George Siosi Samuels: For BSV adoption, focus on people, not technology

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The Bitcoin revolution is most often discussed in terms of technology or finance. But for George Siosi Samuels, its success will depend as much on the human dimension. George is managing director of a consultancy called Faiā, which offers the unusual mix of blockchain integration and community management.

George argues for more emphasis on the users of Bitcoin SV: “it’s so classic in the technical world to think that how you will get adoption is by selling the technical benefits. But if you’re looking for global adoption, if that’s our mission, you have to remember the end users. What are they motivated by?”

While Bitcoin miners may have a purely capitalist incentive, to make money, the users’ priorities are more complex: “remember that not everyone is motivated by money. And when we’re looking at branding and communities, you’ll find that a lot of the time, people will ‘work’ for things other than money.”

If you’re selling the technical benefits of Bitcoin SV, George says, they are only one part of what the customer’s decision will be based upon. A consumer’s choice might be to impress their boss, for instance. And so “I think there’s not enough focus on the people aspect”.

George makes an analogy with the rivalry between Apple and Microsoft, where Apple “made [their brand] mean a lot more”. They understood that “people will buy for simplicity, not for all the technical features. The average person doesn’t care.”

In terms of the people who work in Bitcoin SV, George is cautious about labelling them as a community: “I have seen that when things get really tough, the ‘community’ splits very easily.” If relationships are purely transactional, motivated by money, that’s not the definition of community that George wants to use.

George says that in time Bitcoin will become less prominent in discussions about its applications – in the same way that “when we’re talking about business on the Internet, we don’t need to mention the Internet. Bitcoin is the plumbing system: it’s boring, and simple, but it’s so vital.”

Just as PCs used to be sold to consumers by boasting that they had ‘Intel Inside’, “maybe at the beginning if we want to say ‘Powered by Bitcoin’ or something, we can, but I do envisage the future where it just fades into the background – and that would be a good sign.”

It’s the same with how Faiā works to change culture in a community, George says: “when you’re looking to intentionally create a culture within a community, you do all these things at the beginning and you’re very vocal about it. But the intention is that you then sort of fade away in the background, and the culture does its thing.”

So now we just need to “start focusing more on the products and the ecosystems that will really take Bitcoin to the next level.”

Hear more from George Siosi Samuels in this week’s CoinGeek Conversation podcast:

You can also watch the podcast video on YouTube.

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