One thing should be clear to anyone reading HippiePyro's post: Nobody is this motivated to promote a coin without an airdrop or bounty program associated with it, and without top down management, unless they are so impressed with what the coin offers that they are truly Holding On for Dear Life (HODLing). People simply do not rally organically around a shit coin without compensation; they dump it. Any posts about Spectrecoin you've seen the past couple weeks up to yesterday afternoon (this comment was written on Christmas Eve 2017), were made by individuals who were participating in a spontaneous grassroots effort to raise the visibility and awareness of this highly deserving privacy coin, in the broader crypto community - without compensation of any kind.
Yesterday afternoon I offered a one-time incentive in the form of a small XSPEC Christmas bonus to BTC posters from our core community. This bonus is being paid out of my own pocket; I am just a simple XSPEC investor, and did not even learn of this coin until this past summer, well after the ICO was past. Except for a similar campaign by a different investor on Twitter several months ago, which fell flat, this is the only time that I know of that anyone has ever offered anyone else compensation to promote this coin. That's right. We have not even paid 'professional' marketers or advertisers one cent.
How many other aspiring alt coins can honestly say that?
Once again: There is absolutely NO REASON for anyone to be motivated to actively and relentlessly spread the word about a coin without compensation, unless they really and truly believe in the future of the coin. This alone should give any sensible person pause, and make them want to take a closer look. The reason people are so motivated about Spectrecoin, is its tech.
A large part of what makes this coin special, is the features and technology which are being planned for it. While it is already quite a functional and user-friendly privacy coin, with at least one groundbreaking feature already implemented (Tor + OBFS4 native integration), there are many features coming soon, and coming throughout 2018, which are what will really set this coin apart and establish it as a serious player in the privacy coin sector. The fact that our team of developers, both of whom are cryptographers, are strongly dedicated to this coin and the concept for which it stands, have an established track record of delivering first rate product, make regular commits to the GitHub, and in the case of the lead dev, has donated his time and efforts to the development of this coin before the community rallied to support him with funding, gives us confidence that our dev team will follow through on every last detail of Spectrecoin's roadmap.
We are not competing with any other coin, and one of our community guidelines that we seek to hold to when spreading the word about XSPEC, is that we avoid disparaging other coins. We make no attempt to whitewash ourselves by blackening others. We stick to describing Spectrecoin, and do so as factually and tastefully as possible. Spectrecoin is tech first, but a close second is our solid community of quality individuals who are passionate about the concept of Spectrecoin (in its final incarnation): A Hawala-like, 100% private and anonymous, fungible, digital cash for small remittance applications.
If this is "down your alley" so to speak, please take a closer look at our wiki page, which has excellent information on the background and tech of the coin, come say hi to our vibrant community of Spectrers, and feel free to join us. Links are below.
Wiki page: http://coinwiki.info/en/SpectreCoin
Slack invite: http://slack.spectreproject.io/
I like what you are saying and I think that is the correct way to spread word about the coin. I don't think paying Bounties are wrong but it is true that it might scew the objectivity of an advertiser. But I am not sure that all SpectreCoin followers really are following your nice words: "we avoid disparaging other coins. We make no attempt to whitewash ourselves by blackening others". Foremost I am refering to the SpectreCoin Wiki site on AltCoinWiki.org. Overall it is a great page, describing the interested in SpectreCoin but that Coin Comparison section pretty much does nothing except "blacken" the other privacy cryptos. It does lift aspects of the coins and SpectreCoin but every comparison is done in the favour of SpectreCoin. Don't get me wrong, SpectreCoin looks good on many points but a lot of the comments are subjective in the favour of SpectreCoin which is pretty much what you are speaking against
I think what you are doing as a community is great, to yourself market a coin that you support. I think community support is something that is becoming a major fundation for a successful marketing campaign. I am personally part of a similar project in supporting DeepOnion which you are free to check out via links in my signature. It is true that the DeepOnion marketing campaign differ in that they offer Bounties for select community members but I still see a similar community support within both SpectreCoin and DeepOnion.
Thanks for a great post and I will look more into SpectreCoin and what it has to offer.