Photo Gallery
Great photos provided by Rachael who volunteered.
https://rachaelrawsonphotography.pixieset.com/tedxsaltlakecity/
Posted Proposal
https://www.dashcentral.org/p/TEDxSLC2017giveaway
Not all accounting details are 100%, planning to make a couple more edits.
Is it time to take dash mainstream?
Many of us know of TED, TEDx is the independently organized version of TED. With this independence the quality of the events varies from region to region. Having attended TEDxSaltLakeCity twice before I have seen their dedication to the project. I wanted Dash to be the first Crypto Currency to sponsor such an event. TEDx gives you varying degrees of early adopters and people open to new ideas that are willing to pay for a day of inspiration and a glimpse into the possible future. TEDxSaltLakeCity is run as a nonprofit with significant time donations. It has established relationships as several years of successful events have given access greater than the average TEDx. That is why I believe it is a good match for Dash.
If you had asked me a before going to TEDx I would have expected less engagement than we received. One of the primary goals for this TEDxSLC giveaway was to answer some more questions for the community. The following is my account of the Dash event.
VIP Meetup
10 days prior to the event we had the VIP Meet-up in SLC. The 5 of us had some time to mingle with the speakers and organizers. Unfortunately it was limited to about 2 hours so I had prepared to give dash directly via the mobile app however I kept to building interest then and following up at the main TEDx.
Paper Wallets, Fun and more
To give some quick background, for TEDx SaltLakeCity we were originally going to give away some .1 wallets and some .05 however 1000 got printed so we decided to load all wallets with the same amount as separating wallets would have been tricky due to the printing process. Handing people two of something may have implied more value and we could give two to the most interested people. This did change the giveaway from a planned 55 dash to a 50 dash giveaway.
I arrived Friday night to a pre-meetup for the Dash volunteers. There was much discussion on how to load wallets before and at the time. Because there was no script we quickly got to turn the list of addresses into wallet commands on the dash CLI. This proved to be a little trickier as running the send command consecutively leads to too many nested transactions (due to the default change address policy) and the wallet couldn’t do it. . It’s a known issue, and therefore you must use sendmany. After debugging and redoing it we got the wallets loaded. It ended up being a late night waiting for wallets to load. After the event, Rion wrote a little Node.js script to parse the output from paper.dash.org to check the balances of paper wallets. He mentioned that he can take that and extend it so that it can load wallets automatically with an amount determined by the user. This would make future giveaways much easier and automated. Here’s the parsing script he wrote so far: (https://github.com/riongull/paper_wallet_tools).
The Big Day
On the day of the TEDx event, we started setting up the booth at 8:30am and had little time to collect ourselves before people started walking up and engaging. Dash had 6 time slots each up 60 seconds long for the MC to speak. The MC is the announcer or host of the show. In the beginning of the proposal stages I was under the impression that we would have to do visual slides about Dash, however we were able to switch this to the 6 announcements. Rion was integral in getting this information together and he thought a storyline approach would work good. It ended up working very well.
From the 9am to the first coffee/snack break I was watching the show. We gathered a bit more interest for this break, although short. I decided to stay outside and speak to staff or anyone else then to be ready for the lunch rush with a couple of the Dash volunteers’. At the coffee table, I ended up having a long conversation with a guy who worked at the university that had been in the crypto space for a couple years. He was not familiar with Dash as the majority of his time was spent on another crypto but was interested enough to skip part of the show.
Half Time
For lunch we were expecting it to be busy and it was where most of us waited to grab food. A light rain had come over and the tent was used for refuge by people willing to hear our pitch. We continued to give out two wallets each. My estimation we had given out almost half the paper wallets by lunch. Keep in mind as per the script we did not tell anyone outside the staff just how much was given away. Due to how the script ended up being played the announcement that we were giving away around $20k in Dash happened after the lunch.
Between the lunch event and the mid-afternoon break the crowd heard about the 20k and the value of dash. We got stormed at the booth with a big line. I quickly decided to just give out single wallets because at this point we had given out nearly half the wallets and I was worried we might run out. To keep the line moving we just handed them out as fast as people could take them. The majority of this group of people was much more there because they were getting something for free.
Wrapping up
I had expected some opportunity at the end but the booth started getting taken down by the event management staff. At that point everyone was ready to leave so we did not hand out many more Dash after that. Many of the dash volunteers had to leave at that point as well. The rest of us focused on the speaker reception after event downstairs in the venue. I handed out some more paper wallets to interested parties.
At the after party we continued to catch anyone else who was interested in Dash. I decided to add dash to raffle; everyone there was in the raffle as they came with the drink tickets. The other prize was a 2nd VR headset. I offered 10 paper wallets as the prize or roughly $160. I used this time to catch up anyone else who had not received some Dash earlier in the day. I enjoyed seeing a entrepreneur enthusiastically show a financial advisor how to load his Dash on his phone, both whom i had tried to get interested in crypto before, that made my day.
