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Want to Buy a Good Idea? Neither Do I.

For what it's worth, Dash has existed for roughly 22 months. I pulled historical price data for Bitcoin from Coindesk, and 22 months after Bitcoin's January 2009 release (that would be November 2010), the price of bitcoin was between $0.20 and $0.28. That's right--twenty to twenty-eight cents each.

In my opinion, many of us are expecting too much in terms of price and adoption. I'm sure Satoshi, Finney, and the few others involved in Bitcoin also felt like they were voices crying in the wilderness when their project was only 22 months old.

These things take time. It takes time for people to hear about you, it takes time for people to take you seriously, it takes time to build an ecosystem of exchanges, both DASH/BTC and DASH/Fiat, it takes time to get merchants to acknowledge your existence and eventually accept your currency as a form of payment.

Bitcoin is almost seven years old, and is still at least several years from any sort of mass adoption. Dash is less than two. Buy, sell, or hold, but give the team a chance to build and give the world a chance to hear about you.
 
I am afraid some of you guys are still completely missing my point. Every reference to Bitcoin or how we are better is totally off-message. The average consumer does not care about Bitcoin. Minotaur provided one of the best "tl;dr" summations I could have hoped for:



Most folks in this community (and most posts in this thread) want to promote a message that details how Dash improves crypto-currency - but that argument will not matter one whit until you first convince people that crypto-currency is an improvement over existing payment channels.

I will provide my own answer to how I think we do that in my next post, but before I get to that, I believe it may be necessary to explain why this matters right now. Brevity is not a thing I excel at, so feel free to skip over the rest of this post and on to my next if you just want to get to my point...


Few people work for charity. Dash must be worth something if it is to continue to garner the attention and time-investment of talented developers. We all chant the mantra about focusing on the technical fundamentals and ignoring the price. While there is truth in that, the two things do not have to be mutually exclusive - we can (and must) do both.

As near as I can tell, our market has three basic sources of investment potential:
  1. Tech savvy people who recognize the fundamental merits of what crypto-currency offers. These are the people who do want to buy a good idea.
  2. The pump-and-dump players who are treating crypto-currency markets as their own private online casino.
  3. Everyone else standing on the sidelines, currently ignorant or apathetic to crypto-currency. These are the people I identified as currently holding back their investment because from their perspective, crypto-currency fails to offer any real advantage over established payment mechanisms.

All of us comprise Group (1) and we are the very bedrock of the crypto-currency market, but on any given day, Group (2) provides the lion's share of market volume. One of the most important insights in camosoul's thread is that the current market favors scamcoins - this is a considerable problem for projects like Dash. Any useful coin that eschews the usual pump-and-dump roller-coaster rides in favor of substantive innovation fails to attract Group (2) money. Bag-holding scam-cycles are the life-blood of most exchanges, and if you are too busy developing a genuinely useful product to play these scam games, you risk being de-listed due to low trade volume.

This has had a disastrous effect on Dash in recent months. The price has continued to slide downward and even some of the oldest and most loyal among us are beginning to become consumed by Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Make no mistake - this trend absolutely jeopardizes the future of the project ("few people work for charity").

We cannot target our marketing strategies at Group (1) people and hope to counterbalance the ruinous effect of Group (2) schemes. One need only look at Bitcoin to see how vulnerable our own 800-pound-gorilla is to volatility introduced by Group (2). The only path forward is to draw money into our ecosystem from Group (3).

This market is no meritocracy. Earnest effort to develop the very best technical product will provide no guarantee that our project will not wither and die on the vine before it is completed. Every time Dash is converted to BTC or fiat to fund a marketing initiative, we directly contribute to further devaluing Dash and thereby push ourselves deeper down the price-spiral. Considering then how precious our marketing resources are, we need to be absolutely sure we are targeting the right audience with the right message.

I'm virtually positive that this is the direction the core team is heading in. When we made the Dash video (What is Dash?) we discussed all of this, and hence, you can see the "What is Dash" video is definitely targeting the uninitiated. It will be the backbone of everything in the future.

In the mean time, I agree, our price being so stagnant is not good for moral, not good for spending (on marketing, etc) and looks iffy from the "outside". I feel like we're stuck between a rock and a hard place until Evolution is fully revealed. I have no talent in marketing, unfortunately, and we need some good ideas. On the other hand, I think the meetups in Mexico and Florida should be a big help in getting more of group 1 in here. Maybe there are more meetups that can be attended in the mean time. Spreading the word is the best we can do right now.

Or is it? There I go again, speaking in absolutes (all I can think of doing right now is more accurate)
 
For what it's worth, Dash has existed for roughly 22 months. I pulled historical price data for Bitcoin from Coindesk, and 22 months after Bitcoin's January 2009 release (that would be November 2010), the price of bitcoin was between $0.20 and $0.28. That's right--twenty to twenty-eight cents each.

In my opinion, many of us are expecting too much in terms of price and adoption. I'm sure Satoshi, Finney, and the few others involved in Bitcoin also felt like they were voices crying in the wilderness when their project was only 22 months old.

These things take time. It takes time for people to hear about you, it takes time for people to take you seriously, it takes time to build an ecosystem of exchanges, both DASH/BTC and DASH/Fiat, it takes time to get merchants to acknowledge your existence and eventually accept your currency as a form of payment.

