What are good ideas to help promote Bitcoin?

Even though I'm a person that is usually informed about anything related to new technologies in any area, I can't believe how I didn't know about Bitcoin until a few months ago.

Then I thought, people that don't even care about this kind of stuff will never know about Bitcoin.

Even worse, I live in a developing country and when I comment about this they think it is like a game. It is really hard to explain to somebody without enough knowledge that the system really works and could be daily used in a near future.

So my question is, how can I evangelize the Bitcoin usage between the majority of people?

So far, my ideas are:

Try to sell BTC at market price (not making profit).
Encourage stores (mostly online) to use it.
Have a local store with discounts for paying in BTC.

Tomas

Posted 2012-08-07T04:01:31.187

Reputation: 143

I'm not sure this question is a good fit for this site. Perhaps you should start a thread on bitcointalk.org ... I would just try to learn all you can about it, and talk to people. The number 1 motivation at this point is profit/speculation ... so if you can get people to believe that this is a good long-term investment, you've helped Bitcoin. Don't bring any short term speculators though, they just add to the instability. – ripper234 – 2012-08-07T04:58:05.903

As it stands the question is likely to encourage debate rather than facts. As @ripper234 has commented, this would be better placed on Bitcoin Talk

– Gary Rowe – 2012-08-07T20:12:01.227

I am not asking about what is the best to do. I am just asking about good ideas to promote it. Why would that encourage debate? – Tomas – 2012-08-07T21:26:48.690

@Tomas - because the question doesn't have an objective measure to test whether an answer is good. Like or dislike it, this criteria is part of what defines good SE questions. – ripper234 – 2012-08-08T04:10:03.133

I'll close this for the very reason stated by ripper and Gary. Nothing personal Tomas, it's just not the kind of question that StackExchange is intended for. – D.H. - bitcoin.se – 2012-08-13T18:12:00.517

Answers

I carry around with me a Casascius physical bitcoin (and another one that has been peeled). This gives a great visual aid in explaining it in terms another person is already familiar with.

You can encourage people to visit the faucet, and then do a trial run spending it, as described here:

http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/25967017874

You could print up some Bitcoin notes with a trivial amount of bitcoins (e.g., twenty cents worth) and hand them out to people. Put an expiration on it and if the funds aren't redeemed within that time (e.g. a month) then you reclaim the funds and give them out again. But at least every one that does get redeemed, you know that person (or whomever they gave the note to) now knows what a bitcoin is and how it can be transferred.

But the point to get across is that this is not just neat technology or some type of marketing of a new product. This is how we defang the financial system that repeatedly harms us (or at least lessens our reliance on it).

Every time a bitcoin transaction replaces a PayPal transaction it is like placing a pea on "our" side of scale versus the bricks holding their side down. The scale has a big plate though, and eventually all of our peas together will cause it to tip.

But that's how decentralizioin works -- one pea at a time.

Stephen Gornick

Posted 2012-08-07T04:01:31.187

Reputation: 26 118

Tomas, there might not be anything that can be done except wait. I was one of the people using the internet in 1970s and I thought it was wonderful but I had a hard time convincing other people. Then in the 1990s it really took off, so now even little children are using browsers.

There is also in your post a hint that unless we market Bitcoin better, it will die. I don't believe it is up to us. It lives or dies based on it's own merits.

The thing we can do now is to finish building all the parts of Bitcoin. There are some parts that are still missing. For example, a way to import keys into the client. It is actually very good that public recognition is not happening so quickly.

shoeless joe

Posted 2012-08-07T04:01:31.187

Reputation: 2 129