Fund Usage Giveaway Proposal (73 dash)
One of our initial questions was what would the sweep rate be on paper wallet giveaways of a higher amount. From my conversation with coingun who did paper wallets at both the open house and the bitcoin Miami conference saw sweep rates of 30% or below for a value of about $10. I was surprised to learn this considering the tech crowd. After learning this my personal expectations for the sweep rates at this event were lowered. Enough speculation, below is the data from the event.
Unlike the normal printed wallet, we went through the effort of printing instructions on the back of each paper wallet with a small explanation of how to download the android or ios wallet. Without having done this it would have been impossible to explain to people how to do it with the time we had. The instructions also included a date when the paper wallet would “expire”, and that they needed to pull the funds before then. October 1, 2017 was the expiration date (the date we would pull back the funds to use elsewhere).
Giveaway Results
We will be providing a spreadsheet (at request) of all wallet addresses used at the event for anyone who wants to analyze the data further. This data is as of 2018-01-11
Claimed Wallets: 579 57.7%
Unclaimed Wallets: 425 42.3%
Modified (non-0 & non-0.5) Wallets: 2
Claimed Value: 28.95 DASH
Unclaimed Value: 21.25 DASH
These numbers far exceed my original expectations. If you assume that every person who swept a wallet downloaded two we reached at least 300 people. There are instances where families, or husband and wife loaded their paper wallets onto one phone.
We ended the event with 52 paper wallets left. I had 10 to give away to a few people whom I want to get interested in crypto. Rion took the remaining to use at the SLC meetup group. An opportunity arose to give them out at a paid bitcoin investing course. I found that to be a more than acceptable use of funds as I prefer to primarily give out dash at paid events.
Additional Giveways with SLC meetups
0.85 DASH Random give-aways (2017-11-09 through 2017-12-22)
0.11 DASH 2017-12-22 Meetup (paper wallet give-away). Tron gave away most
0.66 DASH Random give-aways (2017-12-22 through 2018-01-11)
The unplanned experiment
With any of these giveaways one question that is always in the back of the mind is will people remember to load the paper wallet? Will they attempt it after the expiration date? Our wallets showed an expiration date of October 1st and the initial plan was to give some leeway to see how many people scan after the date and still get their funds. Rion made a tool to scan the 1000 addresses and would periodically run it to see how many wallets were withdrawn.
As the dash price rose we were able to answer the 2nd question: Will people hear about the price rise, and attempt to scan their paper wallets anyway? The dash price rose over 4x from the giveaway date however we did not see a significant number of new wallets withdrawn, (about 20) after 10-23-17 which was several weeks after the listed “expiration” date. In a giveaway i see no real benefit in leaving funds on the wallets past a month, if a 4-5x price rise was not enough to encourage a few minutes to try it anyway than nothing will be.
Some wallets already lost
From what I heard is some people already changed phones and lost their dash. Part of the problem is with the Android wallet it is a file backup only way to save the wallet which is not as good as the IOS wallet where you are forced to write down the phrase on a paper. My suggestion is all giveaways should have a paper for people to write their recovery phrase on and the android wallet should be changed.
Possible data issues
Upon reviewing the printed paper wallets about 20 had failed to print the top/wallet side, these misprints were randomly mixed into the stack of 1000 cut paper wallets. It’s also possible extra backside pages were printed. In addition the 5% of leftover paper wallets given to non-tedx involved people could skew the acceptance rate slightly. We also reimbursed volunteer tickets $50 x 4 by paper wallets for the additional tickets as the sponsorship came with 10.
Remaining Funds
In the original proposal I suggested all funds would go to Rion and used to support the meetup(or merchant adoption) in SLC. At the time it was the largest meetup group around and it has grown from around 100 to 268 members today. Rion is now in control of the funds as they were pulled from the wallets as of 2-16-2018.
Rion wanted to go further and build a plan called Dash Hive and put funds towards more productive uses. Total funds leftover and allocated to Dash Hive is about 20.37 DASH. Total reclaimed paper wallet dash is 21.3997 out of 50.2 which is slightly more than the spreadsheet results.
Details on dash hive: https://www.dashcentral.org/p/dash-hive
Great photos provided by Rachael who volunteered.
https://rachaelrawsonphotography.pixieset.com/tedxsaltlakecity/
Posted Proposal
https://www.dashcentral.org/p/TEDxSLC2017giveaway
Not all accounting details are 100%, planning to make a couple more edits.
Is it time to take dash mainstream?
