Nope. The IC is great but the community is quite deluded about several things.
You arent going to convert anyone by making ridiculous & untrue claims. Only by being honest about the tradeoffs will you get them to listen. These people arent stupid.
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@Tbd, I’d love to hear about things you believe the community is deluded about. I am sorry if you have mentioned these elsewhere and I have missed it, perhaps you could simply link to that post if it’s the case.
That would be a better thread in which to debate the technical capabilities and limitations of the IC. I hope to keep this one connected to marketing ideas.
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In general its standing in the current web3 landscape. Its not even close to being a threat to the existing chains if it cant handle Super Mario. And I havent seen any indication of DFINITY trying to address this.
Meanwhile the community keeps parroting “decentralized frontends” which could go down at the snap of a finger.
Its only good for certain things at the moment, wallets, being a meta-layer for other chains, some simple dapps. Those are all things that are under threat from other projects which choose to specialize in those areas instead of trying to be a jack of all trades. Good luck competing with permissionless innovation. See Nillion for example.
If you listen to the latest townhall with psychedelic, harrison makes the exact same points, because he has prior experience from web3, unlike most of the community.
Now, chain key is still amazing, and it can do many things other chains cant. But you arent going to get any of the people who matter even consider it unless you are transparent about the flaws. And the fact that Dom and the community keep slinging shit at other chains isnt fucking helping at all.
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This is one of the biggest doubts I have with the IC, have they cast the net too wide and in doing so doomed the project to become a jack of all trades, which in time will be surpassed by other projects?
I have a feeling we are in the middle of the “decentralization spectrum”, decentralized enough to be less performant than cloud, but not enough to be censorship resistant. The same logic can also be applied to use cases, IC has many but doesn’t shine at any of them due to lack of focus.
That has to stop immediately, unfortunately I doubt anyone at Dfinity has the authority to stop it.
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I have a feeling we are in the middle of the “decentralization spectrum”, decentralized enough to be less performant than cloud, but not enough to be censorship resistant. The same logic can also be applied to use cases, IC has many but doesn’t shine at any of them due to lack of focus.
The Swiss Army Knife was always a niche device. Nobody used it for construction. Nobody used it for slicing. It was even worse for self defense. But it was well marketed.
The iPhone, on the other hand, quickly gained mass adoption. People still purchase calculators, watches, cameras, and GPS… but those are the items that are now niche.
Use cases tend to thrive in open systems with solid fundamentals. But they also need a lot of attention.
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I proposed a weekly livestream to dfinity grants called " the blockchain show" to review different blockchains/dapps etc. Not crypto speculation. But looking into who is gainting traction,etc.
Im a construction worker with very strong desire to understand…most people are clueless as to what the hell blockchain is.
Really really dumb things down. Should be the marketing.
Although …supply creates demand …so build good dapps and theyll come.
But isnt blockchain a bunch of nerds trying to be the next jeff bezos? Why should i care?
It is my suggestion to talk about these things.
God bless
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Has anyone looked at their whitepaper? I tried to, but could not make sense of it. They basically claim they can do secure multi-party computation an almost no cost, which would set off an earthquake in the cryptographic research community…if it were true…
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Dfinity recently started doing twitter spaces - just today there was one with Cubetopia. Do you mean something like this - https://twitter.com/dfinity/status/1561745582309376002?s=20&t=dZwGtmobWoeI_KC9V9NKYA
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No. It cant be run by dfinity or any other blockchain. It needs to be outside of the loop. Them funding it is fine through their grant program. But it doesnt directly tie to it . Its like saying, heres some money, investigate all you wish. Blockchain is overwhelming for the average joe.
Im sure from the developer perspective at IC this is stupid, but people have been duped by developers/computer geeks. Facebook and google steal our data, amazon keeps all of our records, the trust between developers and the general public is broken. So why should we trust any of this? It seems like a scam to make developers rich.
A weekly show,(streaming so that people can interact) looking if anything these blockchains actually say is real or worth it.
Or is there secret code collecting data? Or is it actually funded by a secret agency?
Devs can figure this out easily. Actually the code is crazy confusing unless youre an expert programmer, but thats a whole other topic.
I’d love to see it debunked as well. It’s just an example albeit an interesting one. They have a more technical whitepaper coming soon which will be reviewed by one or more Universities in the U.K.
I want an ICP convention. This is the answer to the question of marketing ideas. I should also clarify that this is an in-person conference, not a digital (zoom) conference or attending as an avatar in the metaverse conference (although that would interesting).
If this is in the current plans already under development please count me in as an early-bird RSVP! I’m ready to spend my money to engage with this community someplace, make connections, learn and invest my time, money and energy into help this grow.
Just some ideas for the conference:
I want demo’s of the apps being built on the ICP and I want to fully interact with the functional apps already deployed, I want leadership to take us down the roadmap, I want to meet other #8yeargang passionate enthusiasts and I definitely want to hear from the team that contributes to this awesome project and it better be in a nice location at a fantastic resort. I’m sure everyone involved with the project would like to be at a resort for a few days, unwind and have fun talking about ICP, sharing in something we are all so passionate about and bring us closer together as a community. It would be fun for everyone involved to get together - build community and camaraderie, foster new ideas, grow the brand and interest from the developers and business community in one place (please be a warm place and have a beach)! Start small and work our way up as the community grows. It also might help detoxify the community as concerns were expressed in another post.
