Spread Bisq 2 education through European meetups

[counterweightoperator]

Summary

Create open-source materials for Bisq 2 workshops and promote them in an organic way through the flourishing meetups and communities scene in several European countries to kick-start Bisq 2 adoption in the euro area.

Goals

The end goal is to increase adoption of Bisq 2/Easy and improve awareness of Bisq across European communities, with a focus on newcomers to the Bitcoin space.

This is achieved with the following subgoals:

• Create a great training material set in several languages so that anyone who would like to teach others how to use Bisq 2 can do so in an easy and high-quality way.
• Promote awareness of the launch of Bisq 2 and the existence of this material through direct contact with several Bitcoin communities in Europe with the hope that they will take the plunge and do live workshops of Bisq 2 in the area, either one-offs or ideally with some regularity.

Rationale

Onboarding friction

Bisq (both 1 and 2) offers a very different experience from that of CEXs. Understanding the trade system, the Bisq network itself and other elements is not straightforward at all for newcomers. In a way, Bisq is not only adopted, but it's actually learned. Learning about Bisq is a requirement to use it for two reasons: one, because otherwise it's impossible to go through the trade process. And two, because only with some understanding of Bisq can a user be sure that he is not being scammed. Many users are reluctant at first and get a sketchy impression, which is probably natural and healthy. Understanding what is going on under the hood, at least partially, is necessary to feel comfortable trading one's funds in Bisq.

Unfortunately, the fact that Bisq must be learned is a (unavoidable) hurdle for adoption. The friction of learning prevents many potential users from joining the network. Some of them don't want to invest the time and effort to do so. Some others might have troubles due to a lack of background knowledge in topics such as Bitcoin, privacy, open source networks and open protocols, etc. Their only hope is for someone to take them by the hand and patiently guide them through the learning journey.

Meetup wave

During the past couple of years, the meetup scene in Europe has experienced great growth. National or language-driven networks like Einundzwanzig (DE), Meetups 2140 (ES) or SatoshiSpritz (IT) are motivating more and more people to start Bitcoin-only groups in their cities and towns. These organizations support in the form of materials, webpages, meetup playbooks, white papers and social capital in the form of experienced meetup runner directories are helping the communities grow exponentially, both in terms of meetup counts and assistant counts to each one.

These meetups and meetup networks provide value to their members in several ways. On the one hand, many Bitcoiners simply find pleasure in sharing their passion with others through discussions and gatherings. Meetups have also become valuable P2P trading platforms, both for Fiat<>Bitcoin exchange and for the trading of goods and services for Bitcoin. Bitcoiners with their own Bitcoin-related projects, both hobby and professional grade, find in meetups a great place to associate with other entrepreneurs or to find users/clients. And finally, and most relevant for this proposal, many meetups have also become teaching and knowledge-sharing spaces, where more experienced Bitcoiners hold talks, workshops, and courses to help others learn more about Bitcoin and the surrounding technologies.

The challenge and opportunity

The launch of Bisq 2, initially only with the Bisq Easy trade protocol, is going to face the classic chicken-and-egg problem. No users will mean no liquidity, and without liquidity, no users will be attracted. I believe that the social networks building out throughout Europe can help fight this and get Bisq Easy to pick up and grow organically.

The plan presented below, in simple terms, is about promoting teaching sessions about Bisq Easy throughout the different European communities. A successful execution would look like dozens of Bisq Easy workshops being organized and managed by the meetups themselves, which in turn should drive hundreds or thousands of new users towards Bisq Easy (and hopefully, the other protocols after some time).

Several factors make this both attractive and feasible. Meetup sessions are a perfect onboarding method for newcomers to Bisq Easy. They can benefit from the experience of a veteran user to learn about Bisq in a personalized way. They also do this in a familiar environment, which helps beat the initial sketchiness skepticism. Bisq status as the OG DEX is a great presentation card. Many experienced meetup organizers are already familiar with Bisq, and probably many of them are also experienced with Bisq 1.

