https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gr0kKwbMs5o

http://www.launchfestival.com/abra

Bring on Bitshares in Africa! This article from CNN says it all dudes:

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/17/business/bitcoin-africa-unbanked/

How small is the Bitshares community Donkeypong? I have not asked about that. Is there cross over between the Bitcoin community or are you guys spy vs spy type enemies?  If I asked the Bitcoin community to contribute to a Bitshares project will I get support for it? Could the blockchain/cryptocurrency publicity aspect of this initiative bring the communities together? How about if I asked for both Bitcoin and Bitshares and immediately transfered the Bitcoin into Bitgold or Bitusd?  Would that upset the Bitcoin guys?

Thanks for the encouragement and the critical feedback guys. In answering Rune:
You have a good point about for profit businesses becoming parasites on Bitshares. That is not what I am proposing if you read again what we are doing. The delegate funding would go towards raising money through crowdfunding, not running a company. This effort would be a marketing/promotional boon to Bitshares to a lucrative demographic and a marketing/promotional boon to us to get the funding for this animation production. Like the artist tokens pushed by Counterparty (like Tatianacoin) the Bitshares DAC would be supplying a digital commodity that could rise in value with the popularity of the project. This would give supporters of our project a sort of "community ownership." And the fact that to participate in that ownership they would have to participate in Bitshares brings the utility the DAC badly needs. Once we get them into the Bitshares system we could keep them there and get them talking via a contest to win some Bitusd for college. After they find out about the prize money you can hit them with the benefits of Bitusd over regular banking. So Rune, you can think of this as a marketing outlay, the dire need for which I have seen come up on these forums many times.  It is marketing, not support for the ongoing daily business of a startup.

I hail from a journalistic background, and I can tell you that this would play big in the media, first the African American media, then the mainstream media hugely.  Millions would know about Bitshares whether we reach our Crowdfunding goals through Indigogo or not. But we will succeed and get funded.
So Volker,  there is no forecast for making money because this is a pure marketing plan for fundraising at this point. After Crowdfunding we intend to do as Bytemaster advised and move on to sales and merchandise monetization. And when that happens we will install an ongoing Bitshares payment and token incentive structure unlike anything anyone has ever done, thus ensuring that as long as we keep making animated adventures people use Bitassets for purchase. A win-win! We get our animated adventure out and Bitshares gets to be the payment process. And the public will already know what Bitshares is due to the marketing push to fund the animation!

I want everyone to understand that what I am proposing is going to get done whether or not we get delegate funding. The wheels are already in motion. If we do get the funding it would allow us to do this bigger and better, thus increasing our chances to make our Crowdfunding goals while making Bitshares a household name to a crucial demographic.
 Lastly I will speak of a practical  example of what we bring to the table for Bitshares. I hope some of you took the time to watch my video on CSPAN. I don't know if you know this but not just anyone can get on that program. My partner Jeffrey Poitier and I have some huge media contacts around the world like this who are waiting to feature us. I myself have a relationship with the Chicago based Bud Billiken Parade,  the second  largest parade in the US.
http://www.budbillikenparade.org/from-the-white-house

This event is broadcast on television and seen by millions each year. The producers are longtime fans of my work and have asked me to put a float in the parade. I plan to do just that, showcasing my African Legends animation and Bitshares for those millions to see around the world. Some delegate funds will help us create a better float, among other things. You guys are the smart economic DAC, so I think you realize that hiring a marketing firm to get this kind of play would cost a hell a lot more than what we are proposing. Hope this gets the point across about the type of "value proposition" we are bringing to Bitshares and what a dream coalition we could be.

Yeah that's the plan man. Byte master said getting a delegate position is good way to jumpstart a business. What better business than one with Bitshares at its core?  Ohhh yeah!!

Greetings Bitshares community. My name is Gregory "Brother G"  Walker. I am an author, animation producer, Bitshares enthusiast and CEO of African Legends Animation LTD, a Bahamian based multimedia venture. I am a long term follower of the astonishing work of “Bytemaster” Dan Larimer and the rest of the able Bitshares crew. He likely does not remember, but I briefly met Bytemaster at the New York Bitcoin conference last April. I was at a table speaking to the guys from Maidsafe, Bytemaster sat down to be next and I asked him about Keyhotee, smiled and left. I should have introduced myself to him then, but I am here now.

The time has come to propose something to the community that I have been working on for many months. But first a little sobering information about where Bitcoin technology is socially. The 2014 Survey of Bitcoin Polling was just released by the Bitcoin Knowledge, Use, and Opinion (BitKOU) project. As reported by Cointelegraph it “suggests that lower income populations are more likely to adopt Bitcoin and recommends greater effort on building knowledge and trust among general publics.”  Cointelegraph went on to report that “meta-analysis” consisting of 21 existing English language public policy data about Bitcoin, found that across various population segments from different geographical areas, knowledge is low, trust is weak, and adoption rates among customers and merchants are slow.”

