Marketing for btc integration

Thanks to @shruti , we have an open letter as marketing for btc-integration!! Many more such things to come for IC on IC.

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I don’t think talking to the Bitcoin community in such patronising terms is going to work at all. Also, it is ‘stores-of-value’, not ‘store-of-values’. And no, stores-of-value do not need to be spent, they can be preserved for a long time and then sold when necessary or sufficiently profitable. Gold is often handed down for generations without any ‘use’. Finally, the analogy is pretty inaccurate: I don’t see how the internet was good for the postal service, any more than the internal combustion engine was good for horse carriages.
Of course Dominic Williams re-tweeted this, testifying once more to Dfinity’s tone-deafness. Now, I need to spend half an hour on the Cardano forum, which always revitalises my faith in ICP.

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I was chatting to a BTC maximalist who wasn’t impressed about the ICP native integration because he correctly assumed that while it is indeed decentralized we would need to rely on the security properties of the IC and the IC smart contracts involved.

We need to really have a big game plan to market this properly. Can’t find Eva’s name with @ sign but perhaps someone can flag this to her. I think if we don’t market the BTC integration WITHIN the BTC communities then we are at risk it is ignored or dismissed. We need the less fundamentalist maxis to take notice. For example, why isn’t someone from Dfinity presenting at BTC conferences?

Just want to flag that we really do need to shout from the rooftops about this. And I am wondering if that is only going to happen after the mainnet integration or if now is the time…

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fwiw I have just flagged this to her.

Gold has plenty of use, always had since it was first discovered by mankind and nowadays more than ever being used in electronics. A store of value which only value is “price go up” doesn’t have much value at all.

Thanks, @diegop.

This is a community driven approach to marketing the btc-integration (as distinguished from advertising mentioned by @paulyoung in Marketing Ideas). We are simply EXCITED about sharing the news!

The demand for this marketing is so strong…take comments from @shruti tweet…
“I want a t-shirt with this picture on the front”
“I am stealing this if you don’t mind”

As @Denis points out, we might antagonize some of bitcoin maximalists. We may not have the terminology just right.

But fundamentally as ICP fans, i think we really really need to get the news out there front-running everything else (the nuances, analogies, spelling mistakes notwithstanding). The btc-integration IS WORKING! Why not let the world know. There is, currently, a significant gap between the vodoo of cryptography in ICP and the layman’s understanding. Who do you think understands (or cares to understand) ECSDA or tECSDA?

I would love for the foundation to jump in and help. For example, can we have a ready-made deck to help give the complete pitch on IC & IC governance? How about a complete deck on SNS? Community Fund? These decks could be used in community driven camps for advertising(as opposed to marketing).

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I believe that the original poster’s comment(which i quoted here) on reddit was his/her indgnation to some r/bitcoin mods calling icp a “s…t coin”. So it was a tongue-in-cheek comment; be it be patronizing or not.

BTC is better than gold. Otherwise why bother?

Your other comments : "stores-of value and analogies is exactly why we need/have a community.

I agree with @dfisher that most BTC maximalists won’t trust the integration unless they already trust the IC.

Perhaps the best marketing tool is a viral game that lets users deposit and earn BTC in a completely trustless way. Something social and easy to understand like Wordle―but using real BTC (not even ckBTC).

It would be a prime candidate for hacks. If the game can survive for a few months, then that would put a lot of trust in IC technology IMO.

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I think one of the biggest concerns for skeptics is even if the underlying tech is secure, once the chain holds enough value in BTC, nodes might collude and steal them.

I mean that’s not even remotely possible so why is that a concern?

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So the argument is that IC is NOT decentralized enough from a node provider’s standpoint AFTER it reaches a threshold value of BTC in the chain (in our case one subnet)?

I think that it is , completely a reasonable thing to think about from a Btcmaxi standpoint. I think that we should be addressing that upfront with numbers. As an example, if we have 35 nodes provided by 5 centralized providers, then the cost to buy 3 of those centralized providers may provide the maximum threshold on the amount of btc to hold on that subnet. Or something like that.

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Once the providers decide to collude, what exactly do they have to do to steal the bitcoin?

@Zane , never said gold did not have any uses, of course it does. What I said was that it is often handed down across generations without being used, which is just a fact, and proves that stores-of-value do not need to be used or spent. The marketing message says, “But really all store-of-values (sic) need to be spent”. This is simply untrue and almost guaranteed to get the Bitcoin gang to dismiss everything that comes after.

I agree that " all stores-of-value need to be spent" is an overgeneralization.

That said, BTC is better than gold in many respects; in particular it’s almost infinite (as compared to gold) divisibility & the ability to store and transport it almost effortlessly.

I would say that BTC as a store-of-value is meant to be used/spent. The verb “spend” is used , most often , to describe the end of an item ( i spent 1$ to buy ice-cream)…but it can also be used to gain something which can later transfered back into btc. For example, i spent 1 btc to provide liquidity for an insurance provider which may return me 10% return (1.1 BTC).

TBH, when i was thinking about “spend”, i was thinking about end of item. My post-facto pseudo defense is after i saw how your point might be valid to btc maxis.

On DFINITY’s side of things, they shouldn’t really focus on marketing until the product is fully ready to go, to have a product to showcase to everyone rather than showcasing a testnet environment. This is why I’m not really bothered much by any lack of marketing efforts for now.

Hi everyone, this is Eva from Dfinity - love the conversations you’re having! :slight_smile:
Let me read through everything carefully and then get back to you. In short, at the current stage, we mainly focus on bringing new devs in. @CarstenJ is currently testing the dev onboarding UX. Bigger campaign is planned when CKBTC is live and we can showcase the full potential

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@saone-pt in addition to Dfinity presenting at BTC conferences another thought I had was Dom personally reaching out to major BTC mainstream cultural heavy weights.

For example, Dom should personally reach out to Michael Saylor, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen (he is an investor), Chris Dixon, Katie Haun etc etc. and get them to understand how important this is. All people like that have massive platforms and are trusted by a wide audience so I think it would go a long way.

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Thanks everyone for the valuable discussion which has thrown some great ideas on how to create a marketing plan for the BTC integration for the community as well as for Dfinity. I appreciate the feedback on wordings and will keep them in mind for the future! The idea behind this was to take @mparikh’s idea to life - which we managed to do in a small but meaningful way. As mentioned by him if don’t get into exact semantics (which may never be perfect!) but the objective of spreading the excitement of the integration, we’ll definitely get some influencers, developers, users to take notice! I am throwing my hat in as the go-to person in the community for marketing the BTC integration - next, I will be work on a simple to understand presentation (as suggested in earlier comments) to start with. I will share it here for your valuable feedback before floating it anywhere! Please hit me up if someone has any ideas which we can work together on!

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I wanted to confirm for folks, this IS Eva, Chief Growth Officer at Dfinity. :nerd_face:

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We should make use of the NFT collection BTC Flower.

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