I believe the approach below also fits nicely with Bisq's philosophy as a project. It's resource-efficient, organic, community driven and exhibits low time preference. Besides helping new users join Bisq, it would also present the added benefit of refreshing and improving Bisq's brand awareness as a humble, community and pleb-driven project, with a completely different approach than the multi-million dollar marketing budget behemoths like Binance or Coinbase.

Plan

The execution plan is divided into three parts. I plan on taking care of the bulk of the execution, although additional help could be very useful in the third part.

Note: I am one of the organizers of the Barcelona Bitcoin Only meetup, and I'm also in touch with a few other meetup organizers from different communities in Spain. This context should help better understand parts 1 and 2.

Part 1

The first part of the plan is to create a Workshop Kit. This kit would consist of a series of materials aimed at helping experienced users execute a session where they show less experienced users how to use Bisq 2. The materials would be open source and accessible for anyone to use without any cost or permission required. Initially, I would include:

• A modular presentation deck with slides to cover different topics around Bisq, Bisq 2 and Bisq Easy.
• A guideline document for presenters with advice on how to successfully perform a workshop.
• Instructions on how to set up a demo environment for Bisq 2, or alternatively, demo materials such as screenshots and videos.

The first version of the kit would be developed in Spanish, and I would personally use it to perform a Bisq 2 workshop in the Barcelona Bitcoin Only community. The community regularly holds both large-audience talks and smaller, teaching-oriented workshops. My workshop would fall into the second category. I would take the opportunity of testing this in the real world to adjust the contents of the kit as best I could and incorporate any lessons learned into them.

At the end of part 1, the deliverables would be the Spanish version of the kit along with any useful takeaways I could produce from my experience. I expect to be able to finalize this by Octoboer/November.

Part 2

The second part of the plan would be spreading this content throughout the Spanish meetup scene with the hope that more meetup organizers would take the lead and perform workshops in their local communities. To achieve this, I would leverage my social network, as well as propose some sort of collaboration with the Meetups 2140 organization (https://2140meetups.com/), the largest Spanish-speaking meetup network. (I could also potentially go to other cities to run workshops myself if agenda, budget and the organizer's willingness allow. But I would strongly prefer this campaign to be grassroots and to have the organizers of each local community take care of it. I have no intent to become a one-man army).

The Spanish expansion would be a new opportunity to, on one hand, obtain even more feedback from the workshop runners to enrich and improve the Workshop Kit. On the other hand, it would also help me understand what the biggest blockers are for a community to hold a workshop like this, with the hope that this information can be used to improve the next efforts.

At the end of the part 2, the deliverables would be a potentially improved Spanish version of the workshop kit and a report on the workshops that took place. I would consider a time period of around three months to call part 2 closed (even though more workshops can keep happening afterwards). This would leave us somewhere around January/February 2024.

Part 3

The third and final part of the plan consists of leveraging the existing effort and the European meetup networks to spread Bisq workshops across Europe. This part could have some degree of overlap with part 2. And also, here efforts can be parallelized across different languages and regions. There is no need to execute different ones sequentially.

So far, I have spotted the following candidate networks/languages/regions:

• Einundzwanzig (https://einundzwanzig.space/meetups/) - German - Germany, Austria, Switzerland
• Decouvre Bitcoin (http://decouvrebitcoin.com/ambassadeurs/) - French - France
• Satoshi Spritz (http://satoshispritz.it/) - Italian - Italy
• Bitcoin Events (https://bitcoinevents.uk/uk-bitcoin-meetup-map/) - English - UK and Ireland

For each of these regions, execution would consist on:

• Translating the Workshop Kit to the corresponding language.
• Establishing contact with organizers of both the Meetup networks themselves as well as with the organizers of specific meetups.
• Provide advice, support and guidance to meetup organizers and community members on how to execute the Workshops.

