Contact/target users with good hardware

Erkan-Yilmaz commented 7 years ago

ways to reach out to e.g. PC gamers (who use mostly Windows) so they can run Gridcoin/BOINC

websites, word of mouth
magazine mentioned in hangout: PC Gamers, Maximum PC

mentioned in hangout 3: 0:31:47

grctest commented 7 years ago

Word of mouth

Quite difficult, especially if the website/forum in question has a BOINC team.

Magazines

Perhaps, wouldn't hurt to email them about Gridcoin.

Websites

It could be worth writing to all the tech websites about Gridcoin?

Vortac2 commented 7 years ago

In early January, I briefly mentioned Gridcoin on www.bug.hr forum (BUG is the most popular Croatian computer magazine). The article was about Bitcoin prices spiking and of course, crypto mining was soon brought up in the comments.

According to statsbot, in the following week (Jan 2-Jan 9) we got 86 users from bug.hr and m.bug.hr browsing www.gridcoin.us, beating even reddit and netsoft. Of course, it's impossible to tell how many of them actually joined Gridcoin, I am sure only about one (because he contacted me directly for some explanations and initial GRC).

Erkan-Yilmaz commented 7 years ago

"talking with video game manufacturers to include BOINC in gaming consoles, so that players that choose to contribute to BOINC can be rewarded with game credits."

LokiToki commented 7 years ago

What about Giveaways for people who actively participate Boinc/Gridcoin AND registration in a gleam.io contest? So there would be the possibility to win e.g. Steam-Coins while gaming PCs idle. A mag threshold could be a protection and so on. Question is: who wants to pay it. ;)

dnb4ever commented 7 years ago

I don't know that most people know about BOINC at all, and those that do are either pretty hardcore about it, or tried it once and gave up once they saw their power bill. However, with Gridcoin, at least it's somewhat possible to earn SOME of your money back and still contribute. The idea is very sound and in my experience the people that I've told about BOINC were very interested. Add money into the equation and you've probably sold most of them on it.

We can easily market to favorable users by placing cheap banner ads in certain spots. In particular, a reddit sidebar ad for /r/gridcoin would possibly bring in more users to the subreddit and I don't think costs very much. A lot of subreddits do that to up their subscriber count. The more subscribers the better; more content, more users, and a possible subreddit of the day situation which would bring in millions from /r/all. This is pretty much a no-brainer. There's also the top of the page ads, but I think most people ignore those since they are usually actually ads, not subreddit ads. Subreddit ads are probably seen less like actual ads so that's good.

Next, we should obviously target gaming websites and, I think more importantly, youtubers. We could, given the funds, have someone like h3h3 promo Gridcoin on their little show. It's an enormous amount of viewers that might actually stick around for the pitch since BOINC is interesting and in their wheelhouse. If really terrible gaming applications and random stupid ads for ??? can get on youtube, why can't we get gridcoin ads on youtube? I know that there are plenty of talented folks in the Gridcoin community that can help with banners and creating ads, but really... let's just buy an h3h3 pitch already.

Let's face it, there are a lot of things we could do if we had the funds. The problem, it seems, is getting the vote that will release funds from the pool. We SHOULD try to make this happen. I don't know how... I'm just a guy with no programming experience, but surely, there has to be a way to make a fair vote without any manipulation. I don't know the story really, just that it happened, and I have no idea how to fix it, but I'd like to.

So, I've got $5 on buying a reddit ad, and $10 on h3h3. Who's gonna help me do this? I recognize that there are negative consequences to an influx of users, but isn't it the goal to have a lot of users so the coin value increases? Aren't we essentially a corporation, in this case a co-op, trying to increase the value of our coin? Most of the time you do have to spend money to make money... so let's spend some money people. Let's get that pool open and working for us.

silent5am commented 7 years ago

BOINC is a more or less altruistic concept: people basically donate resources (electricity + hardware -> CPU/GPU) in order to help out scientists with their research - since the alternative would be to either buy a lot of hardware themselves and run projects locally or rely on cloud computing which can be expensive. So being part of BOINC is not only supporting science but also helping scientists with their mostly limited budgets. Everyone who is part of BOINC is doing it because of this.

