I was thinking about how great it would be if Bitcoin were accepted and widely used in a local community. Local purchases would be encouraged and the price would start to be viewed in terms of its own currency as opposed to a conversion of another.
But what would be the ideal location to do this?
Bitcoin reaching critical mass in New Hampshire?
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https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-reaching-critical-mass-in-new-hampshire-66832At Chaos Communications Camp (CCC) 2011 apparently there was a BTC Village
There have been threads discussing where the community might be responsive to using bitcoins:
Bitcoin in Honduras' new charter cities
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https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-in-honduras-new-charter-cities-53990 A "bitcoin ranch":
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https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3713720Mission / San Francisco:
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http://www.thebitcointrader.com/2012/05/bitcoins-hogwarts-san-francisco-tech.htmlAn individual attempt to start community building:
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https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/phoenix-coin-interest-83803Consider how Meze Grill, probably the best known retail merchant to accept bitcoin, didn't even have enough customers wishing to pay using bitcoins that they never even bothered to reinstate a method to accept bitcoins following the MyBitcoin mess. The staff at Whiskey Dicks, the only restaurant in Florida to advertise that they accept bitcoins, doesn't know how to accept bitcoin for payment and can do so only when the owner is around.
A merchant isn't likely to look into adding bitcoins as a payment method until there are guarantees, such as those that come from the business' customers asking if they can pay using bitcoins. In a normal cross section of the population, there generally just isn't a concentration of bitcoiners sufficient to justify the expense to accept bitcoin (in terms of hardware but also for time to train staff, etc.).
Bit-Pay claims to have signed up more than 500+ merchants for its ecommerce payments system. Since these merchants are already receiving bitcoins then they might then also want to start using bitcoins to pay their labor force and their supply chain rather than converting to dollars (or whatever currency they use) first, like they generally do now. It is when this extension up the supply chain starts to happen that the Bitcoin economy can enjoy a network effect. With most supply chains being global nowadays, using bitcoin throughout the supply chain even doesn't really do much for trying to get a local community to adopt bitcoin. But it might give an indication of where, when they start to occur organically, they might begin to appear first.