Hear me out. This is a half baked idea I got on a walk and it may be absurd.
Say I want to sell a car that’s worth $10k for only $8k in zcash.
The buyer would be getting a deal and while I may be losing out on $2k, awareness in zcash is increased and with any luck the value in zcash will increase making up for the initial loss.
In this way, people get a discount on goods, zcash awareness is increased and the seller is made whole in due time.
Of course the buyer would be forced to go through the hassle of obtaining zcash, but maybe the savings would be worth the effort?
For context, in the case of purse.io, users were willing to exchange their Amazon credits at a discount for bitcoin because they earned them via Mechanical Turk and didn’t have access to banking or Amazon locally.
I never saw any statistics on that platform, but Mechanical Turk users were not the only people buying on Amazon in exchange for Bitcoin; people looking into getting non-KYC’d tokens were another type of users, as were people not having access to KYC’d exchanges.
Imagine if there were a site that allowed users to save 20% on all Amazon purchases provided they paid in ZEC. Now imagine this site really took off and became the de-facto standard way of purchasing items on Amazon.
The owner of the site would essentially be purchasing ZEC at a 20% premium. However, due to the increased demand for ZEC, the price would steadily rise. This cycle continues further driving demand.
The site owner eventually would have to sell some ZEC to make a profit which could potentially drive the price down defeating the purpose of making money but awareness of ZEC would be substantially improved.
I think what we need is to encourage people in this forum, Discord, etc., to share what good and services they can provide for ZEC payment.
Convinced you barber to take ZEC? Tell us! Maybe someone is in the area and can use their ZEC.
An idea that I have discussed with some people is that events like Zcon (when in person) could have a “vendor afternoon” where local vendors can set up their stand to sell stuff to the attendants of the event. If they agree to take ZEC, they can do it for free, otherwise they pay a fee.
If you want to start the freewheel, you need both a reasonable amount of people with ZEC (willing to spend it) and a variety of vendors willing to accept it.
When the Zcon-like event is over, it would leave behind a bunch of vendors that take ZEC in that location.
I ended up selling 2 ounces of gold for $7,000 worth of ZEC on October 8th. Gold was going for $4k an ounce at the time.
Buyer got a $1k discount and I got sheilded ZEC. The discounted price helped offset the hassle the buyer went through obtaining the ZEC through Coinbase and learning how to use Zashi.
The buyer commented that it was cool learning experience. I spent about an hour texting back and forth walking them through the process of actually sending me the ZEC. I explained the shielding process but that step somehow got lost along the way hence the hour-long troubleshooting session. Once the funds were sheilded it was smooth sailing.
It was definitely a smart move to offer a discount when requiring a crypto newbie to jump through the hoops of acquiring Zcash just to complete a purchase.
(Above: It’s the entire zec whitepaper in 9 point font, displayed on a 24x36 inch print. available in metal panel format as well)
I’d post a link, but this forum doesn’t seem to allow it. Pretty sure I am the only person to have made anything like this So if you go on Etsy and type in “Zcash art” you’ll find it.
Sincere thank you to @Tomas-M , I’ve now created a crowdstore.net site so that anyone can purchase the ZEC whitepaper print (or metal panel variant) and pay via ZEC!
I’ve been wanting to accept payments for these, this is so awesome, thank you Tomas.
The shop code is: KYAtTFJQvdNcccHCxrwwj7tmcAns4i3GHeJkhvTyi7U4
So if you go on Etsy and type in “Zcash art” you’ll find it.