Many of us know of TED, TEDx is the independently organized version of TED. With this independence the quality of the events varies from region to region. Having attended TEDxSaltLakeCity twice before I have seen their dedication to the project. I wanted Dash to be the first Crypto Currency to sponsor such an event. TEDx gives you varying degrees of early adopters and people open to new ideas that are willing to pay for a day of inspiration and a glimpse into the possible future. TEDxSaltLakeCity is run as a nonprofit with significant time donations. It has established relationships as several years of successful events have given access greater than the average TEDx. That is why I believe it is a good match for Dash.
If you had asked me a before going to TEDx I would have expected less engagement than we received. One of the primary goals for this TEDxSLC giveaway was to answer some more questions for the community. The following is my account of the Dash event.
VIP Meetup
10 days prior to the event we had the VIP Meet-up in SLC. The 5 of us had some time to mingle with the speakers and organizers. Unfortunately it was limited to about 2 hours so I had prepared to give dash directly via the mobile app however I kept to building interest then and following up at the main TEDx.
Paper Wallets, Fun and more
To give some quick background, for TEDx SaltLakeCity we were originally going to give away some .1 wallets and some .05 however 1000 got printed so we decided to load all wallets with the same amount as separating wallets would have been tricky due to the printing process. Handing people two of something may have implied more value and we could give two to the most interested people. This did change the giveaway from a planned 55 dash to a 50 dash giveaway.
I arrived Friday night to a pre-meetup for the Dash volunteers. There was much discussion on how to load wallets before and at the time. Because there was no script we quickly got to turn the list of addresses into wallet commands on the dash CLI. This proved to be a little trickier as running the send command consecutively leads to too many nested transactions (due to the default change address policy) and the wallet couldn’t do it. . It’s a known issue, and therefore you must use sendmany. After debugging and redoing it we got the wallets loaded. It ended up being a late night waiting for wallets to load. After the event, Rion wrote a little Node.js script to parse the output from paper.dash.org to check the balances of paper wallets. He mentioned that he can take that and extend it so that it can load wallets automatically with an amount determined by the user. This would make future giveaways much easier and automated. Here’s the parsing script he wrote so far: (https://github.com/riongull/paper_wallet_tools).
The Big Day
On the day of the TEDx event, we started setting up the booth at 8:30am and had little time to collect ourselves before people started walking up and engaging. Dash had 6 time slots each up 60 seconds long for the MC to speak. The MC is the announcer or host of the show. In the beginning of the proposal stages I was under the impression that we would have to do visual slides about Dash, however we were able to switch this to the 6 announcements. Rion was integral in getting this information together and he thought a storyline approach would work good. It ended up working very well.
From the 9am to the first coffee/snack break I was watching the show. We gathered a bit more interest for this break, although short. I decided to stay outside and speak to staff or anyone else then to be ready for the lunch rush with a couple of the Dash volunteers’. At the coffee table, I ended up having a long conversation with a guy who worked at the university that had been in the crypto space for a couple years. He was not familiar with Dash as the majority of his time was spent on another crypto but was interested enough to skip part of the show.
Half Time
For lunch we were expecting it to be busy and it was where most of us waited to grab food. A light rain had come over and the tent was used for refuge by people willing to hear our pitch. We continued to give out two wallets each. My estimation we had given out almost half the paper wallets by lunch. Keep in mind as per the script we did not tell anyone outside the staff just how much was given away. Due to how the script ended up being played the announcement that we were giving away around $20k in Dash happened after the lunch.
Between the lunch event and the mid-afternoon break the crowd heard about the 20k and the value of dash. We got stormed at the booth with a big line. I quickly decided to just give out single wallets because at this point we had given out nearly half the wallets and I was worried we might run out. To keep the line moving we just handed them out as fast as people could take them. The majority of this group of people was much more there because they were getting something for free.
Wrapping up
I had expected some opportunity at the end but the booth started getting taken down by the event management staff. At that point everyone was ready to leave so we did not hand out many more Dash after that. Many of the dash volunteers had to leave at that point as well. The rest of us focused on the speaker reception after event downstairs in the venue. I handed out some more paper wallets to interested parties.
At the after party we continued to catch anyone else who was interested in Dash. I decided to add dash to raffle; everyone there was in the raffle as they came with the drink tickets. The other prize was a 2nd VR headset. I offered 10 paper wallets as the prize or roughly $160. I used this time to catch up anyone else who had not received some Dash earlier in the day. I enjoyed seeing a entrepreneur enthusiastically show a financial advisor how to load his Dash on his phone, both whom i had tried to get interested in crypto before, that made my day.
Fund Usage Giveaway Proposal (73 dash)
- -5 Dash for Proposal Fee
- -5 Dash for original Bugged proposal
- The 1st proposal was bugged due to a leading space and was submitted the following month to reimburse the failed proposal. The 2nd proposal did not include a extra 5 dash at the time as i had discussed with core about getting a refund however no core based refund ever taken.
- Expenses Proposal
- Tips for volunteers: 9 dash
- 13 way split based on level of involvement. .25 min. Includes some for the paper wallet work.
