Topic: How do we change people's mentality about Bitcoin (Read 3596 times)

 The real beauty of bitcoin your really do not need a payment network in the end ( now we need it because so less merchants accept it ), it is safe from any third party (you need to protect your own key though), NOT anonymous ( if you and your address is linked) and anonymous at the same time(just like email address). It make financial innovation a snap (you can organize your own exchange and contracts easily).

And like cash, some criminal use it, but you know what? Cash is really untraceable, bitcoin is actually fully traceable!

Explain to them the beuty of anonimity and instant transactions, then tell them like any other currency it has its sum of criminals.

although i was looking for a list of the 2000 PROPER BUSINESSES and not a hand full of 17's hobbycrafts. there are a few proper businesses listed such as a cupcake company. but still no clear sign that bitcoin is for regular use for proper businesses or customers.

i also clicked through a few links and found dead sites. i gave up looking once i seen a majority of them needed updating. but heres just a few to help you out (the link is the category and the standard text are business names.. obviously)
http://www.thebitcoinlist.com/dp_food/sundries/ - bit munchies dead
http://www.thebitcoinlist.com/dp_advertising/classifieds/ bitthreads, btc.isnan, kytrader, dead dead dead

now ignoring peoples online hobbyshops. we need a list of proper businesses selling proper products to help show bitcoins usefulness and acceptance to the non community members.

EG http://cupsandcakesbakery.com/ its an actual high quality designed website. with a real bricks and mortar business attached to it. it looks like someone from outside the community already had a business and seen bitcoin as a benefit to them. thats the kind of lists we need, businesses like that.

although i love the story of the alpaca socks thing. their website looks like a bland hobbyists site, more so then an established business making annual profit.http://www.grasshillalpacas.com/alpacaproductsforbitcoinoffer.html

if we want the non community to see bitcoin as not just a barter system for under 30yo hobbyists where a significant portion are silk road users. then 'the game' needs to be stepped up.

if scam artists can make great looking websites (cpc electronics) and the community opening up their own small webstores can only pull off a one page of bland design. then the outside world will not take bitcoin serious.

other posts in the thread used the term 'official site'. there is no official site. but there is and should definitely be a PROFESSIONAL site. and many of them.

Couldn't companies like Paypal and Western Union just piggyback on the Bitcoin network, thus causing Bitcoin to increase in value yet no one even knows about Bitcoin at the same time? Why does it feel like that is a more likely future than everyone using long addresses and QR codes to do transactions?

The site is mine but I admit I haven't done much housekeeping lately. If you'll tell me which links were broken, I'll update the listings.

This site seems not to be maintained...
I tried 4 random links, just 1 worked 
bitcoinporn 

The Bitcoin List is by no means an exhaustive list of bitcoin accepting businesses, but it's something to point people to.

Paypal is the biggest scam artist around, Bitcoins are far superior.

The possibility is that bitcoin.org deliberately maintains obscurity, it's only spiritual and symbolic, in the same way as a command-in-chief doesn't do much manual work. 

You're perfectly right. If one wants to make quick fortune by selling bitcoin, he does look like and sound like a pyramid scammer. I wrote an essay to address this question because I was a newbie and restricted to post a reply a week ago .

https://www.coindl.com/page/item/651

Now I'm back

Yes. The interesting thing is there isn't any such thing as any official site, including Bitcoin.org. All sites are non-official because Bitcoin is decentralized. However, some sites can be perceived to have more weight, and be regarded as "official" (that's the problem with the Bitcoin Foundation many here tried to voice).

But in the end it's all about accurate, helpful information spreading. That will happen eventually regardless, but may happen sooner depending on what is available to users.


Yes, that's what I mean above.


Yes, the thing is Bitcoin is STILL in a very early stage, though it may not seem like it to us breathing it daily. There was something I believe said by Gavin a while back which I agree with regarding the cumbersome official client. He said he doesn't WANT Bitcoin to be easy for people to use yet, because it's too easy to lose your money. Look at all the people who have lost coins various ways as a testament to that. I think we're only now beginning to get to the stage where we can start inviting more mainstream users to be involved with Bitcoin, because we've already been through many of the pitfalls we can now warn people about.

There are couple of "non-official" sites already, and many are very good. I never myself direct newbies to bitcoin.org. Finnish newbies I redirect to bittiraha.fi, which is very comprehensive finnish bitcoin portal. International users I redirect to weusecoins.com.

Bitcoin.org could be better, but in the end I think it won't matter that much. Some more actively developed sites will take over it, and the more lightweight clients will also replace the main client for casual users. And if we speak about clients, I tell newbies to avoid the official client and use multibit and electrum instead. I made the mistake to recommend the official client to couple of friends, and now they think that bitcoin sucks because the official client is so slow etc.

Exactly. I think a "non-official" site could help in this capacity.

By not really trying, basically.

I totally quote Mike!

Nobody got around to it yet, that's all. Plus, it's the sort of political people work most developers don't enjoy. Whatever goes onto bitcoin.org is effectively speaking with "the voice of Bitcoin" so the content has to make us all look good, be honest, have reasonably strong consensus, be easy to understand, and so on. It's not easy.

I have a few more high priority things I want to finish off for the next bitcoin(j) releases. Perhaps if nobody has stepped up after that I'll do some work on the website.

Shh.. something tells me a solution is being worked on.

For once I 110% agree with you.

But where is the hold up? Can you specifically list the problems? I mean it's pretty hard to imagine someone like bitpay or bitinstant or mtgox or even bitstamp wouldn't sacrifice some of their capital in order to fund a website overhaul and relaunch..

The biggest problem is the bitcoin.org website. It doesn't help people understand the systems benefits at all. In fact it's barely changed since the first page Satoshi wrote 4 years ago.

Compare torproject.org to bitcoin.org - there's no competition. Tor blows us out of the water, and they have a much harder sell.

We need a website that leads the reader through "The Pitch" - what problems Bitcoin solves, why it solves them well and answers to common problems.

This will mean a web designer/author who is competent with HTML and git. We also need to move vital content off the wiki. Much though we all love wikis, the FAQ on the current one is a messy edit war and the wiki itself is barely maintained, there are tons of spambot signups.

The reason Bitcoin gets bad press is that journalists are lazy, and in a hurry. They can type "bitcoin" into Google and read what other journalists have written, spin it their own way and have a story in 10 minutes. They won't find anything easily digestable to challenge their negative perceptions, so they won't change.