Topic: What do we need to do to take the Bitcoin mainstream? (Read 967 times)

Is bitcoin not mainstream yet? We see it on tv shows and talk shows and on the billboards and on the side of buses and on nascar race cars and you say it is not mainstream yet?
What do you want all countries to stop using their own currency and start using bitcoin instead? We are mainstream already I believe.

The author I guess is referring to placing bitcoin into the mainstream in a much wider scope and not only in selected areas. Though somehow bitcoin is in the mainstream in few countries but only a small population is using it. Bitcoin needs more push to bring bitcoin into the masses and it has already started. The year 2017 will be the best year for bitcoin as promotions and movement towards bitcoin is not becoming visible to the public eye.

it's already mainstream

in switzerland the government accept up to 200 swiss franc worth of bitcoin

As soon as people start buying coffees and pumping gas with Bitcoin with a smartphone app - and then people would really want to start doing jobs or gigs for BTC with other on-demand apps accepting BTC. We're getting closer and closer to that with all of these BTC apps nowadays. SegWit would be a huge step in the right direction for that.

Maybe go print plenty of paper wallets and give them away? People probably wouldn't bother learning about bitcoin unless they know someone earning out of it. If you walk them through the process and they see the money (however small it is) deposited in their wallet and you show them how to send or cash it out, they may be more inclined to use it.

it doesnt need to be expensive to 'get together' start local as a 'meetup'.
arrange to all meet at a cafe/bar a certain day/time each week or month.
usually you may only see 5-15 turn up. so no costs. its just a few guys siting in a cafe/bar drinking their own drinks

learn what local skills locals interested in bitcoin have. start discussing what local shops the majority all use, to se the most popular choices you all would want to see accept bitcoin and plan on what to do to help get local stores to accept bitcoin.

this may as simple as where a bitcoin buyer sets up a fiat bartab with the store. and then gives the store a QR code.. then any customer asking to pay with bitcoins can be shown the qr code. the shop worker just checks a phone browsers bookmarked link of a blockexplorer to see if funds arrive.. and then the store manager takes the cash amount out of the bartab.
(that has been found to be the easiest intro to offer to a business to try out bitcoin acceptance risk free)

usually good practice to ask the cafe/bar you intend to use regularly for meetups to try out showing qr code and checking blockexplorer when their customers ask to pay with bitcoin. it hones your confidence and experience of asking a business to accept bitcoin. while helping the bitcoin buyer have a regular bitcoin income. and getting your first local merchant to accept bitcoin.. (then let it grow from there)

as things grow and more turn up. say 15-50 find another venue that can cater to the amount if the cafe/bar cant cope. some have found they simply ask the bar what day is their slowest/lowest occupancy, meaning more room for bitcoiners if there are less random people there. and arrange the meetups for that day. thus not putting a strain on the bar.

if 50-100 want to turn up then set up an attendance fee of say 100th of the room hire
usually you can hire a room with capacity for 100 for under $100 for a couple hours($1 per attendee) and less for the rom hire/attendees ticket in developing countries. in short split the cost

once things start getting bigger and you want to invite international spokes people to attend. then make the attendance fee (ticket price) equate the cost of hiring the even larger venue for the day.

Getting together sound quite easy but it will require some expenses, and there will be nothing rewarding for anyone to just host bitcoin conference in their area. We are only having fewer conference by some big bitcoin related media outlets which are trying to gain some popularity among investors so they can get advertisers for their outlets.

Bitcoin will go to mainstream without any advertising, many people soon gonna realize the potentiality of bitcoin transactions and demonetization along with infinite inflation of cash will force many investors towards bitcoin.

To reach a respective number of users it takes lot and lot time, alternately to go mainstream technology advancement is a must. Now the latest segwit have reached around 30-40% with the same blocksize, continuously reaching 100% we can expect this to be around 25% of bitcoin getting mainstreamed

Op I don't think you have any idea of Bitcoin, you just seem like a guy who brought Bitcoin because it was to go up, and now it's kind of slow rising you want to arrange a meeting to make it reach 2k. I think for a meeting we need to have one person who actually is the voice of Bitcoin people, and that's very difficult Firstly. Secondly the miners and development are the main people who can actually get Bitcoins moving. Currently Bitcoin is rising in its popularity, as schools, cabs, mall and etc are using Bitcoins. I don't feel there any further need to do anything, except to try and reduce transactions time.

you had a point right upto the "compete with visa"
that last 3 words is the nuclear bomb of the last 2 years drama.

many centralists say that by midnight of any given day bitcoin needs to beat visa. the only route is permissioned contracts looped through commercial hubs managing those contracts to keep costs low.

where as logical rational people see and know we do not have 900million users today. the visa debate is not a debate of today. its a slow and rational natural growth towards, which should be a long term 20-30year goal. not an overnight leap.

