Lets talk about public education of Dash, seriously.

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TheDashGuy

TheDashGuy

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So let me just start off by saying this is by no means a complaint thread of me trying to call anyone out on anything, just more of my opinion on the current state of things.

Subject: Just to keep things simple; in basic terms I'm talking about how we approach the concept/subject of educating people about Dash.

Q: I believe we can do ALOT more with very minimal effort and really ramp this thing up, so why are we tip toeing around the subject of educating non crypto folks about the realities/benefits of Dash? Why do I keep getting a "wait for it" attitude? Why is there no newbies guide to Dash stickied in the reddit? Why do we not have massive grassroots campaign like Bernie promoting the benefits of what Dash offers? Why do we spend all this money on conferences to educate people, but we are even giving them a proper on-boarding? We make Dash sound like the nerds crypto, because lets face it, you HAVE to do your own research to really understand Dash, which means our current content is not enough, it does not go far enough, and funds could be set aside to improve this rather cheaply, as opposed to going big off the bat with large PR companies and such.

My Reasoning: There are so many people in the world, that this idea of waiting until the right time to "educate the public" is insane. Think about how long this process is really going to take.... it's going to take YEARS. I mean Bitcoin has been around for what, 7 years now and barely 1/10 people know what it is, let alone could describe how it works to someone else. We need to step our game up on this end, well before Dash Evolution is ready, because when it's ready, I promise you the research to required to understand Dash will double. And we have yet to fix our current information deficit, so I honestly believe we need to start thinking more about this subject in a serious setting. We need more Amanda's, we need more FAQs to be written, we need more community support and outreach on Reddit and social media, we need more intro videos about Dash, we need more blogs about Dash, we need more helpful atmosphere in general and we definitely do not need to keep waiting to start these projects.

Basically, what i'm saying is, it's going to take us very many years to really get people understand why they need to be using Dash, and if we keep pushing this off and only educating the smart people who do all the research, we'll face many issues in the future. The reason Ethereum, Bitcoin, and so on are so successful beyond the technology, is how the community is approaching education of the public, and we are being rather unfair in our expectations of people's time/dedication/computer knowledge and we should lower our expectations and the barrier to entry to Dash.

Aka, if someone only wants to use Dash because its anonymous and they want to bet online, they need an avenue to do this without spending weeks reading up on Dash and cryptocurrency and blockchains and wallet security and so on.... we need to make it EASIER THAN SIGNING UP FOR PAYPAL.... if we hope to beat paypal, user experience is KEY to success.

So I challenge everyone to adjust your attitude on these individuals and do your best to help people find out about Dash, we need to pull out our inner children and get excited about Dash!

I hope that made sense, and I don't mean to be a drag, I absolutely love this community and just want to see it grow.
 
I agree, educating the betting community would be a good target audience. And sorry to repeat myself but I also think precious metal stackers and preppers are also good targets.
 
(Commented in Slack, expounding here)

I think the team is waiting until Dash is more developed before marketing it hard to outsiders. Right now we are the best solution in crypto...but for most people, crypto is pointless at best. Yes, it offers advantages, but the learning curve is incredibly steep and it's easy for us to forget that. It took me 2-3 months of constant forum reading/posting before I became really comfortable with everything.

Consider it from your grandmother's perspective. She has a laptop that she uses for Facebook and email, and occasionally uses a PayPal account to send money to her grandkids and sometimes uses Amazon for stuff that's not in her local supermarket.

She's probably not really comfortable doing too many new things with technology. Heck, even someone who is a techno geek may not want to go through all the steps to buy and use Dash:

To Buy:
Create an account on Circle or Coinbase, verify your identity (depending on how much you want to buy), link your bank account, initiate an ACH withdrawal from your bank account, wait 3-5 business days, and now you have bitcoins.

Take your bitcoins, send them to Poloniex, create a market order for Dash, withdraw your Dash to your personal wallet.

