It's time to announce the winner of the 2015 Cointelegraph and Ziftr competition for the best answer to the question of “what will it take for Bitcoin to gain mass acceptance?”

For the last few weeks Cointelegraph has teamed up with Ziftr to offer our readers a chance to win both Bitcoins and ZiftrCOINs. We've been asking the community a difficult question, “What will it take for Bitcoin to gain mass acceptance?”, and have received a number of interesting answers.

We read through all of the entries to the competition and placed them on our competition page in order to let the readers of Cointelegraph vote for their favorite answer to win a grand prize of 0.5 BTC and 500 ZiftrCOINS.

ZiftrCOIN made a stir back in 2014 by offering a value guarantee in the sometimes volatile world of altcoins. When consumers conduct transactions within Ziftr’s retailer network, each ziftrCOIN can be redeemed for at least $1/coin, for up to 5% of the purchase. If ziftrCOINs are currently trading on the open market for more than $1/coin, then the 5% limit is removed.

The new digital currency recently celebrated the end of it's pre-sale, having raised US$860,000 from a mix of both normal users and venture capital firm 10X Venture Partners. The new approach, of value-backing the currency through Ziftr's existing retail referral network, proving to be an attractive reassurance for those hoping the coins will increase in value beyond the US$1 mark.

Cointelegraph would like to thank everyone who took the time to write and submit their entries, and also to all of you who read, commented upon, and voted for one of the three finalists. After counting the votes, we're happy to announce that the winner of the 0.5BTC plus 500 ZiftrCOINs is:

Dwain Findlay

For his article on how Wall Street could push Bitcoin into mass acceptance

“Retailers begin to notice that a significant number of consumers own bitcoin and worry that if they don’t accept the currency they will be at a competitive disadvantage to the retailers who do. This leads to mass adoption by retailers that are trying to avoid being left behind in the new cryptocurrency revolution.”

You can read the whole of Dwain's entry here, as well as those by the runners-up such as Johan Lundqvist's entry on community, and Brenda Lawson's exploration of Bitcoin's image.

We also had on offer five prizes of 0.2 BTC plus 100 ZiftrCOINs on offer for the best entries we received via our Facebook page. We've been carefully reading over the entries, and will be getting in touch with the winners of those prizes soon, so keep your eyes on your inboxes.

Prizes will be distributed in the coming weeks, and it might take a little time for us to collect everyone's details, so please bear with us whilst we gather all the information we need. Finally, thanks again to

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