- T-shirts (60): $754.70
- Banner: $222.67
- Cards: $10.69
- Printing costs 1000 paper wallets and 2nd and 3rd giveaway: $636.74
- Lodging: My stay & travel expenses in SLC were covered by the original proposal.
- Tips for volunteers: 9 dash
- Giveaways
- 1000 Wallets @ .05 - 50 dash.
- Grand prize (3.3 Dash / ~$1050) Given to winner of the gamify system setup by using the TEDxSLC event app.
- After Party raffle 10 dash wallets or .5 dash.
- Refund for tickets for additional dash volunteers (4). 16 paper wallets.
- Giveaway Total: 53.35 Dash + fees.
- Remaining funds
- See Below.
One of our initial questions was what would the sweep rate be on paper wallet giveaways of a higher amount. From my conversation with coingun who did paper wallets at both the open house and the bitcoin Miami conference saw sweep rates of 30% or below for a value of about $10. I was surprised to learn this considering the tech crowd. After learning this my personal expectations for the sweep rates at this event were lowered. Enough speculation, below is the data from the event.
Unlike the normal printed wallet, we went through the effort of printing instructions on the back of each paper wallet with a small explanation of how to download the android or ios wallet. Without having done this it would have been impossible to explain to people how to do it with the time we had. The instructions also included a date when the paper wallet would “expire”, and that they needed to pull the funds before then. October 1, 2017 was the expiration date (the date we would pull back the funds to use elsewhere).
Giveaway Results
We will be providing a spreadsheet (at request) of all wallet addresses used at the event for anyone who wants to analyze the data further. This data is as of 2018-01-11
Claimed Wallets: 579 57.7%
Unclaimed Wallets: 425 42.3%
Modified (non-0 & non-0.5) Wallets: 2
Claimed Value: 28.95 DASH
Unclaimed Value: 21.25 DASH
These numbers far exceed my original expectations. If you assume that every person who swept a wallet downloaded two we reached at least 300 people. There are instances where families, or husband and wife loaded their paper wallets onto one phone.
We ended the event with 52 paper wallets left. I had 10 to give away to a few people whom I want to get interested in crypto. Rion took the remaining to use at the SLC meetup group. An opportunity arose to give them out at a paid bitcoin investing course. I found that to be a more than acceptable use of funds as I prefer to primarily give out dash at paid events.
Additional Giveways with SLC meetups
0.85 DASH Random give-aways (2017-11-09 through 2017-12-22)
0.11 DASH 2017-12-22 Meetup (paper wallet give-away). Tron gave away most
0.66 DASH Random give-aways (2017-12-22 through 2018-01-11)
The unplanned experiment
With any of these giveaways one question that is always in the back of the mind is will people remember to load the paper wallet? Will they attempt it after the expiration date? Our wallets showed an expiration date of October 1st and the initial plan was to give some leeway to see how many people scan after the date and still get their funds. Rion made a tool to scan the 1000 addresses and would periodically run it to see how many wallets were withdrawn.
As the dash price rose we were able to answer the 2nd question: Will people hear about the price rise, and attempt to scan their paper wallets anyway? The dash price rose over 4x from the giveaway date however we did not see a significant number of new wallets withdrawn, (about 20) after 10-23-17 which was several weeks after the listed “expiration” date. In a giveaway i see no real benefit in leaving funds on the wallets past a month, if a 4-5x price rise was not enough to encourage a few minutes to try it anyway than nothing will be.
Some wallets already lost
From what I heard is some people already changed phones and lost their dash. Part of the problem is with the Android wallet it is a file backup only way to save the wallet which is not as good as the IOS wallet where you are forced to write down the phrase on a paper. My suggestion is all giveaways should have a paper for people to write their recovery phrase on and the android wallet should be changed.
Possible data issues
Upon reviewing the printed paper wallets about 20 had failed to print the top/wallet side, these misprints were randomly mixed into the stack of 1000 cut paper wallets. It’s also possible extra backside pages were printed. In addition the 5% of leftover paper wallets given to non-tedx involved people could skew the acceptance rate slightly. We also reimbursed volunteer tickets $50 x 4 by paper wallets for the additional tickets as the sponsorship came with 10.
Remaining Funds
In the original proposal I suggested all funds would go to Rion and used to support the meetup(or merchant adoption) in SLC. At the time it was the largest meetup group around and it has grown from around 100 to 268 members today. Rion is now in control of the funds as they were pulled from the wallets as of 2-16-2018.
Rion wanted to go further and build a plan called Dash Hive and put funds towards more productive uses. Total funds leftover and allocated to Dash Hive is about 20.37 DASH. Total reclaimed paper wallet dash is 21.3997 out of 50.2 which is slightly more than the spreadsheet results.
Details on dash hive: https://www.dashcentral.org/p/dash-hive
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