Author Topic: Importance of early adopters  (Read 4326 times)

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Offline Tuck Fheman

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Offline onceuponatime

Thank you @bytemaster for your timely response. It is much appreciated.

I am also pleased with your response itself, demonstrating your confidence in the readiness of the core protocol and GUI,  and the ability of the infrastructure to scale with significant increased demand once responsible management ensues at OL.

I just would like to ask for advice from the core BTS community and whatever governance committee structure is in place, if they would support or strongly advise against, use of the term "3.0 Blockchain" in reference to BitShares blockchain, within my marketing communications and materials currently under development. Thanks in advance.

@BunkerChain Labs:
Noted re Windows 95, although MSFT certainly had the manpower to provide robust customer support, which level of manpower I don't think BitShares currently has...  or even plans to have, given the dac model
I'd avoid saying Bitshares is 3.0. That, especially if it comes from someone with an interest in Bitshares's growth, comes across as "making ourselves bigger just by giving us grandiose names". It comes across as having to pull that "naming trigger" because there is no substance.

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Offline santaclause102

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Thank you @bytemaster for your timely response. It is much appreciated.

I am also pleased with your response itself, demonstrating your confidence in the readiness of the core protocol and GUI,  and the ability of the infrastructure to scale with significant increased demand once responsible management ensues at OL.

I just would like to ask for advice from the core BTS community and whatever governance committee structure is in place, if they would support or strongly advise against, use of the term "3.0 Blockchain" in reference to BitShares blockchain, within my marketing communications and materials currently under development. Thanks in advance.

@BunkerChain Labs:
Noted re Windows 95, although MSFT certainly had the manpower to provide robust customer support, which level of manpower I don't think BitShares currently has...  or even plans to have, given the dac model
I'd avoid saying Bitshares is 3.0. That, especially if it comes from someone with an interest in Bitshares's growth, comes across as "making ourselves bigger just by giving us grandiose names". It comes across as having to pull that "naming trigger" because there is no substance.

Offline xeroc

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Therefore, I would appreciate if the core developers at bitshares could tell me definitively and unambiguously as soon as possible, if bitshares is truly ready and stable enough to handle thousands and potentially tens of thousands of people downloading and starting to use bitshares accounts and wallets, over the next six months and beyond.

@xeroc @bytemaster
IMHO, it is ready for primetime .. we will though see plenty of rough edges in the process that can, however, be fixed quickly (lack of API servers, slow trading interface etc.)
The tech is here and we will sooner or later see how it behaves when thousands of people are entering the system.

Offline cube

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Fact is, the Bitshares wallet is good and getting better.  Which is probably at least partly why it's getting more and more use by a growing number of people.  @viz10nari's users will do just fine.

I cannot agree more. 

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Nothing Bitshares is ready for the prime time yet. Products are still very much in pretty complete

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Offline tbone

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The GUI is not ready for the masses. There needs to be mouse over tips and help for the average person. There needs to be explanations on the site on how thing works. It's a website to the average user, not a wallet. They will not the difference. We deal with it because we love the tech and the potential. The average person won't. If they the slightest reason to thing their money is at risk, they are gone. It's that simple.

Tooltips are nice to have and we should add them (doesn't take much to do so), but they don't make an otherwise unfriendly UI friendly all of a sudden.  For example, the Bitshares wallet is FAR more friendly than the Digix wallet (yes, even with its tooltips). 

By the way, what's the point of saying the GUI is not ready for the masses?  Find me one crypto UI that is ready for the masses.  Fact is, the Bitshares wallet is good and getting better.  Which is probably at least partly why it's getting more and more use by a growing number of people.  @viz10nari's users will do just fine. 

Offline Akado

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The GUI is not ready for the masses. There needs to be mouse over tips and help for the average person. There needs to be explanations on the site on how thing works. It's a website to the average user, not a wallet. They will not the difference. We deal with it because we love the tech and the potential. The average person won't. If they the slightest reason to thing their money is at risk, they are gone. It's that simple.

