Sorry for being so quiet these past few days. As you know I've been working on an initiative to bring educational opportunities to steemit. One of the initiatives I'm working on in conjunction with @imaxess is to bring college level educational materials over to steemit specifically targeting aspiring young doctors.
But my end goal here is to build out a complete, soup to nuts educational platform where anyone, anywhere in the world, can just learn a new thing every day at home in their spare time and eventually even earn an accredited degree simply by taking courses on the platform.
Beyond medicine, there is a huge opportunity right now for us to bring core technical competency courses here, but real technical courses, require a lot of hands on materials and for that, we are going to need a supplier...
Years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Lady Ada at a talk she was giving and while we barely even got to shake hands, I was just floored by her vision. What I remember most, is just how impressed I was with her desire to make technical knowledge accessible to everyone. Her videos introducing electronics concepts to kids were required watching in my house.
So in a way, everything you see me doing here to bring education to steemit is at least in part inspired by her.
Lady Ada is also the founder of Adafruit industries. A large and well known supplier of affordable hardware and educational kits to schools and educators as well as home hobbyists and home schoolers.
At the moment, they only accept paypal and amazon, but I've recently popped into their forum asking them to consider accepting SBD as a method of payment as well. I was thinking it would probably be pretty straightforward to integrate #blocktrades into their payment flow in general.
I'm hoping @blocktrades will watch this and chime in.
However adding any new payment system is always a tradeoff. I'm certain they would like to know that if they put forth the effort to accept steem dollars, that of course it will result in additional sales for them beyond their core audience. I haven't even broached the idea of advertising on here with them. But I'm sure they are savvy enough to see how getting an exclusive lock on the eyeballs of 100,000 nerds at literally no cost to them, might be a good idea. So maybe this will be enough to get them to at least consider coming here and telling us about their latest gadgets for sale ;)
So I'm asking all of my followers to go to the Adafruit Forums and let them know that if they build it, we will come (and order more great products!).
Thank you everyone, please make sure to drop by the Adafruit Forums and voice your support!
p.s. All SBD raised from this post will be used to purchase educational kits and supplies from adafruit, one way or the other.
update: I found an old article from 2013 saying they would accept bitcoin via bitpay. It's not listed anywhere on their site. I placed a test order to see if any other payment options were available. It looks like they used to accept bitcoin, but the checkout page sent me to a dead link when I tried to checkout. So just an FYI they USED to accept bitcoin and they still MIGHT. I would like to ask everyone to head over to the Adafruit Forums and let them know that if they build it, we will come (and order more great products!) and let them know that SteemDollars are better ;)
update 2: After talking with Nick in their customer service department, it turns out that they do in fact accept bitcoin still. It's still via bitpay. We don't know where the problem was with my order, but at least they are aware now. I have to say I'm very impressed with their customer service. They are watching the forum thread so head on over to Adafruit Forums and let them know this whole steem dollars thing is something you would like to see them accept!
Thanks!