what's the best way for both the site and the player.
Token Control Acces will be a main feature of the gaming site so I wanted the marketing/video blog site to give the chance for the devs to implement that code like letstalkbitcoin's site and play around with it. It will allow us to add cool features for players and tokens besides OCTO that we issue to sweeten the pot to sell OCTO and other tokens in a crowd sale.
Stay tuned. I'll definitely keep you guys updated after the bitcoin meetup
On a personal view, as cool as the Bitcoin Bowl was, and I liked it, I was always shocked that Bitpay would pay such a large amount of money for that specific Bowl game. It's not like it was one of the main ones and it was on a Friday night. I support both Bitpay and Coinbase as far as merchant integration because I think it's important. But it is just disappointing that they got themselves into an issue like this. But hey it's Bitcoin, uncharted waters and territory. You don't know until you try. I just hope that it didn't hurt Bitpay and that they see good reason to stay involved in Bitcoin Merchant adoption in this area even without that stupid football game.