If you check Digix, a project on the Ethereum blockchain, their wallet actually has this and looks nice https://app.digix.io/
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Offline Pheonike

The GUI is not ready for the masses. There needs to be mouse over tips and help for the average person. There needs to be explanations on the site on how thing works. It's a website to the average user, not a wallet. They will not the difference. We deal with it because we love the tech and the potential. The average person won't. If they the slightest reason to thing their money is at risk, they are gone. It's that simple.

Offline @viz10nari

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Thank you @bytemaster for your timely response. It is much appreciated.

I am also pleased with your response itself, demonstrating your confidence in the readiness of the core protocol and GUI,  and the ability of the infrastructure to scale with significant increased demand once responsible management ensues at OL.

I just would like to ask for advice from the core BTS community and whatever governance committee structure is in place, if they would support or strongly advise against, use of the term "3.0 Blockchain" in reference to BitShares blockchain, within my marketing communications and materials currently under development. Thanks in advance.

@BunkerChain Labs:
Noted re Windows 95, although MSFT certainly had the manpower to provide robust customer support, which level of manpower I don't think BitShares currently has...  or even plans to have, given the dac model

Offline bytemaster

Therefore, I would appreciate if the core developers at bitshares could tell me definitively and unambiguously as soon as possible, if bitshares is truly ready and stable enough to handle thousands and potentially tens of thousands of people downloading and starting to use bitshares accounts and wallets, over the next six months and beyond.

@xeroc @bytemaster

The protocol is ready. The GUI is ready.  The server infrastructure and support staff at Open Ledger would have to grow quickly with the increase in demand. It should be able to grow.  I think we can easily scale to Bitcoin's user base without any major hiccups.
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Offline Shentist

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i am using on a daily basis the online wallet and it is absolutly not really that buggy heavy.

i importet my whole keys after my harddrive crashed and the backup run smothly.

the only problem we have is sometimes the server seems to be out of sync, but this is handled in a matter of hours.

what i see as a future problem is, that "normal" user are not adjusted to take their backup in their own hands, so this should be
considered. The devs are working on a serverside backup, but i think this will only solve 1 of 2 major problems with the end
customers

1. "i need to backup, because something happend with my own machine" - here we have a solution
2. "sry, i forgot my password and i need a new password" - daily used for email, facebook etc. recovery and i think
you can address this problem if you force all users on your plattform to make a 3way account. 2 accounts they or a friend holds and 1 key for you
- with this solution we could provide most of the users a solution if they are loosing keys or have no backups

So, i think the wallet in it current form is a good startingpoint and is stable enough to make it your core feature and you code your stuff around it.

Offline Akado

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Therefore, I would appreciate if the core developers at bitshares could tell me definitively and unambiguously as soon as possible, if bitshares is truly ready and stable enough to handle thousands and potentially tens of thousands of people downloading and starting to use bitshares accounts and wallets, over the next six months and beyond.

@xeroc @bytemaster
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Offline BunkerChainLabs-DataSecurityNode

If we are not ready for prime time.. the world would have never seen Windows 95 on the same assessment. :)
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Offline @viz10nari

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"Nothing is ready for the prime time yet. Products are still very much incomplete and buggy"

Well this revelation is of concern to me... the impression I got from slack engagement and the bitshares articles shared from time to time, was that bitshares was a pretty matured blockchain platform being a 2.0 platform and not alpha or beta or 1.0. It was even being bandied around as being a "3.0" blockchain, given its 100k tps claims.

I naturally would not have even considered bringing masses of average users to use something that is "incomplete and buggy". I wonder if Ken and Chris share this view of Bitshares' technology state, since they have poured a lot of time and resources into their bitshares based projects.

So my question is, are projects like OpenPOS, ECHO and SollarsandSense intended only for "early adopter crypto enthusiasts" at this time? I'd love to hear the leaders of those projects speak to this, because my impression of those projects is that they are very much targeted at everyone on the planet who happens to have a pulse.