Gridcoin (as far as I can tell) is the first concept that brings some type of reward system to the table that has actual value on the currency market. It gives some people an additional incentive to run BOINC projects - especially for those with high energy costs (compared to average - yes Germany, looking at you). Rewarding people with GRC can be considered as a "thank you" for donating their resources to scientists.

Now here comes the issue with gridcoin: while some people can certainly make decent profit with this, either via pool or solo crunching, it requires some solid investment first. Compared to other crypto currencies, the profit margin seems to be rather small though. A solid high-end config that allows me to make actual profit with BOINC/GRC will net me (currently) more profit mining other currencies.

So the actual value - or long-term profit - of GRC can only be estimated, based on assumptions about the future of the project. Someone who just wants to mine casually - or not bother with setting up too much software, etc. - will thus pick another currency to invest resources in. It's a simple input/output calculation.

So - imho - there are several things that need to change (skip to 5) if you are not interested in my feedback):

1) BOINC/GRC setup needs to be a lot more easier.

I just started roughly two weeks ago with no experience at all regarding BOINC or crypto currencies. It took me about half a day reading through the basic info, getting started (installs and configurations), setting up the necessary accounts, etc. And after that, I wasn't even sure it worked, so I had to read through some more posts to find out how to verify if everything has been done correctly. Which leads me to the next point:

2) GRC client/wallet setup&config needs more feedback

Maybe I've been missing something the whole time, but I feel there could be more progress feedback for newbies like me. The status messages within the client didn't make any sense to me, so I spent another night on reddit, reading, asking questions, trying to understand what was going on, why things are taking so long, etc. While it is ok for things to take a while, there needs to be some sort of visual indicator imho that let's people know, e.g. "You are currently at [this step] and it will take a while to verify, so just go about your day and check back in [X hours]" - or something similar. For me, the first time I was actually a bit relieved about setting up everything just fine was the moment my first faucet transaction arrived, roughly 48h after initial install. That's just way too long waiting time for a "you did everything right" confirmation.

3) GRC client could use some sort of progress indicator after successful setup

So after everything is working, I wish there was some sort of progress indicator that tells people when their first payments will arrive, what projects are currently most likely to payout GRC soon so they can focus on these projects. Let me elaborate what I mean by that.

When I started to run the first projects I didn't expect to get any GRC just yet. I let them run for a week and then decided to look up some stats and realized that the projects I picked weren't that great after all. Plus I joined pool.gridcoin.co which turned out to be another wrong choice (at least that's what I was told). So I won't get any payment from that pool, which isn't really an issue, just a bit unnecessary experience because it confused me a lot that my progress in BOINC didn't seem to matter at all. The moment I switched to grcpool.com a week ago everything finally made a lot more sense and I ahd direct feedback about what I did, could track progress and actually see some numbers change. This is something that needs to be part of the wallet imho because it will calm ppl like me down.

While I've been running about 10 different projects to see why my system can handle best, it would have been nice to receive a recommendation by the client itself. I'm not sure if that can be done but it would be really helpful. Something like "Recommended Top 5 BOINC projects for your current hardware config" that helps newbies to better understand the reward system.

Alternatively, maybe a GRC project that has runs in the background (similar to WUProp) and generates a really tiny amount of GRC during the first week that is payed out as fast as possible. It could be used to verify if everything is set up correctly and give ppl a "good to go" because if they get payed they know everything works fine and can then focus on actual research projects. Because, even after two weeks and lots of reading, I didn't receive a single GRC yet (all faucet transactions only) - so while I'm not that uncertain anymore, I'm still not 100% if I've done everything right and I'm also not sure how much longer it will take until the first payment will arrive.

So in combination with all this, maybe there should be a more insightful display of MAG, DPOR and RAC in the client that tells people which values they need to have "at least" to receive their first payout in X days, e.g. some sort of calculator with a few sliders etc. that uses my current values and then tells me what I have to do, like "In order to receive payout tomorrow, these are your options: buy 20 more PCs, run projects A, B or C to increase RAC/MAG/DPOR by [value1] to fullfill [minimum requirement] - or simply wait X more days" - something like that maybe.

4) With direct feedback on GRC, maybe include feedback on projects

I found out today that I can check on project progress on the respective websites. BOINC manager also has a "news" tab, so that's something. But I feel there is a lack of something like "with your resource donations (energy/hardware) you contributed to these projects [list] as follows" where I can directly see "ok, I've been running PrimeGrid for 2 months now, and this allowed the scientists behind the project to achieve X - now that's really cool!"

