You are dead on!

PR game is critical now. The wiki should have a PR section addressing main issues as they evolve. Twitter is full of garbage and ignorance. We need a PR team.

What are you going to say? "buy Bitcoin! We have only one real exchange, and it was hacked twice! We have no actual goods market so the value of our currency is only driven from the speculation on this exchange and is otherwise illiquid! But, don't forget, we are decentralized so you can feel like you are sticking it to the man as you watch your money being lost from the weekly fiasco every weekend!"

 

Guys like you are the exact reason we need a PR .

I am IN!

the thing is, i think a lot of people here would really like to use btc as a medium of exchange. it's a great way to move money!

the pr idea is awesome; we need more of that. it would be helpful for information to not come only from mouthpiece-fanatics like bruce wagner (bless him).

yeah clearcoin is on hiatus
and the btc-consultancy is not very active...

we need a new bounty like weusecoins ...

I would think about making the wallet security more user-friendly before launching into a PR crusade. I am not computer-illiterate but I am certainly not confident about securing wallet.dat. It's fine to say RTFM you moron, but I've read lots of TFM about it, and understand the *theory* of shutting down bitcoin.exe, backing up wallet.dat and encrypting it with 7zip (easier or at least less scary than the idea of using Truecrypt), saving the encrypted file to a thumb drive or emailing it to my gmail account, then deleting the in-clear version. But I'm not so confident about being able to get it all back again — or traces of the in-clear wallet.dat being recoverable from my hard-drive afterwards by some malware — as I've read stories of people screwing it up and losing their coins.

I'm not asking for help with wallet security, just pointing out that it isn't user-friendly for the average guy who uses a computer. And this is a big no-no if you're asking someone to put more than some spare change into it.

Similarly, what's with the indiscriminate addresses used for sending a payment, thereby possibly compromising your pseudo-anonymity? I saw a post yesterday about someone who had written a patch allowing you to choose which address to fund a payment from. Of course this should be included in the main client and not left as a patch.

I can't code, so can't help fix this. I understand the developers have their own priorities and will get around to things like this when they get around to it, and that's fine. But Bitcoins are nowhere near ready for prime time yet.