The most surprising thing the results pointed to was that lower income respondents are more likely to use Bitcoin in the future. Said Dr. Stephen P. Konieczka, the author of the report, “The relationship between knowledge and likelihood of adoption is exactly the opposite of what, logically, we would expect to find.”

Konieczka went on:

"Assuming the data could be confirmed, one thought I had that might explain [this trend], is communities from which the lower-income American respondents were drawn," he stated. "We are just speculating here, but let's say that those communities have a higher level of immigrants from South America and Africa, then their own or their family's experiences with digital currencies may be greater, and therefore, they are more willing to experiment with Bitcoin."
Another possible reason of this trend might be the challenges of giving the under-banked the ability to gain access to financial services: 
"It gets increasingly difficult for low-income people to secure traditional bank accounts. Assuming the respondents understood that Bitcoin circumvents the banking system, that might cause them to adopt more readily than people in higher-income brackets with easy access to banks."


The report was informative on many fronts, but it indicated most strongly that developing trust and building knowledge on the promotion side, and pushing into the micropayments and remittances markets are the way forward.

I was not surprised by these findings. Coming from a journalistic background, it has been easier for me to utilize that training for being both objective and enthusiastic. First of all no one leaves a system that is already working for them, in this case the mainstream monetary system, without a multi million dollar campaign to entice them. Bitcoin technology sounds great, but is up against incumbents that spent billions to get their customers and believe me, will spend billions more on smear campaigns to undermine adoption of blockchain technology. This is why we in the western world have an average 30 year wait for technology improvements of any kind. An unnamed guest writer on Cointelegraph was hilariously on point about the image of the Bitcoin community and what we are up against when he wrote:

“The current style used by online and physical merchants is better and less reminiscent of the nerdy underworld than its predecessors, but it’s still large, unwieldy and orange. It looks like a payment option for Stewie Griffin. If there were an entity able to make Bitcoin’s only point-of-contact material look half as trustworthy and enticing as the crooks at Visa and MasterCard have managed, a major battle would be won.”

This is an excerpt from wikipedia about what is took to transform the buying public into credit card users. It is the type of thing the Bitcoin community will have to do to mainstream blockchain technology in a head to head economic battle:

“Early credit cards in the U.S., of which BankAmericard was the most prominent example, were mass-produced and mass mailed unsolicited to bank customers who were thought to be good credit risks. But, "They have been mailed off to unemployables, drunks, narcotics addicts and to compulsive debtors, a process President Johnson's Special Assistant Betty Furness found very like 'giving sugar to diabetics'."[14] These mass mailings were known as "drops" in banking terminology, and were outlawed in 1970 due to the financial chaos they caused. However, by the time the law came into effect, 100 million credit cards had been dropped into the U.S. population. After 1970, only credit card applications could be sent unsolicited in mass mailings.”


Bytemaster I hope you are reading this, because what makes you better than all the other players in this space, and consequently makes Bitshares superior, is the level headed economic foundation upon which you rely.  Your cool, calculated and realistic way of developing Bitshares has been the key. So I ask you and the rest of the community to be cool, calculated and realistic about this:

Intellectually elite white males, those who make up most of the current knowledge and usage demographic of blockchain technology, are not going to be able to mainstream it to their relatives in the foreseeable future. Visa/mastercard and Chase bank works for them. And there is no billion dollar war chest to win them over with promotion. And before you call up Roger Ver and his cohorts, please don't. All the “bitcoin millionaire” money is just a puddle compared to the oceans of cash the incumbents can borrow from their friends in the banking industry.

But there is another way to do it. A way for Bitshares in particular to gain a worldwide marketing/usage foothold without going up against the incumbents directly. There are three revolutions going on in the world that are ripe for Bitasset usage and growth:

1. the massive African adoption of digital currency, which many Bitcoin news outlets have reported on, like Mpesa that is spreading all over the continent:

http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/04/the-invisible-bank-how-kenya-has-beaten-the-world-in-mobile-money/

2. The Caribbean Bitcoin movements:
http://cointelegraph.com/news/112391/caribbean-island-becomes-bitcoin-nation-interview-with-sarah-blincoe-project-manager

3. The new African American economic initiatives:

http://negusvu.com/2015/01/16/the-well-anticipated-black-film-7am-hits-the-theaters-this-mlk-weekend/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/28/these-seven-charts-show-the-black-white-economic-gap-hasnt-budged-in-50-years/

African Americans and Africans worldwide do not have stocks, bonds or much of any type of investments. So the interest that banks used to hand over were precious beyond compare. I have spoken to my African friends and told them about Bitshares, especially Bitassets, and watched their eyes light up as they ask how to sign up. The handwriting on the wall, the elephant in the room, is that people of African descent are the most viable growth market for Bitshares.  As a member of this group with contacts worldwide, I have a plan to get widespread Bitshares/Bitasset usage, knowledge and trust. How?  By giving the people what they want and are not getting -quality entertainment.

The Bitshares African Initiative

Details coming tomorrow...

http://www.amazon.com/Princess-Nefertari-Protectress-Nile-Saga/dp/1500325740

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ATEXXwSuzs