This certainly is not a GRC-only thing, this needs either BOINC or project involvement directly and this is something we should try to achieve because right now it feels I'm just mining a bit GRC in exchange for donating my resources and yeah, that's all there is. It is still great, but I'd like to see a bit more hype. People should not just run BOINC or get GRC for it, there should be some more emotional feedback. Maybe you people already have that, but to be honest all those numbers don't really make me that happy, especially since I'm a casual miner, meaning this won't make me rich - I'll probably have some expensive bills at the end of the year.

In order to make this more appealing - visually - there could be something similar to Steam achievements or idk - whatever makes the entire journey a bit more exciting. Either a website or client-side achievement/progress tracking feature that could be also be used for the other suggestions I mentioned above (checking if setup was done correctly, etc). This tracking feature could then directly display progress for each project - MAG/RAC, as well as payment stats e.g. "you have earned x GRC with project A during this month and a total of y GRC since [month/year]". The BOINC manager basically already gathers this kind of data partially, all we need is to implement it somehow and make it more attractive.

Then directly display project updates within this tracking feature, which can be news by the scientists about the project, progress updates, whatever - without the need to login into project accounts. If not too complicated, this could actually be the "GRC project" - the workload that is done by the network to make all this information available generates GRC which then is donated to the newbie pool to give them free GRC for the first week. And a certain percentage of that could be used for development. So we basically would pay ourselves - if that makes any sense - but the profits are split among newbies and devs.

5) Attracting more high-end system users by creating another motivational aspect

So - with or without my suggestions 1-4 (which imho would attract a few more ppl and also turn them into long-term community members) there needs to be another incentive apart from the classic BOINC altruism and mining GRC for "profit" - since other coins will net more with the same hardware atm.

Running ads won't do the trick because even with decent profit margins one would have to trade/exchange to actually use GRC. Holding the coin, that's something for believers and long-term investors, which is not the majority of high-end system users (aka gamers) out there.

5a) our own platform or some sort of partner (Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, or similar) that allows for direct trading GRC <-> product, without the need of an exchange, which will only deduct additional fees, etc. This needs to be trustworthy and secure.

5b) a trustworty and secure marketplace for user-user trades similar to Steam marketplace. Something were e.g. I can trade games for GRC and vice versa but also other products like PC hardware, etc. basically a tech-market of some sorts. if there's already something like this out there, maybe we can partner up or at least ask them to allow GRC as payment.

5c) since GRC and BOINC are connected, there should be more science in all this. We could try to talk to non-profit like arXiv.org to allow GRC as donations. We could try to talk to Nature or Science for collaboration to allow GRC as payment for journal/paper access. In short: GRC has the potential to become a currency for all science related stuff.

5d) find ways to allow long-term, real-life GRC investment options. Some ppl don't seem to like the current situation because whales hold a high % of total GRC. While ppl argue this will change over time - I think it would change a lot faster with actual investment options, e.g. buying shares from startups or companies. Focus could be in general technology, if possible sustainable/green/eco/etc.

5e) directly support universities/institutes with donations which then accelerates progress and creates new projects for the community to work on, etc. Basically get more scientists to use BOINC/GRC, which then creates (hopefully) more incentive for regular people to get involved as well by contributing with their resources (electricity/hardware).

In general, there needs to be some real long-term motivation - either via trade/sale or further investment options that involves GRC more prominently. I really like this concept and I want more ppl on this, but I do not think it will turn out well if we just aim for those who want quick profit by mining and trading on exchanges. That's a general issue with the crypto concept atm, it's just another fast trade thing (not to mention all the scams) and it lacks an actual long-term real life value. If the crypto bubbble will burst one day, GRC should be the currency that won't be affected because it is more than just about numbers and quick cash - at least that's my hope regarding this project.

silent5am commented 7 years ago

Just to expand why I think my points 1-4 are relevant in context of marketing: with more features and a more interactive UI, displaying more stats, etc - but also at the same time lowering the initial complexity for becoming part of the community, newbies won't be discouraged to give GRC a try.

During the past two weeks I really was excited about BOINC/GRC and sent links to friends and family. All of them started to look at the stuff and decided it was just too much work to get started. So basically I was the only one who decided to give it a try and experiment a bit.

