Topic: How to attract late adopter ? (Read 2641 times)

If we only got the Saudis to accept bitcoin payments for oil now...

For me two things other than I am a programmer and this is interesting, foreign transaction fees and online poker

Being from the UK we regularly had to put up with currency swings on online poker sites, which have now really suffered. Foreign Exchange fees for heavily traded currencies such as the dollar, euro and sterling are in my view just a licence to print money for large banking institutes

How to attract late adopter?

Improving the bitcoin client would really help, adding options to manage the wallet and the blockchain (maybe something btter than adding things like -rescan in a textual way  )

I think it applies here too. Assume a shop sells a gadget for USD or BitCoin. What would you use to pay ?

In case you understood BitCoin's deflationary nature you would use USD and hoard BitCoin.
In case you did not understood BitCoin you would pay with USD since you have no BitCoins.

No matter you use USD. This is why I do not see BitCoin picking up for trade.

To encourage trade and discourage hoarding we might need to use either inflation or demurrage. We know and do not like inflation, rule that one out for now...

Demurrage means a block created yesterday would be accepted for less than a block created today. If parameters are chosen right block creators, who contribute to the function of the system would make up for this devaluation. Success rate of mining would have to be aligned with demurrage and total amount of money in circulation remains constant,  favors those who invest into the system, until they keep doing it, others are encouraged to spend it.

This would also end the disproportional reward for early adopter, foster trading and allow hoarding only if aligned with CPU power to keep up with demurrage, that is again common interest.

I assume above arguments are not unknown to some seniors here, please tell me if and why they were rejected at design ?

Yah there it is...volatile, might be unable to reuse it, and who goes first. All the obstacles in a nutshell.

I think there are parallel operations that go on to make any payment method gain traction: People working on making transactions as easy as possible (comparable to easy hand over cash transactions), and people willing to take a risk in accepting them before they are widely accepted. As the second grows, volatility reduces as prices have something other than $$ to peg to.

I have to agree it fluctuates, aside from that the business needs to sell their bitcoin to pay the bills. Ahh good old days, running gameservers, voip, hosting. indeed good times.

I think one of the biggest barriers to entry right now is that business don't feel comfortable accepting a currency that's so volatile and which they can't cash out immediately.  I'm a relative newcomer to bitcoin and own an online gaming business.  We're looking into bitcoin adoption, but one of the trickiest things is how to to do pricing when the value of bitcoin is still tied to the USD.  Until more places have stable bitcoin prices, merchants will be hesitant to set stable bitcoin prices.

A bit of chicken-and-egg, but there it is.

Be the entrepreneur you set out to be

If you've heard of Gold Partys (gold parties), maybe that idea could be taken to the next level: Bitcoins for Gold Party. My only suggestion would be is to offer the maximum possible for the gold (silver, copper, etc. works also) in exchange for the maximum possible bitcoins (current market price during party), and still recognize a fair profit. I would go as far as to show the exact profit made for full disclosure purposes. At that same time, everyone is introduced to bitcoins and their wallets are sent up. Now show them the sites where to spend their bitcoins (linked from your site with affiliate programs attached possibly). Of course they'll still have the option of only exchanging it for USD, at which point you offer them less but still more than they can get anywhere else.

I remember when PayPal was in beta stage.. . I loved the idea, but when I saw a website using it, I figured they were just a "newbie" company who just started a business or maybe even ran a business in their own home.

Many people were iffy about it, but look at it now. Just about every merchant is now using them and is widely accepted. It may be harder for some of us to accept "BitCoin", but the younger generation would easily adopt it as a normal currency.

My only question is why eGold never really for their name out as much as BitCoin. I found out about BitCoin yesterday while reading Bloomberg Businessweek" magzine (June 20-26 issue, page 41). Don't get me wrong, eGold was noted in the past, but only because their data center got robbed.

Gresham's law only applies if the government forces the same value on the "good" and the "bad" money.

Hypothetical example: Gov't mints new coins for circulation with half the raw material value in it than the coin it replaces. People will start hoarding the old coin and take it out of circulation completely if the raw material value goes above the nominal value.

I don't think "should/shouldn't" is relevant in a free market. Whatever is (outside of manipulation/intervention) is what is. The market [miners/investors/adopters] define what "should" be.