The deliverables for part 3 would be the Workshop Kit translated into the different languages and reports on the workshops that took place. I think a three-month period is also reasonable here (even though more workshops can keep happening afterwards). Given my lack of social connections outside the Spanish meetup scene, help would be appreciated, and my hope is that at some point, things get a life of their own and Bisq and the training material spread organically across the networks.

Potential next steps

The scope of my proposal is limited to what is described above. Nevertheless, a few lines of work can be foreseen already:

• Expanding the viral effort to other languages and regions.
• Maintenance work on the Workshop Kit to keep up with new Bisq 2 releases and anything new that comes around.

Open issues

There are a few areas where things are not 100% clear to me and I would appreciate your feedback or suggestions:

• Measuring the success of this is rather difficult. There is no way to distinguish adoption generated by this proposal from adoption coming organically or from other initiatives. Any input here would be welcome, but I don't this has any decent solution.
• Keeping a list of workshops that have taken place, along with details on them such as the assistance count would be a proxy measure. For the Spanish community, I will probably be capable of roughly keeping track of that. But beyond that, I think I would have a hard time, plus me chasing events is not reliable or scalable. I haven't found any creative solutions or workarounds yet. One way would be to lock down the content and only provide it upon request, but I think that wouldn't fit our philosophy and would also introduce a lot of friction. I would rather have people use it without us knowing than sacrifice that to keep track of who's using it. Suggestions will be appreciated here.
• I also think it would be interesting to have incentives that could be provided to meetups and their organizers. In my opinion, any kind of financial compensation should be out of the question. I don't think it aligns with the grassroots attitude of the project, it could potentially attack greedy mercenaries who really don't care about Bitcoin or their communities and it would send the wrong message. I would trust someone from my community running the workshop because they think the app and system are great, but I would be suspicious if that person was getting paid for it. Perhaps offering a free small merch pack with a few t-shirts, stickers and such to communities that will hold a workshop could help both on this point and the previous one. Anyway, any incentive ideas will be more than welcome.
• If you are aware of any other interesting meetup network that I have missed, I'll be happy to know about it and include it in the list.
• As well, if you are related to any of these networks or run a meetup and want to help spread the message, it would be great to hear from you.

Related ideas

Some proposals with some degree of overlap have been discussed in the past. Here is non-exhaustive list:

• Create growth kit growth#204
• conducting offline bisq demo events to acquire new users growth#257

[HenrikJannsen]

Great initiative and idea!!!

To create specially designed Bisq T-Shirts for workshop runners and partizipants might be a great idea. Maybe something more valuable than a T-Shirt as a "Thanks you" gesture for the workshop runners would be great. Maybe a hardware wallet which can be branded with Bisq or the like?

[alvasw]

Excellent idea!!

[suddenwhipvapor]

• Measuring the success of this is rather difficult. There is no way to distinguish adoption generated by this proposal from adoption coming organically or from other initiatives. Any input here would be welcome, but I don't this has any decent solution.

maybe have a dropdown list of choices for users to choose from at install time,
**Where did you learn about Bisq Easy?

• I come from Bisq1
• word of mout
• 2140 meetups
• twitter
• satoshispritz
• telegram
• blahblah

that later sends to Bisq server the vote together with a unique ID based on system hardware configuration, to avoid giving weight to multiple installs?

[counterweightoperator]

Glad to see some positive reactions 😊

@HenrikJannsen I also like the merch idea and I think we could try to also find something more valuable. I wouldn't be sure about the Hardware Wallets, mostly since it's not a good practice to obtain them from anywhere that's not the manufacturer itself to prevent tampering.

@suddenwhipvapor That would definitely help, but I feel it's very dangerous to have Bisq collect that kind of information from users. With such a privacy minded audience, this could become a disaster. I would personally not want to disclose these kind of details myself.