Less complexity and a much more smoother initial experience will not only convince people to give it a try on a Sunday night, but also keep them invested during the first few days/weeks that seem to take forever until things finally get rolling.

These kind of changes would be a major long-term investment into the GRC-side of user experience. While we can't tell BOINC what to do, we could try to make the entire process as easy/comfortable as possible.

And if we are aiming at gamers especially, we really will need some sort of achievement system or better visualized stats/progress client-side - not to mention that we all would profit from this instead of using several websites to track everything, that's just tedious imho.

Gather all the available information in one place for starters. If it is too much work to create a responsive UI, at least introduce a way to export the data for Excel, etc. so ppl can create their own graphs.

ʕ༼◕ ౪ ◕✿༽ʔ

dnb4ever commented 7 years ago

I like the idea of an achievement system. This would really get the gamers involved and also be a better indicator of progress, which is an almost mystical thing as a total noob. If I weren't in the IRC I wouldn't have known that you really need a decent balance to get paid at a rate that makes it look like this system works. Everyone SAYS that the estimated time is very wrong.... so maybe we shouldn't show that then? I think a lot of noobs come to the conclusion of "oh, I actually do need to buy some GRC to have any chance at staking, but the BOINC is gonna cost me electricity too..." so then they jump out thinking it's a scam of sorts because you basically have to buy in.

If we had achievements for things like "10000 hours online!" then it would also guarantee that more people keep a wallet up.

silent5am commented 7 years ago

If we had achievements for things like "10000 hours online!" then it would also guarantee that more people keep a wallet up.

Oh this is a very good point as well! It would be another incentive to keep wallets running 24/7, and maybe also stake more often?

Basically, if there is something we want people to do, we should see how we can reward that - even if it's just virtual rewards that don't have any real value other than prestige.

Although, we could introduce GRC rewards after X % achievement progress, e.g. 50 achievements @ 100% -> 5 GRC, 100 achievements @ 100% -> 10 GRC, etc. Ofc, there should be some measure that prevents abuse by using multiple wallets/CPIDs/IPs/etc. if we are going for GRC rewards.

Vortac2 commented 7 years ago

Regarding the release of funds from Gridcoin Foundation:

Everyone with a balance of 100k GRC or more can create a vote within the Gridcoin wallet, seeking an approval for an expense or advertising campaign (Note: voting system currently does not work, but it's a temporary glitch and devs are working on it). If you don't have the funds, you can request from someone who does to create a vote for you.
You should present your ideas, ads, banners, campaigns etc on Slack (https://teamgridcoin.slack.com) and Steemit (https://steemit.com/trending/gridcoin). Github is a not really the best choice for such discussions. I will upvote any Gridcoin-related content of reasonable quality on Steemit (with rewards up to 50 SBD). If you want people to vote for you and to approve your expense, you must present some plan, idea, concept, results. Here are some articles about Gridcoin advertising on Steemit:

Be aware, advertising to users who are unfamiliar with BOINC and crypto is very demanding. We need some top-notch marketing across the board to win such users, along with everything else (wallet UI, new design/logo, further improvements to our website etc). It's easy enough to get the clicks, but the effort is wasted if the bounce rate is above 90% (not to mention the conversion rate).

silent5am commented 7 years ago

Ok. I thought I shouldn't start posting my ideas in the open and have an internal discussion first, mainly because I'm new and don't know much about programming, etc. in order to estimate what is possible and what is just wet dreams.

But I sure can post a more detailed concept on steemit if that is what you guys would prefer :)

Vortac2 commented 7 years ago

Steemit has many advantages, marketing wise. Two main are:

You will get rewarded. High-quality Gridcoin articles earn up to 100 Steem Dollars there (that's almost 200 USD).
This is marketing we are talking about. Only hardcore Gridcoiners will notice such content here (and we already have them on board, obviously. But Steemit is currently the hot spot for all things crypto-related and many potential new users will notice it there. Thus, the article about marketing becomes a marketing tool itself, because it's a reliable sign of active and vibrant community. Who wouldn't want to invest in a coin like that?

Erkan-Yilmaz commented 7 years ago

Here are examples from today how user zipity invited in a French gamer site people to Gridcoin:

Erkan-Yilmaz / Gridcoin-tasks

Contact/target users with good hardware #52