yet we have the centralists who want permissioned commercialised hub services (pretty much what visa/paypal do anyway, meaning no benefit) to be the solution because they shout out visa by midnight, now now now. while halting and hindering dynamic blocks because dynamic blocks wont scale to visa levels by midnight..

then we have the diverse dcentalised community wanting dynamic natural growth scaling where nodes decide what they can handle and grow at a natural pace nodes can handle. which allows slow, risk adverse scaling.. which means visa in the next 30 years.

logically we wont have visa overnight. and logically stopping natural dynamic scaling out of fears of overnight scaling are silly. but it just ends up as a fight between pushing for or against commercialised hubs.

satoshi roundtable 2017
majority blockstream and the corporate bankers who all love hyperledger

What BTC need to go mainstream is unity, the house divided against itself will not stand, there are some people that want to reap where they did not sow and this is hurting BTC. The issue of scaling needs to be resolved soon and be able to compete with Visa.

Unfortunately bitcoin is not meant for mainstream by the looks of it, ever since Satoshi left the community to themselves they are divided and hostile, trying to sabotage each other not knowing it's hurting the system, atleast another 10 years is needed because without a strong community everything we do is futile, governments and their central banks are too powerful for a community of less than a million people.

We already have these meetings, but it is on invite only and then the participants can talk about the meeting, but they are not allowed to identify the persons behind the talks, and what they said. We only need the secret hand shakes and then we are ready to turn this into some secret underground frat party for the "in crowd" ^hmmmmm^

They only invite the influential people they can use, not the people who make up the network of users who use the technology.

cores change from reactive fee estimates to average fee estimates has caused a rise in fee's subtly.

when proposing segwit they mentioned 'fee discount' as a bribe.
the issue is the discount does not return fee's back down to 2009-2014 levels. instead even the discount if activated today will just backdate the fee's by a couple months.. and then the fee average estimate will grow again.

inshort segwit fee bribe is a temporary gesture. not a long term and definitely not a permanent fix.

secondly core want to add extra bytes later on to tx's so that the fee per tx grows faster.

we need to concentrate on long term solutions of lean tx's and proper onchain scaling.. not the temporary gesture of segwit.

It's well on its way Mainstream, the issue is the Majority of People are *ahem* less than interested in Crypto-Currencies.

You have people like Richard Branson and Bill Gates saying good things about Bitcoin, so it's definitely out there.

What's the Bitcoin paradigm?

The two ideas below, alone keep Bitcoin from gaining faster adoption. Businesses won't get on board because of the currency risk. Full stop. People can be educated through their network of friends and family or through their local and National economy.


We've seen a stable period after this recent run-up. This bodes well for future business adoption, let's see if we can maintain some stability for 6 months.

Another angle fir businesses is if the see the low inflation risk benefit. This makes bitcoin advantageous for store of value, thereby opening them to accept it as payment because they want to maintain a portion of retained earnings in the currency.

I think OP just got franked when will people start using green energy, solar energy? when fossil energy resources diminish and technology needed is not so expensive and is mass produced.

When did computers, smart phones become mainstream? when companies started to manufacture micro processors and chips and when it was convenient for people because they had the potentials of making their lives much better and easier.

From more than 7B people if 200M decide to test bitcoin for a while to see if they like it or not, what happens if every second 20k transactions broadcast into the network? I know the network get jammed.

What happens if hashrate multiplies 3 times in matter of a week? do you think price has the flexibility to follow or market just cripples itself?

Do you think someone with $400M will ever take the risk even if it's 1% drop in value which would be $4M loss to him? while we've had 20% decrease of value and even greater %s.

One of the easiest ways to allow bitcoin to be able to become mainstream is as follows.
1) Let the transaction fees fall by allowing segwit to activate.
2) Bitcoin must become less volatile for people to actually accept that as people don't want to have $100 one day and $50 the next and so on.
3) Big stores are going to have to start accepting it as no one is just going to use it for the shits and giggles.
4) Educate people on it; as the only thing people really know about bitcoin is that it was used in Silkroad the drug website, which is something that scares people horrifically.

1. do not have the aim of your "meetings" just to gather 'investors' with the only goal to push bitcoin to $2k by january 2018..

2. to take bitcoin mainstream. requires
a) get core to release their barbaric hindering of growth by delaying onchain scaling, and instead get real scaling happening rather than their centralised commercial services due to onchain hindered scaling which they are causing.
b) make bitcoin as easy to use and secure to use as a NFC smart watch that only sends out public data (public keys and signed tx's), not private keys
c) remember bitcoin is just code it has no legs to walk up to merchants/shops. has no voice to talk to merchants/shops. PEOPLE need to get involved
d) do not expect rich investors to fly to your local town to get your local shop to accept bitcoin. if YOU want your local shop to accept bitcoin YOU ask for it.
e) if everyone follows point (d) then everyone can help get bitcoin more mainstream in their own area

3) to summarise points 1 and 2. concentrate on letting bitcoin grow. rather than the short term greedy mindset of price spikes and pump and dumps