2018.07.12 Growth call

[ripcurlx]

• Date: Thu July 12th
  • Time: 11:15a–12:15p Pacific / 8:15p–9:15p Central European
  • Place: YouTube livestream, see Call Details below

If you want to help Bisq grow, then this is the meeting to attend!

Everyone is welcome, and there's no need to RSVP or register, but if you do plan to attend, please add a 👍 below so we have an idea how many people will be there.

Note also that you can subscribe to the Bisq DAO Google Calendar to get notifications about this call and other Bisq events. See https://bisq.network/calendar.

Agenda

You'll find the general agenda of our growth calls here: https://github.com/bisq-network/growth/blob/master/docs/growth-meeting.md

As decided on our first growth call (6th of Dec '17) we will focus all our efforts for the next couple of months on increasing liquidity on the Bisq network.

Before we can grow the number of overall traders on the Bisq network, we first need to make sure that we have plenty of liquidity available in major trading pairs, esp. EUR and USD.

This means that anyone who considers themselves a potential 'market maker' or 'liquidity provider' is especially welcome on this call, to help us brainstorm ways to make Bisq an attractive place to be for you. We already have a number of ideas, and are looking to get your feedback.

Note that while we're happy to have pro and semi-pro traders serve as liquidity providers, we're also looking for anyone who simply has a need to sell BTC on a regular basis, e.g. for basic cash flow purposes.

This week will be about: TBD

Feel free to add any remarks below or points you want to discuss on this weeks growth call!

Call details

We are streaming the meeting live on YouTube this time:

• https://youtu.be/jwzp3oEyQVw

You can just watch the live stream and add comments in the live chat or if you want you can join the call by using following Google Hangout invitation link:

The link will be posted here and on Slack 15 minutes before the call.

Comments welcome

Please add comments below with any questions you have or regarding any other topics you'd like to discuss on this call. See also the open issues in this repository.

Hope to see you there!

[ripcurlx]

@flix1 Will you run today's call?

[flix1]

@ripcurlx no problem! I'll do it today.

[flix1]

[flix1]

Agenda for today:

1. Failure of XMR, CHF liquidity weeks.
2. New markets (VND, THB...)
3. Market-making guide & discussion
4. 0.7.1 Survey results
5. China?

[sqrrm]

Perhaps it's time to rethink the liquidity weeks. They worked well for EUR and USD but other markets might need different methods. I know @flix1 has already asked for other ideas on how to promote growth. My feeling is that a dedicated team in each smaller currency area could work well in boot strapping and perhaps also growing it from there. Vietnam seems like a place where that's happening and feedback from those working on it there would surely be enlightening.

[flix1]

Links to today's growth call: Hangout: https://hangouts.google.com/hangouts/_/aiulttrchfckxh6frgm524wvqae Youtube: https://youtu.be/jwzp3oEyQVw

[ghost]

@sqrrm wrote:

Perhaps it's time to rethink the liquidity weeks.

Yes, and perhaps it's also time to rethink about the tools used.

1/ For my part, I find a bit paradoxical to use unsafe and unsecure tools (like youtube) to promote a software who's main advertising is safety. It's highly probable that what many customers/traders, the most demanding users, are searching with Bisq is safety. And Bisq itself answers nicely this demand. But there are too many tools surrounding Bisq and leading to Bisq who are absolutely unsafe. For the exact same reason some users use Bisq, some potential other users are (rightfully imo) relunctant to use youtube/facebook/twitter/etc.

2/ It is also highly possible that bisq's youtube channel is simply not seeable in some country, eg China. So we are in the situation where we do some advertising work ... which can just not reach its audience.

For the reasons above, imo, we should explore other tools more in accordance with Bisq itself.

This would be more coherent and probably fruitful in the long run.

[m52go]

In my experience with the US market, sell offers are the biggest limiting factor in onboarding new users. I've gotten a handful of people on Bisq in the past couple of months, but often there weren't any offers available for them to buy BTC immediately. While you can make your own offer to buy, having to wait for some unpredictable amount of time before getting the bitcoin you were so excited sucks out the initial excitement and makes it harder to get the user to buy again.

This also makes it hard to put on Bisq-specific onboarding events like Anders has mentioned.

How about a strategy that's a bit more hands-on? Could we just manually recruit 5-6 people in a market to always have a handful of offers using the most common payment methods? I guess this would basically become a compensated contributor role where the duty is to provide a continuous supply of small BTC sell offers (0.01 - 0.04).

Even in a market like the USD, which is relatively large compared to most other currencies, having just 5 people provide 5 reasonable outstanding sell offers (i.e., not with premiums of 20% or 30% like recently 😠) would easily double outstanding offers, get new users on the happy path quickly & smoothly, and perhaps most crucially, enable in-person events to evangelize Bisq.

I think that combination (designated market makers & in-person events) could be incredible for both existing markets like USD and brand-new markets. I used to discount in-person events as old-fashioned and limited in reach, but digital marketing has so much noise, and engagement requires so little commitment that I think the scale can be disillusioning...meaning there's a chance that a quality in-person event with ~30 people 100% engaged and invested trumps a tweet or article that gets 30,000 impressions. We could also explore webinars to get the best of both worlds. Either way, liquidity on the sell BTC side is crucial.

@HarryMacfinned I think we need to distinguish between privacy and security, and privacy and security for individuals and for organizations. Google's security is probably about as good as it gets for any consumer-oriented centralized service. Its privacy is terrible, but is that really a concern for the Bisq account? I'm not sure it's necessary for the Bisq YouTube account to have privacy like I want for my personal Google account.

Actually, it's good for Bisq for YouTube's algorithms to promote the channel to other YouTube users who will like it. Over a billion people use YouTube, and it's the biggest search engine in the world after Google. It's foolish for a project seeking growth to avoid it. Users can watch YouTube videos on virtually any device with any OS without signing in. For consumers, privacy isn't compromised.

I can see how an individual might be hesitant to participate in a Hangout call because of privacy. If you or others are in that boat, it's a discussion we could have.

[ghost]

I can see how an individual might be hesitant to participate in a Hangout call because of privacy. If you or others are in that boat, it's a discussion we could have.

Yes, I was also thinking to this case. Because I observed on several growth call, that X persons were following the videos ... but there weren't X persons signaling themselves although it was repeatedly asked. It may be that people forgot, but it may also signal that people are reluctant.

You can watch youtube videos thru torbrower ... but you cannot participate to online yt video thru torbrower. You'll have to go thru clearnet, and then hop your IP is collected.

Google is a wonderful company, but google works hand in hand with the US gov. As other, I have 0 trust in google to preserve any anonymity against the US gov. (If the US gov asks some information to google it's probably less than some hours for them to have the answer). https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ https://thefreethoughtproject.com/julian-assange-google-cia/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Authenticator not open-source etc

I believe that, by nature, there is a significant part of Bisq's customers who are really concerned with such issues.

And as said, there is also the simple case were YT conforms to govs demands and censors videos or channels in this or this country.

[m52go]

@HarryMacfinned I just realized @cbeams made a comment earlier addressing a similar topic over here. I echo his thoughts.

[flix1]

From China 18-07-2018 . Using regular hotel wifi (no VPN).

[ManfredKarrer]

Ah cool!

[ripcurlx]

@flix1 👍 Btw. I've just tweeted the short questionnaire (http://survey.io/survey/10363) which can be used by everyone to give feedback: https://twitter.com/chrisattee/status/1019524052212436993