To me, "incomplete and buggy" is a whole different ball game from saying, the wallent/client UI is not the easiest to use and needs to be simplified. That I can understand. However, the only reason I am here today is because the blockchain platforms I investigated before getting to Bitshares, provided me with a truly onerous experience from the perspective of a newbie trying to setup a wallet. I mean I'm not geriatric, blind and don't have alzheimers, but in one instance, I actually made 20+ attempts to "correctly enter the 12-word brain key that was automatically generated for my account setup, and their system kept on telling me i entered it correctly.  The average member of the masses would probably have left as soon as they saw the 12-word bran key. So in contrast, I found Bitshares account and wallet setup to be a breeze and am not confused by the client. Like any new software, you just need to poke around for a week or two and you'll get the hang of it. Yes it can be simplified but I'm made to understand that anyone can create their own version if they choose, to interface with the bitshares system/dex.

But if you're telling me that what's under the hood after connecting, is still an incomplete and buggy engine, then why should persons like ken solomon and myself be encouraged to build their business ventures on top of bitshares at this stage?

If I am a shrewd business person, this info would cause me to put the brakes on my pre-launch ramp up and re-assess if I should be powering my venture with bitshares at this point in time, or should be starting elsewhere with a blockchain that is past the incomplete and buggy stage. Question is, am I qualified to make that determination? Not really, so I would need to engage an independent blockchain consultant who is not partial to any specific chain.

While I have the goal of building my own wallet client and building significant direct blockchain integration for my venture, at this stage my approach is simply to leverage the bitshares UIA component and the bitshares wallet in order to be able to issue my UIAs to my users and allow them to trade, transfer or otherwise manage them. My users will not be coming to bitshares because they have interest in crypto or bitshares itself, they will be coming just because having a bitshares account and wallet is the only way they can access and participate in the value proposition i am presenting to them, so bitshares for them is just a means to an end, a "value access gateway". I was proceeding with bitshares for my venture because its just UIA leverage at this point and I was comfortable that its pretty easy to setup a bitshares account/wallet and that there are a decent amount of good videos explaining the bitshares wallet/client.

Bottom line, however, is that

a) I will be working to inspire millions of people to embrace the value proposition I have crafted over the next 12 months. Even falling short significantly, it should still be tens of thousands.

b) I can't have a situation where my users find that one minute they have x funds in their wallets and the next minute or next day, they're seeing something less (or more for that matter)... or have situations where they make transactions that never go through or other serious issues happening to a large number of users at once.

Therefore, I would appreciate if the core developers at bitshares could tell me definitively and unambiguously as soon as possible, if bitshares is truly ready and stable enough to handle thousands and potentially tens of thousands of people downloading and starting to use bitshares accounts and wallets, over the next six months and beyond.
...........

"There is too much to do and only a few people actually doing"

Perhaps it's buried somewhere on this forum, but what I find odd is that there are lots of comments like the above on slack and in the two mumbles i attended, but I am yet to see any document or article link circulated where this "much to do" is actually spelt out so people can go through the list and see what they can do. It's as though people are expected to just know what needs doing specifically and just do it without any coordination. Is it because nobody wants to create a long list that amounts to a declaration that bitshares "really ain't ready yet"?
.............

"That's why we should be targeting marketing to people who can be easily attracted to become early adopters (like libertarians and other people who want to change the current financial system)."

Why should they be "easily" attracted to bitshares when there are scores if not hundreds of blockchain camps all proclaiming change of the financial system?

And are these libertarians and people who want to change the current financial system active cryptosphere participants at a technical level? Or are they people outside the system whom you first have to educate and indoctrinate about crypto before they can be "useful and productive" early adopters?

In my opinion, 90% of adult human beings are libertarians and want to SEE (as opposed to consciously and individually LEAD) change in the financial system. They just don't run their mouths about it and just grumble to themselves or a close friend, and they don't want to be labeled as libertarians. If, however, they can join an initiative that has that stated "change the fs objective" (WITHOUT the libertarian tag and chant) but where they can just blend into the large body of people participating in "building meaningful, significant and rewarding value" with no spotlight on them personally, they will be much more inclined to get involved. I do however take the point that if bitshares is not a product ready for prime time as is an iphone when Apple releases it to their early adopters, then there's no point bringing the masses to it. I also take the point that consumer gadgets like an iphone and a crypto project are two very different things, handled quite differently.

