I don't understand how people still get excited over a new alt-coin that does not offer anything new. Apparently most people think "new" means simply switching the block time and hashing algo, and all of a sudden you have "innovation". Out of hundreds of cryptocurrencies, there are only a handful that actually offer anything new, and maxcoin is not one of them.
Although, I suppose if I had a huge collection of GPUs, I'd be excited to make $k's of cash every time a new coin came out so I could mine and dump immediately... a sobering reminder that most miners don't care if they are securing the network, only that they are lining their pockets.
Which does bring me to my point - we need to market to a slightly different demographic. Marketing to those already invest in PoW coins is an inefficient use of resources, because if they can't mine it, they are not interested. Of course there are always exceptions, but if the accusations of "nxt is pre-mined!" are any indicator, most of the complaints are in-fact from miners. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to convert those invested in bitcoin and clones (we should, and we already are with LTB), but they should not be our main focus.
We need to be attracting people who are actually interested in innovation and smart investments. This means our focus is not on the majority of the cryptocurrency crowd, but on tech and business oriented people (Forbes, IEEE, universities, etc). We just have to present NXT in a manner that is easy to understand and why it completely blows all other coins out of the water. Right now is not quite the right time, but when nexern releases his client (along with the AE), we should have a very simple to install client as well as be able to show off the power of decentralized exchanges. We should not market to raise the price of NXT, but market to recruit talent and smart investors that will contribute (and not just ride the wave) to the NXT ecosystem. The price will rise as a side effect of the cumulative contribution. NXT is the only cryptocurrency platform that allows an exponentially growing ecosystem due to BCNext's decentralized vision - the rest of the coins are limited to what their developers can put out - NXT is unlimited.
Cryptocurrency crowd + tech / money people + ?
Who is / should be our target audience? Please
comment and discuss.
Just want to catch on the discussion we had this afternoon about features and target audience for nxt.
1. (Possible) Features:
- TF for instant transactions
- TF + punishment against 50% attacks (correct?)
- no bloated blockchain
- energy friendly crypto
- mobile friendly crypto
- easy to add new features
- many many TPS
- parallel blockchains
- blockchain shrinking
- decentralized exchange
- colored coins
- decentralized voting/opiniongrabber
- decentralized AM (data storage, link storage (eg torrents), encrypted messaging, ...)
- dividend payouts (all fees per block) for everyone instead of mining of the few with lots of power
- Turing capability
- smart contracts
- anonymous transactions
- SMS gateway
2.Today it was clear that the nxt community isn't sure yet, which features are the most important ones, which could be ignored in favor of other features (some exclude each other), and who the target audience is. Would it be easier if we knew plan 2 and 3 from BCNext? I don't know. But regardless of BCNext's plans, we should discuss this topic in the community: which is our target audience now, next months and in one year? Does this depend on the features we implement or does the features depend on the audience we want to tackle? The answer is clear (or is nxt just fundamental research?) That's why we should discuss this.
...
Business people, developers, entrepreneurs, academics, marketers, philosophers, etc. People who can see raw potential, and do something about it. It's not a matter of IQ, but the willingness of that person to actually positively contribute. And these efforts can be profitable, they just take more effort than sitting back and pointing your computer in a certain direction. For example, I'm not particularly smart, but I do have a few ideas that I am coordinating with a friend that hopefully will be of use when AE is implemented. I also volunteer to edit papers, articles, etc.
So basically what I am saying is that, in the short-run, we need to be focusing our marketing efforts on getting doers on-board. I think we can all agree that users right now can't do much with NXT, so marketing to the Average Joe at this time will only serve to temporarily increase the market value, but not add any real substance behind NXT. Of course, for people to make services, people have to use those services, so that's why I said we should not completely ignore this segment of the market. I don't know the ideal split of our marketing focus, but something like 75% towards doers and 25% towards users. Can you imagine if all the features on the list were completed right now? The price would be through the roof in an instant. That will be us in the future, but we need a strong community to get us there first.
My viewpoint is actually quite similar to jl777's, we should do everything because we can - we're decentralized. We just have to get more people on-board that are capable of doing these things in the first place. With all the bounties he is handing out (I lost count), we simply have to spread awareness to the correct demographics, and we'll have people interested in innovating. And the best part is that all this stuff can be developed in parallel to the main core development, so that's a huge advantage as well.
I agree, we need articles/theses/dissertations first. It would be fantastic, if you wrote a letter - an invitation to Nxt for those people - academics, philosophers, developers, entrepreneurs... Sending the letter to 1.000 universities would be easy for me, I just need a letter