Oh wait--we missed a step. Before you do that, you had to create a wallet for yourself. Either:

1) Download dash-qt, sync the blockchain, encrypt your wallet, backup your wallet (including multiple off-site backups if high value)

OR

2) Download Electrum-Dash, follow the steps to set up a new wallet, copy the seed phrase into multiple locations, including off-site (preferably)

Great, now you finally have some Dash in your possession! You can use it at...OK, so right now you can't buy much stuff with it, but you could Shapeshift it back into bitcoin if you want, and use bitcoin to buy a limited array of stuff.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not down on Dash at all. We are the best crypto in existence, and that statement includes Bitcoin. But we have a long way to go in order to get to mass adoption. We have to a) make Dash easier to use, as Evolution will do; and b) build our ecosystem in non-core areas.

We need:
Major, reputable USD/Dash exchanges.
Major, reputable payment processors similar to Bitpay and Coinbase
Services such as purse.io to allow Dash use on sites that don't usually accept Dash
Major vendors accepting Dash
Ease of use (Evolution)
Better laws (less paperwork, headaches, compliance issues)
Time (to build familiarity, undo the "dark web" mentality, etc.)

Before anyone gets discouraged, consider this: our Dash will become drastically more valuable, in time, even if we only attract crypto users and never get a single "mainstream" new user. Think about it: if Dash reaches 10% of Bitcoin's market cap, each coin will be worth $964.*

*if it happened tomorrow. Realistically, due to inflation, if we reached 10% of bitcoin's market cap next year, the price would be $937, or if it took two years, $909.

P.S. It's important that we don't get so caught up in our knowledge and our idealism that we forget what the rest of the world sees. For most people, existing services provide everything they need. They don't care too much about PayPal fees, and they probably don't worry too much about centralization either. They are comfortable dealing with big, reputable corporations and they may not love banks, but neither are they willing to upend their ways of doing things just to avoid them. So what's in it for them? What's the incentive to learn a new technology and change their habits? Our primary selling points would be speed (way faster than ACH or PayPal echeck), security (irreversibility), lower fees (will matter to some people), and ease of use (making it easier to use than PayPal, online billpay etc.)
 
David said:
(Commented in Slack, expounding here)

I think the team is waiting until Dash is more developed before marketing it hard to outsiders. Right now we are the best solution in crypto...but for most people, crypto is pointless at best. Yes, it offers advantages, but the learning curve is incredibly steep and it's easy for us to forget that. It took me 2-3 months of constant forum reading/posting before I became really comfortable with everything.

Consider it from your grandmother's perspective. She has a laptop that she uses for Facebook and email, and occasionally uses a PayPal account to send money to her grandkids and sometimes uses Amazon for stuff that's not in her local supermarket.

She's probably not really comfortable doing too many new things with technology. Heck, even someone who is a techno geek may not want to go through all the steps to buy and use Dash:

To Buy:
Create an account on Circle or Coinbase, verify your identity (depending on how much you want to buy), link your bank account, initiate an ACH withdrawal from your bank account, wait 3-5 business days, and now you have bitcoins.

Take your bitcoins, send them to Poloniex, create a market order for Dash, withdraw your Dash to your personal wallet.

Oh wait--we missed a step. Before you do that, you had to create a wallet for yourself. Either:

1) Download dash-qt, sync the blockchain, encrypt your wallet, backup your wallet (including multiple off-site backups if high value)

OR

2) Download Electrum-Dash, follow the steps to set up a new wallet, copy the seed phrase into multiple locations, including off-site (preferably)

Great, now you finally have some Dash in your possession! You can use it at...OK, so right now you can't buy much stuff with it, but you could Shapeshift it back into bitcoin if you want, and use bitcoin to buy a limited array of stuff.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not down on Dash at all. We are the best crypto in existence, and that statement includes Bitcoin. But we have a long way to go in order to get to mass adoption. We have to a) make Dash easier to use, as Evolution will do; and b) build our ecosystem in non-core areas.

We need:
Major, reputable USD/Dash exchanges.
Major, reputable payment processors similar to Bitpay and Coinbase
Services such as purse.io to allow Dash use on sites that don't usually accept Dash
Major vendors accepting Dash
Ease of use (Evolution)
Better laws (less paperwork, headaches, compliance issues)
Time (to build familiarity, undo the "dark web" mentality, etc.)

