Quote from: alc on February 10, 2014, 07:48:32 PM

Quote from: Nmonic on February 10, 2014, 07:16:17 PM

Just a thought on the ELI5 explanation of the merits of Vertcoin -

Vertcoin is designed to be only produced by off-the-shelf commonly available hardware, which ensures wide adoption and decentralization.

Large scale operation of the Vertcoin network and minting using specialized hardware is impractical and cost prohibitive, by design.

Succinct, but the problem is that regular folk don't care about this stuff. Paypal don't list the minutiae of their technical differences vs. credit card companies.

Short-term, adoption is only going to be seen among people who are already cryptocurrency-savvy. I really don't think there's any changing this. You can't just add a cute mascot and expect Dogecoin returns in community size (the ship has sailed on that one and playing at being a second-rate Dogecoin seems both unwise and unnecessary to me). Over the long term I don't think it'll be an issue - any vendors who accept one coin can add support for more fairly easily, and if Bitcoin et al take off in the real world then adding Vert as a payment option just won't be a big deal. This assumes that a significant number of people have Vertcoins. Given the combined network hashrate among current scrpyt altcoins, and the current threat to those GPU miners from ASICs, I think it's plausible to say that a lot of people could be mining Vertcoin one day, and if that happens, network effects kick in.

The intractable problem is that Vertcoin doesn't offer anything for the point-of-sale user over and above existing and better-established coins. Attempting to talk your way out of this with clumsy marketing and mascots is a fool's errand.

Well, I suppose time will tell. I'm only speaking from experience at having built several multi-million dollar businesses from scratch and working at one of the Big 6 ad firms.

Whether the emotional connection is done with a catchy tune or good marketing or a mascot or whatever, it'll be quite integral to the long-term success of this coin.

I can only hope that we will populate our forums and meeting tables with the kinds of people that will ultimately use the product (not just technical people). Not doing so would be a big mistake.