I think one of the best marketing strategies I can think of is to use direct mail and giveaways.

The more people who try the software the faster it will catch on and even if it does not catch on immediately, the more people who have a wallet the quicker it can go viral. AOL did exactly this to promote the Internet and AOL instant messenger.

For years people were introduced to the Internet by AOL's direct mail. We should find the ideal target demographics who would be interested in being early adopters and initiate a targeted direct mail campaign. A bitcoin wallet such as electrum and a Bitshares wallet should be included. Information on what Bitshares is, how it works, information on Bitcoin and how that works, how to print paper wallets, videos, interviews, a documentary, all of that should be included on the DVD.

In my opinion finance students, business students, computer science students, unemployed college graduates, gamers, all should be in the initial target demographic because I think if most of these people knew what Bitshares is and what it can do to improve their lives they'd at least check it out.

It should be presented as Bitcoin 2.0 in the documentation. The documentation should be heavily visual. It should also include some success stories such as people who are starting businesses or who are using Bitshares so that other people can learn why people would benefit from using it.

Please consider this marketing approach. If you like it then I propose this approach be one of the first community based approaches. The community should come together to create the direct mail package. Brian should lead the initiative of bringing the community together for this project. Video footage should be assembled by Invictus. Bounties could pay for the infographics. Exclusive interviews could be included too.

Linux, AOL, Microsoft, all have used this method. If not for the fact that I could get a free Linux CD back in the day there is no way I would have ever have been able to try it. I don't think it would cost too much to make these CDs and send them out, nor would it be difficult to find the demographic to send it out to. Over time people will hear about it in the news or some economic crisis will happen they will remember they have it installed already or they have a CD in their house somewhere.

Metrics to measure the success or failure of this approach would be the amount of users who install a Bitshares wallet or Keyhotee.

To describe what I think we need.

1. An academic journal on decentralized autonomous networks. This journal should give prizes to good ideas, brilliant new theoretical approaches, brilliant whitepapers, even if the ideas are not implemented just by rewarding their creation you create a better environment where ideas and knowledge have value. In the community today there is no reward for generating new ideas or new knowledge. If it's a good idea then someone will probably use it but the originator wont get the credit. There is no economic value attached to a good idea so there is no incentive to share knowledge, ideas, theoretical concepts, and I think this is pushing us into a culture of knowledge silos and competition where cooperation is better.

2. Beyond just giving incentives to visionaries and theoretically inclined researchers we should develop some formality and decentralization to the process. The forum was sufficient for putting new ideas about DACs into the public and I've put several of my ideas onto the forum, but it's not a very scholarly environment. If an idea is good it's not peer reviewed with the level of scientific rigor which in the future will be necessary. The knowledge isn't all in one place, it isn't searchable, you would have to literally either scan the entire forum or select certain thought leaders to follow in order to track the new ideas (this is not sustainable).

An initial solution I am proposing is based on a solution I offered up for Peercoin called "AskPeers"(I had a Devcoin version called "AskDevs" also). The idea is to have a question and answer site where anyone can sweeten the bounty to have any question answered. The people who answer the question best are voted to the top. The top results are paid the bounty.

Now that Invictus exists and has the money to build sites how about a site like this so that we can decentralize knowledge while simultaneously rewarding people who generate knowledge? It would be open, accessible to all, anyone could make a bounty, anyone could answer or ask a question on the topic of DACs, voting is allowed.

I don't think we can seriously build a new industry if we don't attract and reward the generation of knowledge. If you look at any industry there is an academic journal with loads of great research articles, whitepapers, books, etc. This is where people test and develop out new concepts like Zerocoin, the zero knowledge proof, the proof of work, we need a theoretical foundation for decentralized autonomous networks.

Is there an incentive under Bitshares so that the person who creates the popular topic or bet can charge a fee and receive a percentage of all who bet one way or the other? Say if it's a binary option or a bet on some sporting event? What is the incentive for the creation of the bet in the first place?

I think a fee incentive would encourage more betting and higher quality betting. The bets which have more participants would generate more profit in fees to go to the issuer of the bet. This would give incentives for everyone to create attractive topics to bet on.

The distributed economic allegiance system:
A participant may pledge allegiance to a participant of equal or higher level whether economic or other criteria. This pledge is sworn or sown into the blockchain.

Definitions:
Mentors are like leaders/mentors in a social network.
Apprentices are like followers/apprentices in a social network.
Pledges are a promise of loyalty sown into the blockchain.

How it all works:
Participant A (Alice) is now a sworn Apprentice of participant B (Bob) who is the Mentor. The Mentor earns a percentage of the credits that the Apprentice earns. In this way participant A and participant B are linked in an economic allegiance stored within the blockchain itself.

A Mentor who has more Apprentices would gain more credit and rewards. As a Mentor gains more Apprentices their title could reflect that.

By having this economic allegiance system cooperative competition is encouraged.

This is not the only possible economic allegiance system but is just an example of what can be built. There are endless possibilities but the main component which has to exist is to allow one address in a blockchain and public key to swear allegiance to another. This allegiance can be sworn to anything because the public key and address could be a regular corporation, an autonomous agent, a contract, a DAC, some principles, I think you get the point.

