Cunningham's law again, beautiful

This is my concern as well and it is multifaceted. First, we have seen the best doesn't always win. e.g., Beta vs VHS, etc. Marketing often has a HUGE role to play, which is why I asked a few times in the last day about getting on a podcast. I don't get the (outward) lack of interest, or have they tried? When I heard security experts speak on podcasts (e.g. Kristov Atlas), he sounded relatively positive on Dark and I'm not sure he said much if anything about XMR (8 months ago or so) as it was relatively unknown imo. In order to make the next big step, it DOESN'T MATTER if you are the best but being great sure will help. Yeah, tech guys will eventually find out (they still have Beta VCR's at home  ) but the common man likely won't. So, in a way: we, the developers, anyone with an interest in Monero - would be wise to pass the word on and go out there with the message. This isn't exclusively about $$$ return either. It is primarily about making sure the best anonymous coin gets used and with good reason. It is in the best interests of the alphabet agencies to make sure the best doesn't win. Chew on that.

I really don't think many know if Monero is better than Dark, from a technical standpoint - they don't look deeply, they just go with the biggest market cap (Perhaps another fork changes that, what the 4th one now?). This reminds me of AOL. Those damn cd's were every where and me being an IT guy at the time thought "Who the hell is going to use these? I can connect easily by putting in the information. No big deal." Well, let's not make the same mistake twice, just as BTC needs that perfect app, so to speak, to hit the masses, Monero needs something akin to that to get the word out there with potential crypto users. I speak to a lot of people due to my job, lots of relatively intelligent people (lots of I.T. guys and business professionals). I know of 2 out of 50 who knew anything worth mentioning about BTC. One had a few. Those who even have a clue about BTC, mostly have little clue about alts.

We are in the early days here, and Marketing, unfortunately, is going to play AT LEAST as big a role as the technology. Mark it.
Let's not make the same mistake as Beta did. And, btw, much thanks to Risto, developers who are here, etc. I am not meaning to talk down to anyone. I'm just trying to bring something that I have almost a knowing of, to the attention of others. I's sure there is some kind of plan, so again, I am not meaning this derogatorily. Having worked in IT it is clear IT guys that are people persons are hard to find. You often need to go out and get someone like that to help do that "non technical" work.

Its about sharing

Welp, the one rebuttal is that marketing an incomplete *thing* will lead to newcomers coming in, trying it out, getting flummoxed over the lack of "point, click, done", and then abandon it and possibly worse, tell others that what going on with Monero is crap.

Of course the questions is who are we marketing TO. Point and clickers (the drooling masses)? or ..... those that are on bitcointalk?

And then there's the question of the need to market. I try to draw parallels to linux and its eventual evolution to a "point, click, done" that I am familiar with that is embodied by Ubuntu (I mean, I was really blown away with Ubuntu.... until my wifi stopped working).  Was early linux marketed? I don't think so (i dunno though, anyone feel free to step in). Yet it still exists, and it runs the internet, even though Microsoft Apple was first to the punch in terms of OSs. Why? How did this happen?

Fair enough, but is Dark more developed than Monero? How long should "we" wait? I'm not against a timed "campaign" but inaction (with no offense meant, might just be my perspective) in general, in other words an absence of communication to the common Crypto man, is DANGEROUS. Again I look to the podcasts and such. Being on a few with good listnership would do wonders. Fellows with Money (not sure this is the best way) can help subsidize getting the word out. Just an idea. And this gives people time to do their DD.

Linux is a specialized operating system, a bit incomplete for the masses (at least it was and imo still is to a point). Is Dark/Dash where Windows is and Monero where Linux is? I don't think there is anywhere near that separation. Mainly we are waiting on a wallet and you could easily argue (e.g. mixing levels, accounting possibilities) we are more ready for where Crypto is going than Dark/Dash.

You might be right, is there a need to market? Well, considering we are 1/5 of Darks market cap (at least right now, I know, subject to change and quite dramatically at that), there is reason to not be passive. It would be a bit sad to "lose" if you are superior and now we are not talking superior in a "good enough" way - like VHS was, we are talking potential violent repercussions from not being good enough. I don't think we should lose sight of what we are talking about here. This is not just marketing per say, not by a longshot.

Hopefully we can just look at this as a brainstorm for all, not so much a right or wrong or I told you so, thing.

Who knows, maybe there will be a Dash from Dark into Monero.  
IAS

Untill we have a wallet, nobody out of this forum is going to use Monero (period)

Nobody is going to use a commandline wallet or trust a web wallet much. Nobody is going to search for 3rd party wrappers for simplewallet.

No marketing is possible untill we have an Official Graphics User Interface for noobs

yes, there has been lots of discussion on this.

one recent proposition was to make official one of the 3rd party wallets. (temporarily)

based on what I've read of the core-devs position on keeping things sparkly awesome, and keeping things associated with monero-core to be straight from core-devs, I don't know that this will happen.

Alternatively, due to the nature of monero (still wild and free), the community can help unofficially make official these 3rd party wallets. Someone recently suggested making a video on how they work etc. I don't do the youtubes so much, so I can't really tackle this. But to encourage it, i'll kick 5 XMR towards it. Bounty time. (unless one exists and I've just missed it)

FreeBazaar is in development
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/583449.msg10492521#msg10492521

apparently things take time.


xmr.to

(thats a website that enables you to pay anyone with a bitcoin address with monero)

Isn't that a little bit of an oxymoron?

User adoption has to come before merchant adoption, why would a merchant accept or begin to accept something without the user adoption first to justify it.

Of course merchant adoption needs to be as easy as possible but merchants won't adopt without the demand from users.

We had a dedicated exchange which could have morphed into accepting fiat but the cold hard reality is all the volume moved to Polo, people will always trade alts on multi alt platforms until a crypto is big enough to support a dedicated platform.

We already have mymonero.com, which functions just fine as an easy safe storage option for the average joe. But that's only useful after he acquires his XMR in the first place. Hence the need for super easy fiat trade.

xmr.to, as cool as it is, is somewhat ahead of itself because it only caters to current monero supporters or savvy btc users. This is fine, but it still doesn't free us from the bitcoin dependency bubble.


You have to admit the above sounds rather silly.