There was a post recently by Nick about conferences the MaidSafe team should attend. He suggested that Bitcoin conferences were a lower priority because we want to appeal to a wider audience. I think it’s great to appeal to a wider audience, but Bitcoin enthusiasts will be MaidSafe’s early adopters. It’s a mistake to assume we’re all good with the crypto community. From what I’ve seen MaidSafe is light years ahead of many popular projects, but isn’t discussed as much. “Optics” is important. Perception is truth.
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MaidSafe is already one of the top four or so Bitcoin projects (even though it isn’t one 
- quite an achievement!), so bitcoiners might well wonder why it isn’t at conferences, but they will at least know about it.
It has much wider appeal than bitcoin, and I think its a good strategy to focus on things that appeal to many more people:
- cheap secure storage
- secure anonymous communications
- built in content rewards for publishers and creators
We could find that this is the thing that brings crypto currency to a mass audience without them even realising that’s what it is. If apps and publishers start utilising Safecoin, and users find they can easily acquire it, or more likely, already have it - crypto currency becomes a no-brainer rather than: “er, why would I need bitcoin?” Which is the “normal” reaction I’ve had when describing it.
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I agree and no assumptions made. Our event planning is forward looking and 6-9 months down the road we need to start creating awareness amongst partners and users not intertwined within the crypto space. This does not mean we ignore it (I will be at Inside Bitcoins New York and was on a crypto currency panel at Warwick Uni this weekend) but we have generated decent awareness within Bitcoin (Paige is one of the organisers at one of the biggest btc meet ups in SF) and we’ll start to see a law of diminishing returns if we continue to focus on this vibrant yet still quite niche (in comparison to the wider Internet) sector.
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Is that a hint at about the internal expectation of the launch date? 
Meh… The biggest nightmare of Bitcoin enthusiasts is to miss the boat to be an early adopter of the next big thing. Once MaidSafe is up and running and proving itself, there will come a storm of them. You really don’t have to market to them, they’ll recognize the superiority of MaidSafe’s features. Everyone has seen MaidSafeCoin in the top 10 of crypto-currencies, so they’re all aware at some level.
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Agreed. Once the network goes live, the btc community will be all over it in a really big way, with little or no additional push.
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No, I wouldn’t read anything into this 
. The vast majority of decent events (with a couple of exceptions) tend to be over by the Autumn so that was more what I was getting at.
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Having a well established network, and software will be a great accomplishment to have when attending the next round of events that are each time in the September and August months;
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I don’t know what hype machine people are talking about. Let’s hit the "hype machine with fact: every day I don’t get one e-mail from github about a code commit to maidsafe-- I get many e-mails from github about code commits to maidsafe. Furthermore, maidsafe does something the others don’t-- it is a plan to capitalize bandwidth provision. A plan, in essence, to capitalize on communication, and to enable those who don’t have it to pay to receive communication services. Maidsafe is going to be just fine, folks.
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Festina lente. Roman saying, “Make haste slowly.” (Borrowed from a friend.) As a mere customer end user I don’t know if now is the decision crunch time. That doesn’t make sense. If you are saying it is an either/or situation then is a grim situation no matter what. If it’s fear that years of genius could be sidelined that seems very unlikely. See meal analogies. Fear is best used as a motivator not an operating system. Maidsafe is going to be loved for a long time.
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