So for example if Mentor A swears to a set of principles, then their investments would be set up in such a way so that it automatically invests in what that organization representing those principles requires. That means in order for the investment to take place there are certain qualifications which would have to be met, and the Mentor would decide if these qualifications align with the principles of his or her followers, if the Mentor signs off on it then his followers would automatically invest as the Mentor does. This can be facilitated and amplified by Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption.

Additionally, the Apprentices would be able to set aside a specific amount of investment capital to be used for this purpose in follow the leader manner. The Apprentice is always free to break allegiance. The benefit of allegiance is that the Apprentice would become part of a guild and gain a guild badge giving them inclusion and all the special privileges associated with being a member.

Please peer review.

I suggest an approach similar to the GPL. We should come up with our own software license which specifically indicates our terms and percentages in the "Social Contract/Consensus". This would make it so that if we write code it cannot be used or cloned in a way which violates the "Social Contract/Consensus" without also violating the law and testing a legal precedent.

The reason to turn the Social Contract into a software license is to create a situation where the programmers themselves agree to only write or contribute to development on projects which accept that particular license. It could allow us to extend the Social Contract/Consensus outside of the bounds of Protoshares and Invictus Innovations and into a much broader space similar to impact of the GPL.

Can Invictus Innovations consult with their legal team to come up with some language which can help us to establish a software license which would restrict the use of our code as only being used in projects which meet the terms of the minimum of the Social Contract/Consensus?

So here is my idea, we create a system where KeyhoteeID, Reputation, and Credits are used to replace Proof of Work mining.

Anyone can earn Credits by proving their Commitment level to the DAC. To do this they will do tasks which can range from stuff similar to BitcoinGet to bounties that heavily committed Keyhotee IDs vote on.

So anyone who has no Commitment at all should be able to earn some Credits from doing some sort of BitcoinGet like tasks. These Credits should be like coupons which can be exchanged for Bitshares. 1 million Bitshares should be reserved specifically for this purpose. The system should be set up in such a way that even people who do BitcoinGet all day should earn some reasonable amount of Bitshares but the difficulty should adjust so that if too many people are doing that task then the amount of Bitshares they get for it should decrease appropriately.

Miners should be retrained to do different tasks now that Proof of Work is considered obsolete and we should build Keyhotee up in such a way so that it can be used to automate the process of rewarding Keyhotee IDs for completing specific tasks. It should be as simple as clicking a link, going to a website, claiming a task, associating it with your Keyhotee ID, and Keyhotee wallet address, do the task, win the credits, save the credits until you want to redeem them for the Bitshares or whatever future DACs decide to set aside some shares to use to reward those who show Commmitment through action.

This could be getting referrals, it could be seemingly pointless tasks like you find on Bitcoinget, it could be FAQs, documentations, Wikis, Tweets, putting Bitshares or Protoshares in your signature or anything else.

When I ran the giveaway thread the rule stated that you could put Mastercoin in your signature, Tweet, or do anything like that and I was assigned to check to make sure everyone followed through on their end of the deal. A script could do something similar and make sure everyone follows through or a human can simply check to make sure they keep the signatures for a month and credit them if there is a trusted Keyhotee ID with the reputation to do that kind of work.

And that Keyhotee ID should of course be given reward credits for his/her work as well. Having Bitshares in your signature would be marketing it and would be just about the same amount of Bitshares as you would get from mining it if the scheme were to work correctly. This could replace mining entirely with signature marketing and other kinds of marketing.

If you write on the Wiki then just like with Devtome it should be that there is a script which checks it and then credits everyone who added to the Wiki.

Please consider this idea and improve on it. I think it is necessary if we are going to move away from mining to replace it with something like this.

There should be a decentralized autonomous job posting/listing/matching corporation.

Users pay a fee to list a task which needs to be completed along with an expiration date and the currency they'll be paying in. It can also function like a decentralized local community exchange protocol build on top of a blockchain allowing barter.

So for example if you need a website built or a programmer to help you build your DAC you could create a job listing on the Get Work DAC. You could also put your Keyhotee ID on this blockchain so anyone can track all the jobs you did for anyone else and get an idea of how much certain jobs are worth in the labor market.

Could it be built? If Keyhotee is working and Keyhotee wallet is working so we can pay people who have good reputations using some sort of multi-signature transaction, reviewing or rating system, it seems to me it could be theoretically possible.

 

It would be very interesting if we reach a point where Protoshares can be traded over the Mastercoin decentralized exchange, or Mastercoins can be traded over the Bitshares decentralized exchange. We will get to see the true market value for each.

To do it in Mastercoin someone would have to create a virtual Bitshares backed by Mastercoin in escrow. At least that would be one way to do it and people would send some cryptocurrency to the issuer of virtual Bitshares and these could be traded as if they are Bitshares on the Mastercoin protocol.

To do it in Bitshares my understanding of it is that a cross chain trade would take place and you replace the example in the whitepaper of bitBTC with bitMSC. Basically users could trade bitMSC for real MSC 1:1 allowing MSC to trade on the Bitshares network. This could potentially improve the stability of both as individuals could hedge between the two.

I'd like to see cross protocol reputation. Meaning if someone builds a reputation on their Keyhotee would it be transferred over to the Mastercoin protocol so that the reputation functionality of Keyhotee can benefit the Mastercoin eco-system? If that is the case then I see Mastercoin and Bitshares having a great synergy because they can solve each others problems.