Validation! PorcFest proved the model works.  

Good Morning!

PorcFest was awesome

This year's PorcFest was an incredible time. Several hundred liberty lovers, probably way more than 700 of them, made it up to Roger's Campground in Lancaster NH to party for freedom. Shire Silver was there in the middle of it all, having a prime location in the free market vendor area named Agorist Alley.

We arrived on Wednesday afternoon, and after getting set up we started selling the Shire Silver cards we had produced. We were very busy all day Thursday selling them as well, and by that evening an amazing thing started happening: people came up to us that we had never seen before and showed us the cards they had gotten in trade. People were using the cards as intended - as a currency!

The crowd at PorcFest loved the cards, and almost all of the vendors there not only accepted the cards, but they handed them out as change. This validates the model as one that can really work in the real world, as having the one gram silver cards allows exchanges to occur totally in Shire Silver.

On Sunday morning I had several discussions with attendees, many of whom stated that they had spent the entire time there never using Federal Reserve Notes, but using silver and gold exclusively.

Vendors/Merchants

While we didn't have time to sign up merchants at PorcFest, it appears that many of them will end up being official merchants. Some of these vendors were temporary creations just for PorcFest, but many of them are ongoing businesses that temporarily relocated to the campsite for the week.

One of the ones we visited most was George's Famous Baklava. Their desserts were very good, especially the deep fried baklava. The gyros were also good, and they were even able to scramble to come up with a vegetarian version. But the best part was that they were heavy users of Shire Silver.

Another vendor that we ran into was Andy's Leather Shop, who was making leather goods right there at his campsite. He makes his business cards on the spot too - they're little bits of leather with his website punched into them. Cool as heck.

There were a lot of other vendors there that used Shire Silver, and of course all kinds of other opportunities arose, like using it for poker games and informal trades.

Sales

We did sell a lot of cards, although not as many as we brought. In great part due to their actual use as currency, we seemed to have saturated the market at some point. Sales were good on Thursday, but they petered out to almost nothing by Friday evening.

Some people might consider this a failure, but we see it as the opposite. The market became saturated because people were using it. They were getting it as change from the merchants, so they didn't need to get it from us. Nothing could have been better because it showed that far more than is the case with standard bullion, Shire Silver is meant for use in trade.

Plus, with a reasonable supply of cards left over, we can now take them to the streets as well as sell them on the website.

Lots of work to do

Unfortunately, the success at this event, introducing the Shire Silver cards for the first time to the public, means that we have a lot of work to do. We still need to figure out a good source of data four our pricing display - Yahoo is still giving us bad data. We also need to add the left over inventory to the shopping cart.

Also on the list is rewarding people for getting merchants to sign up. Often called affiliate marketing, the idea is that a portion of the merchant's monthly fees would be directed to the person who got the merchant to join.

PorcFest was an invigorating and exciting time, and is highly recommended. We got a lot done, but like Liberty Forum before that, we now have to switch to a higher gear and get even more busy.

Here's to Defending Traditional Value, with Shire SIlver