Bitcoin is almost seven years old, and is still at least several years from any sort of mass adoption. Dash is less than two. Buy, sell, or hold, but give the team a chance to build and give the world a chance to hear about you.
I believe you're seeing half of the picture.

Bitcoin's adoption has stagnated because it has stagnated in development. No one wants to fix what's wrong with it. Most people barely understand it, much less realize it needs fixing. But retail doesn't like it for a reason. The clusterfuck band-aid of Bitcoin ATMs is proof of why BTC's adoption isn't, ever, going to go any further than it already has. We'd be scanning Bitcoin QR codes to buy stuff at Wal Mart if it were instant and locked like dollars in the cash drawer. But it's not. Since they refuse to move forward and fix that defect, adoption stands as far as it can go. Someone is going to fill that void. It's only a matter of time...

Most people using any form of BTC or it's clones, barely has any idea how it works. Most still think it's anon money for teh drugs. They want that to be true so bad that they're never going to listen.

DASH's ability to cross the retail bridge is really all it has going for it as far as mass adoption goes. Stupid people view learning as a form of corporal punishment. We can't flog them into using DASH. We need carrot not stick. Bait. A reason they already want. Most people are just fine with guvpaper and banks. So, we're left with a segment of people who understand crypto, that it's broken, and that DASH is the fix. Which are people who are already here...

Sprinkle tastier bait near and around the places where they already do the money. A sign at the Point of Sale. Get it there by making it cost the retailer nothing, and guaranteeing the payments. There were gas stations already interested, but nobody could Point of Sale Bitcoin, the same problem it has always had; Bitcoin is immune to retail. DASH is not. Capitalize on what DASH can do, not fighting the same old battle that doesn't need to be fought and can't be won anyway... We've watched Bitcoin fail to make the move and stagnate, now relying on advertising to pump the price. Use what Evan gave us. Do something different because we can! Do what Bitcoin and it's clones cannot because they have chain-synchronous payments, the rest will fall into place. DASH has chain-asynchronous payments. Use it!

It's weird.It's like we believe init, but then keep trodding the same old path that doesn't work. Do you really believe that DAHS's advanced features make a difference? When why do we not even talk about doing anything with it? Why do we talk about the same old crap that doesn't work? It's like watching other people pay rent, rack up debt, etc, and then mimic that? Hello? It's stupid and doesn't work, why mimic it? Why are we even talking about "what other coins do" when it clearly doesn't work for them?

This is about actions.

Have a system already in place that they can use. Don't talk about how bright the future is going to be, if only adoption... Duh. Remove all barriers because we can. Regardles of which coin they're bagholding, it's as fast as shapeshift.io to experience something that actually works in real life! Adoption has appeared as a chicken or the egg paradox because that is how it has been not handled so far. It's not. Put the chicken and the egg out there at the same time. Who would use Debit Cards if there were no place to swipe them? Complain about the adoption paradox?

I still say gas stations are the way to go. They already tried and failed with Bitcoin. Pick up that lead and run with it. Because DASH can what Bitcoin can't. You don't have to worry about downward sell pressure from the retailers cashing out, because someone had to buy in in the first place in order for that to even happen, right? It's a neutral at worst.
 
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I think the most likely candidate to help with adoption by "normal" people is Open Bazaar.
A spam bot necro-ed this thread, but It was a nice time capsule from which I can make a good point.

Note the above quote.
I think the most likely candidate to help with adoption by "normal" people is [something normal people don't do, don't want to learn how to do, don't want to fool with, and it actually makes their live more complicated and more difficult so it's never going to happen]
FTFY
If you want adoption by normal people, then you need to be usable where normal people are already using their money daily.

You cannot control the herd.

DASH has followed the rest of Cryptosphere's lead and disappeared up it's own butt.

Who cares what "the market" wants? What's the market? A bunch of ponzi/tupil traders playing with their digital Ouija Boards who have zero use for any of DASH's innovations. Why would you give a crap what people like that want, when the whole purpose of DASH is to do something entirely not at all that?

You keep creating a bunch of new fancy crap. But you have no bridge to reality. You have no bridge to the way things are done now. You have no bridge to the people who will never be able to code for some gay platform thing.

You want the people who are swiping a card to buy groceries and put gas in their cars. Yet you have not only done nothing to be useful to these people, you are deliberately ostracizing them. As if Crypto et al hasn't already done a great job of that... You've let yourselves get sucked into the cryptosphere. The whole purpose of DASH was to reach outside of the cryptosphere. Through this failure, DASH has abandoned it's own purpose.

The best marketing/advertising you'll ever get is "DASH accepted here" at the POS terminal. After the shitshow that crypto has made of itself, it's the only thing that's going to work. Put up or shut up. You do pretty much anything else and you're just throwing money away.

5 years ago I could get you to talk about it. Now, you just look at me like I'm an idiot because you're so brainwashed by the leftist echo chamber of the get-rich-quick tulip/ponzi cryptosphere, you don't have a clue what reality is or how to interface with it anymore...
 
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I think the MNs should provide services and an open API that is platform agnostic and compatible, thus allowing other crypto systems to equally support those products and services.
 
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