I don't claim to know it all or have all the answers, but speak out of my personal experiences with engaging people and assessing their psychological motivations and comfort zones, in order to strategically craft value propositions that push all the right buttons while soothing and calming all (or most) underlying fears that could potentially precipitate inertia and inaction.

..............

Thanks @Samupaha for taking the time to respond to my previous substantive comment.

Offline Samupaha

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There was good comment on Slack, I move it to here so it won't disappear so quickly.

This was a comment by viz10nari for my claim that we need more early adopters.

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well i very respectfully hold a different view on that, because as a marketer, and i speak for myself only, getting a significant amount of people (or even just one person) to take a specific desired action is for me simply a matter of creating the right value proposition to motivate them to act. In other words, non-early adopters (the so called masses being the demographic that doesn't care two hoots about how the underlying technology works as long as it works, ) can most definitely be incentivized to become "early adopters". Also, the masses don't arrive all at once as in a million of them in one day... so the first 10 that turns into 100 and into 1000, 10,000 are effectively "masses early adopters". My question for you @ samupaha, would be this - what exactly are these early adopters doing that the masses are waiting for them to do? I do not agree that early adopters for a crypto platform have to be limited to or defined as "crypto enthusiasts". I really cannot imagine a single housewife or young professional, upon being presented with a powerful and compelling BitShares powered value proposition, sitting down to do research and then telling themselves "hmmm, i don't think they're enough "early adopter crypto enthusiasts on board with BitShares yet, so despite the amazing solution presented to me using BitShares that can clearly solve my financial problems in the next 6-12 months, I'll sit on the fence until whenever BitShares manages to get 20,000 crypto enthusiast early adopters on board." I personally think too many marketers accept widely promoted marketing "principles" as being irrefutible. For me, everything is irrefutible and anything is possible. In closing I will say this - if I invented a new kind of screw and when i advertise it nobody rushes to buy it, it doesn't mean that my new screw technology is flawed or not useful (a la BitShares), it just means that the value proposition I presented wasn't compelling enough. So if I then design some visually beautiful and functionally cool household gadget that solves a real pain in the but problem for consumers and my new screw is at the heart of the new gadget's ability to solve the pain problem, the new value proposition i present around the pain solution can be compelling enough to get a million units of the gadget sold. But guess what, not a single one of those million buyers will have given a single thought to the screw that's in it, yet they have indirectly bought and are using my new screw technology. Then screw manufacturers and retailers would take notice and come knocking trying to licence the patent, offer distribution etc. BitShares is an enabling technology that when adopted by and wrapped within a truly powerful "use case", will gain rapid users "by default". That is what Sollarsand Sense is trying to do right now and I'm sure many others, like Ken's OpenPOS and ECHO... when the masses see something really useful and "accessible", they migrate up the early adopter food chain as fast as their motivation drives them. Marketing without strategy is just plain old gambling unfortunately, and nobody really wants to be doing that.

Crypto projects are quite different thing than for example simple gadgets. Nothing is ready for the prime time yet. Products are still very much incomplete and buggy. And very complicated to understand, especially Bitshares.

Because of this environment the early adopters are really important. They are people who will help others to use and understand what all this is about. They will file bug reports when newbies encounter problems. They will do continuous marketing wherever they happen to be. They will show other people how wallets work. They will buy stuff with cryptocurrency just to show support for the merchant who accepts them. They will try to attract more developers to join.

Without very active early adopters it's much more difficult for big masses to adopt any cryptoproduct. Most of the value comes from network effect. Big masses will lose their interest very quickly if there are not other people using the product, no matter how beautifully it's packaged. They don't do anything with a currency that nobody else uses.

IMO Bitshares is suffering right now lack of active early adopters. There is too much to do and only a few people actually doing. That's why we should be targeting marketing to people who can be easily attracted to become early adopters (like libertarians and other people who want to change the current financial system).