Any other way of looking at this leads to the possibility of legal tender laws where you force people to accept something they don't want. That is directly opposite of free market. The thinking and force behind those laws are proximately behind the situation leading us to be interested in bitcoins as an alternative to their fiat currency!

I think with e-Commerce, the benefit of taking a BTC is not the profit initially.  I think if anything, you could and maybe should take a little hit price wise, to both give people incentive to get into Bitcoin and use it in a legitimate way, and then of course the word of mouth from that alone should overall be beneficially to your store in the long run.

I hope others can chime in with some thoughts on this, as proven by my sig I am going a different route

However I am more and more getting interested in other aspects.  Like graphic design, I almost want to help the community a little by doing some start up websites logo or something simple, because I notice a lot of people have their heart in their work, but that doesn't mean poop to Joe A Websitevisitor.  I am finding it hard to think of a proper pricing structure myself with that.  I might go with 'for tips'

Back to your e-Commerce though, maybe do something the market hasn't seen before.  Go by the average of whatever the set price of the top 5 markets is on Sunday midnight.  Then for the week make that the "Bitcoin Price" of course if/when the price goes to whatever is opposite of what would be more positive for the customer, take that hit.  It will act as a built in coupon.  Just have a limit that the coupon can't be more than $5-10 or something.   Seems wordy and hard to explain, but I would argue that the Bitcoin customer is a little smarter and maybe would appreciate such a deal.

Just tossing out ideas.

That's a very important question, and I'm sure a lot of people wonder that.

In gold rush era, did shovel sellers sell their shovels for 1 gold nugget or 1 USD? Most likely they just accepted both, and the gold nuggets were very cheap (plentiful). As the gold started drying up, the price in gold had to naturally drop, because people just didn't have the money for it.

The same applies here; charge in BTC if that's the economy you want to grow. You'll be forced to change your prices based on how many BTCs are floating around anyway, and you can gauge that based on the exchange rate. Perhaps fixing your price for a month or something, then lowering or raising it for the next month will give start giving the currency a hint of stability. If you think the price for 1 BTC will rise over the month, you will probably be best off undercutting the GBP at the start of the month, and get most of your sales then while it's cheap, and benefit once those BTC are worth more at the end of the month. At the end of the month, when your Tshirts might be considered expensive, you'd naturally get fewer sales, except from those who really have more BTC than they know what to do with.

I understand what you're saying, I mean that it's going to be difficult to discourage speculators until the mining is mostly done, and exchange rates stabilize.

To best find a sustainable model, we can ask: what advantages do bitcoins offer for businesses right now?

The only thing I can think of is people with btc that have nothing to spend them on...everything else is quite unattractive; seedy silk road element, horribly volatile currency exchange, lots of currency speculators not here to spend, only hoard to name a few. The only business I can see anyone paying for right now is security, when everyone is afraid they'll be hacked and lose their BTC before they can save it.

I suppose that's an important start, though...safe BTC is very important to attract business.

I'm starting a t shirt design/printing company in a few months and looking at accepting Bitcoin as payment but I'm also struggling to work out how to tier it, do I have a fixed price ie 1 BTC or do I link it to the £10 GBP price I'll be charging and people will have to pay the fluctuating BTC price?

You're an early adopter of an uncertain new technology that lacks safety, infrastructure, or widespread use. When it has established infrastructure, safety measures that you don't have to worry about, and your average soccer mom is using it, then you're a late adopter.

The bonanza is in mining is over, do not try to trick me into that now low (if any) margin business.

I am after a sustainable model to lure new merchants and discourage speculators.

How to attract male late adopter ?
Easy, show him real tits or promise to show tits a little bit later... Sorry for kidding, but I hope it helps dispel tension.

You're not a late adopter. You're still a very early adopter, considering it's about 25% done of all mining. There will eventually be 3000 microBTC available for every human currently on earth. If you have more then that now, you're richer than average, and consider yourself extremely lucky.

Bitcoins are designed to last potentially hundreds of years as a monetary system, and everyone here will be dead long before they reach stable prices.

Of course, that above figure assumes everyone on earth will be able and willing to trade in BTC...more likely it'll only be about 2-3 billion people max, in which case around 5 mBTC will serve you well. If it remains the domain of nerds geeks and speculators, perhaps only 20M will use it, in which case 10 BTC, mineable in a few weeks/month still on average hardware, will be good times.