A Case for paying meet-up attendees BCH dividends

As co-organizer of the Toronto Bitcoin Cash Meet-Up , I was trying to come up with ways to encourage more participation in our recently resurrected meet up.

Right around this time, SLP tokens were getting a lot of attention thanks to the bitcoin.com dividend tool, which allowed anyone to pay BCH dividends to holders of a particular SLP token.

I thought, why not create an SLP attendance token for our meet-up, and reward token holders with BCH proportional to their attendance?

The next logical question was "how will our meet up generate BCH"? If we were to distribute dividends, we needed revenue.

Thankfully there was a very simple solution : Bitcoin.com was sponsoring meet-ups with swag like stickers, pins and t-shirts. We could sell this swag for BCH and then re-distribute it to token holders.

And so I created the Bitcoin Cash Toronto (BCT) Token. Each attendee would receive 10 tokens for every meet up they attended. Members were encouraged to install the badger.bitcoin.com before coming to the meet-up.

Test Driving the Token Reward System

We test drove this system at our OCT 27th meet up. I was surprised by how many people walked in the door not knowing anything about BCH, but still had their badger wallet in had ready to receive the tokens. In this brief video I'm explaining the difference between SLP and BCH receiving addresses to two young women attending the meet up.

We sold swag such a t-shirts, stickers, lanyards, pens, pins and more. Attendees could spend their BCT tokens on some swag, or pay directly with BCH. Attendees were also able to enter a draw to win some swag, again paying with either BCH or BCT SLP tokens to enter the raffle.

ALL BCT tokens spent on swag, along with any extra un-redeemed tokens would be later burned using the Electron Cash SLP edition wallet which minted them. This was to ensure that every attendee would really earn their fair share, be it through the upcoming dividend pay-out, swag received for the tokens, or a combination of both.

We had earned just over $12 selling swag for BCH and paid this out to the 9 token holders of the night.

An Incentive System That Drives Adoption

Rewarding attendees with SLP tokens is a great way to increase adoption. The benefits of utilizing these are many:

• Attendees have a financial incentive to attend the meet up, by the possibility of winning a raffle, earning BCH dividends through the SLP tokens, or spending the SLP tokens on swag.

• Attendees are on-boarded on the spot, introduced to both BCH and SLP tokens, and get an opportunity to use either one that same night.

• Attendees get to learn about dividends, and then experience their magic the following day when the payments are sent out.

• The meet-up co-organizers have the same financial incentives for attending, since they also earn 10 tokens for attending.

Working Out The Details

The first test-run was certainly a success, but there were a few lessons learned along the way:

1. One guy brought 3 friends and earned 40 tokens for all four of them. For the sake of increasing adoption, future attendees will not be allowed to collect tokens on behalf of their less interested friends.

2. Those who wanted to spend BCT tokens on swag needed some dust to process the transactions, since SLP transactions require some BCH to process. We easily solved this by giving a few pennies worth of BCH to the attendees while on boarding them with the SLP tokens (This problem might already be solved thanks to Vin Armani's SLP post office system)

3. We sold more swag with the SLP tokens than we did with BCH. While this was great for getting people to spend their tokens as cash, we might have earned more BCH if we priced the tokens a little less aggressively. On the other hand, more tokens spent mean less in circulation, which means each dividend holder gets proportionally more BCH that way. I imagine it will take some fine tuning to get this just right.

Future Directions

Although selling swag from Bitcoin.com was a great way to get people to use, earn and spend SLP tokens and BCH, I'm hesitant to rely on only one method of funding our meet up. What happens if Bitcoin.com stops sending free swag, or if we sell our current stock and are waiting for another shipment?

For a system to be robust, it can't have a single point of failure. I've thought of a few ways meet up organizers can still earn BCH for their meet up outside of selling Bitcoin.com swag:

Other ways Meetups can Earn BCH

1. Charge local vendors/artisans a small fee to sell their goods at your meet-up. Be sure to clear this with the venue to ensure they are okay with it. The vendors can accept what ever form of currency they want, but make sure they also accept BCH.

2. Recruit sponsors. At our upcoming December 1st meet up, a local Canadian exchange (virgocx) will be sponsoring a $50 "Guess the BCH price on our exchange" BCH raffle. I'd be interested to see if they'd be open to regular sponsorship of the meet up, either through a raffle or small sponsorship fee (or a combination of both).

3. Save up some BCH and buy this crypto-candy dispensing machine. Ensure you charge more for the candy than you paid for it, and you have an ongoing revenue system for your meet up.

4. Share what you're up to on sites like this (read.cash), reddit, twitter, etc. I've found that the Bitcoin Cash Community is more than happy to reward good ideas with BCH.

5. Similar to #4, you can appeal to the community for donations. Charities like eatbch and coins4clothes are a testament to the generosity of the BCH community. Just make sure to explain what you plan to do with the donated funds, and how this will increase BCH/SLP adoption.

I would love to hear what you think about these ideas. Do you have any other strategies/tips to finance meet-ups? Can you think of other strategies meet-ups can employ to increase BCH/SLP adoption?

If you'd like to support our December 1st meet up, you can tip this article or donate at the address below. All BCH earned will be airdropped to our attendees. I might save some towards buying the crypto-candy dispenser though! :)

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P.S. we are also air-dropping 10,000 SPICE to our attendees. If you'd like to increase this with some spice you can do so here:

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