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Came across this - Dfinity is organizing an in-person meetup in Zürich - it’s not a convention as you are suggesting but I guess it’s a start. IC Community Meetup - Zürich, Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 6:00 PM | Meetup
Although, not sure if an internal convention will answer the marketing question as it’s going to remain quite ‘internal’ and limited to the existing community - I am not saying it should not be done - just that it has a different purpose.
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I hope every Dfinity supporter with a Twitter account will retweet the latest crypto leaks investigation. Their previous scoops got little attention, possibly because they were transparently Dfinity-focused. The latest one exposes a structural problem that goes beyond the IC and therefore has potential to make more people pay attention.
Here’s the tweet: https://twitter.com/CryptoLeaksInfo/status/1563286425197776898
Also, through reddit notice boards, bring it to the attention of the Solana community, which is far larger.
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I think an influential celebrity is needed to speak for ICP. The ICP technology is very good and advanced, but no one knows that when it comes to ICP, people can only think of tokens that have been falling all the way. For example, this integrated online test network with BTC, I only got news in the community, and I couldn’t see any voices in other media and blockchain celebrities. No matter how good the technology is, it must first attract people’s attention to attract developers.
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The Goon has responded; this is good news, as soon as people feel the need to deny something like the latest crypto leaks allegations, they tie themselves up in knots and give the allegations much more publicity:
https://twitter.com/el33th4xor/status/1564006450531377156
Having said this, Dfinity needs to clarify its connection with crypto leaks. Although its investigations are credible, crypto leaks looks Dfinity funded rather than the independent media outlet Dominic Williams makes it out out be.
Kudos to @shruti for tieing the upcoming eth merge to eth dapp owners and how they can build on IC.
Co-operating; not competing.
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What concerns me a bit is the approach of tayloring marketing to specific people. I know that makes sense for many products but I doubt this to be the right approach here for 2 reasons.
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All Blockchains more or less try to achieve the same thing. People are aware what the value proposition is. It’s more or less clear to everyone that we want more scale per „level of decentralization“.
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There still seems to be no explanation of the IC out there that truly nails it. It‘s equivalent to selling google glasses by saying „its this thing that contains glass“.
Given these two points it feels unconvincing to talk about reverse gas model, http calls etc.
I read heavily into dozens of projects and I always just wanted to know one thing. Does it scale significantly better than anything else without just being more centralized.
Personally I would not care at all about any other feature (I find them brilliant though!). Or maybe I‘d care to the extent that I would dig harder trying to understand the scaling approach. Trust is the core value proposition of this system.
People that are committed to crypto all go through the process of figuring out what specifically to commit to. Nobody wants to be on the loosing thing. What you need to give people are the tradeoffs and the analogies to other chains.
Just make clear that it’s about sharding! Explain what a beacon chain does (communication between shards) and explain how it limits the number of shards that can be added. People don’t get sharding yet but they know ethereum will do it. It‘s easy to figure out they will only add 64 shards. IC can add orders if magnitudes more. Explain sharding better than Ethereum does it (pretty bad…)
Is there a marketing working group? I‘m not experienced in marketing but damn I read into many projects…
Of course it can be that others do these things very differently compared to myself. I doubt it though, people are scared to bet on the wrong horse. I think they DO the work, if you make it reasonably easy for them, they will notice the IC.
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This is much more subjective than I initially thought, some would say yes, others me included, aren’t so convinced.
Not sure how much that matters atm, what most care about are actual use cases and partnerships with known brands/companies and I’m talking about real partnerships, not the useless ones many chains brag about but don’t amount to anything, many L1s have big tech companies like MS and Google as partner on their sites but it’s only for minor stuff, not an actual product or service. To this end Dfinity should try to snag some talent from Matic 
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Step 1. There need be channels open to reward the so called celebrities. Who will funnel the money?
Can a system be set to have the NNS or SNS automatically reward persons per contribution…how many people they influence to actively participate in ICP, either through investment, building projects or constantly using The IC products.
Does this exist, if so then the next step would be figuring out how to turbo charge the process.
Step 2. What would go wrong ? Usually it’s the opposition. It’s easy to get in trouble by the law because there are no clear guidelines on the chain of events to a successful promotion.
Step 3. Speaking from a black community, Education has been key in transforming communities. When missionaries came to Africa besides building churches they built schools. That helped the communities thrive and hence more people were inclined to join Christianity.
To have mass adoption of the IC there need be actual schools or universities that would educate the next generation of block chain engineers and investors.
It could be as easy as setting up a class, example with a professor in NAIROBI UNIVERSITY. Or getting a building set up a building because just online communication would not get the job done. Also The Bible says it better, instead of giving a man fish, teach him to fish. The hardest part of this is that it relies on well wishers. It would be much easier for black artists to promote this project mostly when there is motive of developing the community other than financially. Just my thoughts
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