Before anyone gets discouraged, consider this: our Dash will become drastically more valuable, in time, even if we only attract crypto users and never get a single "mainstream" new user. Think about it: if Dash reaches 10% of Bitcoin's market cap, each coin will be worth $964.*

*if it happened tomorrow. Realistically, due to inflation, if we reached 10% of bitcoin's market cap next year, the price would be $937, or if it took two years, $909.

P.S. It's important that we don't get so caught up in our knowledge and our idealism that we forget what the rest of the world sees. For most people, existing services provide everything they need. They don't care too much about PayPal fees, and they probably don't worry too much about centralization either. They are comfortable dealing with big, reputable corporations and they may not love banks, but neither are they willing to upend their ways of doing things just to avoid them. So what's in it for them? What's the incentive to learn a new technology and change their habits? Our primary selling points would be speed (way faster than ACH or PayPal echeck), security (irreversibility), lower fees (will matter to some people), and ease of use (making it easier to use than PayPal, online billpay etc.)
Click to expand...

All very fair points.

I guess my main point is, we need to worry about the onboarding processes more, and yes currently they might be more complex than we'd hope, but it's going to take YEARS to educate enough people to take over Bitcoin, and I feel like if we had more than 1 marketing platform "Crypto Geeks", we could hit this stage a lot sooner. I doubt it will have a world changing effect, but we need some experience dealing with people who have no idea what crypto currency is and we need a way to get them from 0 to 100 if you will without expecting them to spend 2 months reading articles.

And just a thought but why do people use paypal, credit cards, banks and so on even though there is very little benefit to doing so? Because they saw a commercial promising 3% cash back, or they want ease of access to their funds, or they want to buy things online and so on and so forth. Nowhere in that statement did I say, they researched how credit cards work, right?

the same needs to one day be true of crypto and Dash specifically, otherwise we have a very long road ahead of us trying to educate everyone to becoming a crypto nerd.

Just my thoughts though, I recognize my priorities are different than everyone elses.
 
David, everything you said is good but forget "better laws" because that's never going to happen. If anything laws will get more restrictive as time goes on. Governments are alwayus behind innovation and once they realize how they can control and limit the crypto world they will do what they can. Government is the enemy.
 
Bugeater said:
David, everything you said is good but forget "better laws" because that's never going to happen. If anything laws will get more restrictive as time goes on. Governments are alwayus behind innovation and once they realize how they can control and limit the crypto world they will do what they can. Government is the enemy.
Click to expand...

Two things:

1) By better laws, I meant more clarity. There are many service providers out there who limit themselves not by what the law says they can't do, but based on how a regulator might interpret existing laws.

2) I also don't think that government is always opposed to innovation. We've seen the U.S. government show great foresight with the development of the internet, in particular, by not crippling it with regulation while it was still being born. Government is hit and miss.
 
I think it's great that TheDashGuy wants to produce introductory material for the general public. It doesn't have to be hard to produce in large quantities. The main thing is that it be enthusiastic, very, very simple, and should not aim to explain much beyond the most basic user level experience of using any cryptocurrency - the idea of wallets, buying from an exchange etc. The main point of this kind of campaign is not really education about the specific benefits of Dash, but more of a brand awareness exercise.

As far as generating an immediate increase in adoption, I think by far the greater "bang for the buck" would come from recognizing that our immediate target market is current Bitcoin users. They already have a perceived need, they don't need to be told the basics, many are unhappy with the current bitterness and uncertainty in the Bitcoin world, and they may be quite unaware of alternatives, thanks to the strict exclusion of posts mentioning alts on forums like Reddit.

If we accept that Bitcoin users are the richest source of potential Dash adopters, the next question is how to get our message to them. I'm not talking about the kind of people who are on Bitcointalk or r/Bitcoin 24/7, but the much larger number of people who have a Bitcoin donation address on their website, and may get a trickle of donations to it, but who are not particularly engaged with the crypto world.

Would it be possible for someone here to write a webscraper that would collect a list of sites that have a Bitcoin address on them? Could that list be used to direct them to a one page Bitcoin vs. Dash comparison, or a YouTube video telling them how to add a Dash address for extra privacy? If they did that, then all those websites would effectively be advertising Dash!
 
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