The immediate aftermath

Now the Bitcoin London conference 2012 is over, there is lots and lots to ponder over, and I don't just mean future prospects related to speculating on and mining bitcoins, though those are major topics in and of themselves. Life in London (or “the Grad” or “the Burg” as I sometimes like to call it) goes on seemingly as normal, merchants in town dealing in the same old fiat bankster paper as before, probably, a few financiers, investors, gamblers, geeks and anarchists aside, blissfully unaware of the conference and possibly even Bitcoin itself. That is the first and most obvious problem: general awareness, or lack thereof. Bitcoin needs to be promoted and publicized a lot more, not to mention become more widely understood, to go mainstream and boost the BTC economy. There have already been occasional mainstream-media articles about Bitcoin published in the last year or two, but they alone did not really trigger much interest from me, at least not at the time. I just thought it was a silly little “geek thing”, which it pretty much was and maybe still is at the moment, if we're really brutally honest amongst ourselves.

The overall content of many of the conference's lectures was not exactly hard-core geekology, though a bit of it surely was, but neither are we looking at “Bitcoin for Dummies”. Now now, there's an idea for a book! Does it even exist yet? There are oodles of possible ways to draw more public interest in Bitcoin, but they will most likely have to involve the utmost user-friendliness and one-click simplicity. Technology possibly requiring an IQ above 120 to use effectively is never going to gain massive traction. Talking publicly about fiat currencies, sound money, austrolibertarianism, Ron Paul and so on and so forth is not the answer either: that might be gibberish to some, but worse than that, is even a kind of politicization that we really don't need right now. The YouTube video Screw Banks! Use bitcoins instead is much closer to the mark, in my opinion.

I have noticed a few social BTC donations arriving, and I suspect at least some of them are associated with this blog. Thank you very much for your support! Whatever I managed to achieve within the Bitcoin community and beyond, I can't do without the help of geeks like you, some of whom are undoubtedly even smarter and more geeky than I, so it's great to have you on board in any capacity!