Alright ladies and gentlemen, what’s the game plan? Our objective is simple: get as many people trading on B&C exchange as humanly possible.
I’m talking preschoolers with tablets in hand learning about B&C before they learn the alphabet. I’m talking triple A director movie about B&C e.g. ‘The Social Network’.
How do we make this happen?
QUESTIONS:
Will any of the development fund be available for marketing purposes?
What is the best avenue to get Bitcoin users to know about B&C’s existence, and the fact that they are B&C shareholders if they hold onto Bitcoin at a certain date?
Will the official B&C exchange site have a countdown similar to the NuBits pre-launch one? I remember that generating a fair amount of hype.
What will be B&C’s most common criticism, and how will be respond? Never forget what those sniveling rats arrI-I mean Bitshares users did to attack NuBits in the beginning.
I just wanted to get an idea of what people think we should do to market B&C, post your thoughts!
The simplicity of use and the safety of funds would be the winner cards. Those should be advertized first. If people find this just a little bit complicated or unsafe, B&C would die quickly!
What good is a fork on a block number if you can’t be sure of a vast majority doing the switch?
Seeing the slow update of minters to 4.x is a pain (currently at block 403,256 it’s 44.2% that vote for protocol 4.0), but at least the threshold of 90% makes sure the network is safe and sound after the switch.
I’m currently a contributor on the project for a small number of hours. Right now, my primary tasks are monitoring/updating the Bitcointalk thread, and running a set Twitter posting schedule I developed. The Twitter schedule was broken down into five strategic goals, with various messaging supporting these goals occurring on different days. For example, here is a page from the playbook showing our “Feature Focus” tweets that support our goal of providing education on B&C Exchange features: http://i.imgur.com/xTAkNCn.png
I plan to continue providing updates to Bitcointalk and Twitter, especially now that the pace of development has increased. There isn’t much of a marketing budget beyond this right now, because our limited development funds must be prioritized for features that improve the exchange. Given the choice between creating an infographic video or completing a web UI for the exchange, most shareholders will prefer the latter option.
The one activity I plan on completing soon is quantitative analysis of the decentralized exchange space, namely running a few different marketing engineering analyses (such as conjoint analysis and positioning) to better identify our target segments. The results of those surveys will inform B&C Exchange’s social media messaging, as well as its eventual full-scale trading website. I hope that these efforts will answer your next question about the best ways to publicize B&C to Bitcoin users.
I agree that the NuBits countdown was successful in driving substantial website traffic. Once a more concrete date is set, I’ll look into adding a countdown timer.
Assuming the exchange works as expected, I think there will be two criticisms:
The trading speed is slower than centralized exchanges. The response will be to point out that we are not marketing our product to high-frequency micro trades and that B&C prioritizes safety over speed. We can also point out that as blockchain technology advances, our trading times can speed up too. BitShares users will undoubtedly throw out their NASDAQ comparisons (“our platform is faster than the NASDAQ!”), but that’s simply not true, not to mention they use artificial proxy assets that are inferior to native assets. It’s quicker for me to mail someone $50,000 in monopoly money (that I promise can be redeemed by a local monopoly enthusiast for $50,000 US) than executing a wire transfer through a bank, but I’m sure most people would prefer receiving $50,000 US in legal tender. Redemption counterparty risk is a real problem that B&C Exchange avoids.
The signers might steal funds. The response will be to point out that centralized exchanges are effectively 1-of-1 multisig, often with unknown operators (such as BTC-e). B&C Exchange will have 6+ signers required, all of whom have built reputations for honesty in cryptocurrency communities. The longer B&C Exchange operates without a theft, the less effective this attack vector will be.
One feature that I hope is prioritized is an automatic BlockCredit (BKC) transaction fee. So, if I wanted to trade 100 NBT, I could “pay” a 1.00 NBT transaction fee. A conversion from 1.00 NBT to 1.00 BKC would occur behind the scenes; either by purchasing 1.00 BKC from a B&C Exchange custodian, or else using an external service like ShapeShift. This will be a key aspect of improving the simplicity of user experiences, along with an intuitive and attractive web UI.
Long story short: all BlockShareholders should be marketing the exchange in the external communities they are active in. My goal is to provide strategic messaging that everyone can use to convey the benefits of B&C Exchange to our target users.