[suddenwhipvapor]

@suddenwhipvapor That would definitely help, but I feel it's very dangerous to have Bisq collect that kind of information from users. With such a privacy minded audience, this could become a disaster. I would personally not want to disclose these kind of details myself.

by "that kind of information" you mean "where did you find out about Bisq?" (which would necessarily be opt-in and still doesn't help IDing someone) or "unique ID based on system hardware" (which would be implemented in an open source way so that it's verifiable it's only tied to the "vote" and nowhere else in the code it is used to trace the user behaviour at all)? I thought about your objection myself first-hand and I saw no stopping arguments, that's why I suggested it

[pazza83]

@counterweightoperator great idea.

I think one of the challenges with it being grassroots will be making potential presenters aware of the created Workshop Kit resources and confident enough in presenting something they might be a little unfamiliar with.

To reach more users it would also be good to have the workshops presented as a screen recording session, in addition to the live in person events, in multiple languages and uploaded to Bisq's YouTube channel and Bitcoin TV channel

Maybe a bounty system could be considered. That way you access passionate Bisq users that are keen to spread the message and are happy to take the lead on contacting bitcoin group organizers to arrange a presentation.

Bounties could be given for various contributions:

XXX USD for presenting Bisq 2 to a meetup.
XXX USD for creating a screen recording for use on Bisq's YouTube / Bitcoin TV channel
XXX USD for talking about Bisq 2 in a podcast

Bounties could be claimed in BSQ for the USD equivalent once delivered / uploaded (link could be shared, or in-person events could ask users to leave feedback on their issue).

[counterweightoperator]

@suddenwhipvapor

I agree with you that the information that the user is giving away is not something anyone should worry about.

I still think that the community is very skeptical about any kind of data collection. I'm not saying doing this is bad, just that the public could get a bad impression out of it. I guess people have been abused to such extremes privacy-wise that are now radicalized towards the other extreme. We should also take into account that not all users have the right knowledge to judge whether the sharing of some specific piece of data from their client to some other server is risky or not.

@pazza83

Thanks a lot for your suggestions. I think it would be great of some of the sessions would be recorded. Although I don't think it should be a substitute to have someone make some high quality video content for youtube, which I consider out of the scope of this proposal.

And about the bounties idea: that would definitely generate incentives for people to go for it. But I'm still hesitant as i mentioned in the first issue. I think offering money can (1) attract mercenaries who do not care about the project or presentation quality at all and just want to get it done to collect the bounty and (2) generate some skepticism across the audience (I wouldn't trust the same way a presenter who is doing the workshop out of passion/personal responsibility than one who is getting paid for it, even if it's not the main reason for him to do it).

I might be wrong on this one, and it might by a net positive to provide the bounties, but this is how I am feeling at this point. Happy to discuss.

[counterweightoperator]

Hello everyone,

Since this proposal got some positive feedback, I'm going to move forward and soon start working on part 1 of the plan.

Given that this is a bit of a larger/longish line of work, I thought it would be a good idea to share some estimates on effort and potential costs to manage expectations and align if necessary. For now, I'm limiting myself to part 1. According to my own number crunching, I would value the total in part 1 at $1,400.

More than happy to receive some feedback on the effort/compensation rough sketch as well as on any other part of the proposal before I get started this september with it.

[pazza83]

Marking this proposal as approved but will leave open for discussion

[counterweightoperator]

Hi all, now that the launch has happened it feels like the timing is right for this.

Do you still feel positive about this line of work? Is there anything you think should be changed?

If I don't hear any concerns, I'll probably start going for it.

@HenrikJannsen, @pazza83, @alvasw, @suddenwhipvapor

[suddenwhipvapor]

I still stand with the opinion of it being useful.
Considering how bisq easy could be a sort of introduction to the bisq environment for complete newbies, I would make sure to deliver how it allows nocoiners to get their feet wet in a nokyc manner, so they can then take advantage of the safer multisig protocol of bisq1