Why I Stopped BCH Builders

After a recurring theme of community consternation around the need for BCH to have a roadmap in the latter half of 2021, I organised a series of publically broadcast sessions to attempt to create a BCH community driven roadmap.

The initial rationale doc is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17xwqueUvKOfIx5edqX-juckWJs1xpi1XDll4DeYGEbg/edit?usp=sharing

You can see all three sessions in the playlist here:

There was no BCH Builders session at the end of February 2022, and after more than a week overdue no one has called me out on it. I was planning to discontinue the sessions anyway, and this provides the confirmatory evidence that it is superfluous to requirements.

In the interests of transparency and accountability, some brief details of the reasoning for this and lessons learnt.

Reasons the sessions have been discontinued:

1. It achieved its goal. The original intent was to address growing community concern, doubts and requests about BCH needing a "roadmap" or better intra-scene cooperation. All calls for that have completely vanished. After the debut of the proof-of-concept first BCH Builders session, I subsequently responded to several people who were engaging in this kind of hand-wringing, and though the idea of BCH Builders was sometimes lauded as a good initiative, none of the complainers ever followed up their supposed need for a solution with putting in the effort to actually join me for a stream session. It is very clear therefore that it was simply a convenient thing to complain about, not something that people actually felt important to fix. Examples:

   1. https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/r54kew/really_does_blow_my_mind_how_we_have_such_a/hmn8com/?context=3

   2. https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/qzj4jp/whats_your_criticism_about_bitcoin_cash_im_not/hlr232o/

   3. https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/rc9j1l/some_random_bitcoin_cash_project_ideas_i_had/hntk82q/?context=3

2. Lack of time and resources to justify the effort. I did feel there was some value being produced in these sessions. I did receive positive feedback from viewers on a number of occasions, and it did serve as useful brainstorming for potential projects I can complete myself in future. But why that needed to be public was not clear, and although there was some good comments no one really took it any further by actually jumping in to a session. So it wasn't worthless, but it didn't justify the substantial time and effort it required to organise. So it may be an idea that I revisit (or remix) in future, but currently my time is already under extreme demand for a lot of other BCH projects, and continuing this series is the lowest priority.

Lessons Learnt

Besides provably establishing the calls for a roadmap as essentially concern-trolling FUD, there was several other lessons I learnt from this experience. Perhaps the community can also reflect on these points and take some value from them.

1. BCH actually is very decentralised. Part of the reason this project didn't gain more traction is that there is no convenient timezone or schedule for the BCH community - as it is globally distributed, busy, and there is no obvious "nexus" of central control such as an American based foundation or similar that other coins have. Instead, work delivered in the community does come from a grassroots and independently managed collection of individuals and companies, under their own auspices and with no central coordination. This is very good news.

2. The community does attack meaningful projects, and doesn't need a roadmap to identify good things to work on. A couple of the ideas we had on the show to implement did independently get some work started from other BCH community members. I don't take any credit for this, I think it was merely convergent evolution, but it does confirm that necessary projects will get implemented (given time). Examples:

   1. More BCH Twitter Spaces. Shoutout to https://twitter.com/SheriUcar, https://twitter.com/VladTheProfit and https://twitter.com/Hayden_Otto among others.

   2. Practical onboarding videos: https://www.use.cash/start-here, shoutout to https://twitter.com/MarcFalzon

3. Community bandwidth is quite limited, prioritising is key. As they say, "If you want something done, ask a busy man" - but proactive contributers to the BCH scene are already mostly tapped out. They generally don't have time for this kind of session, because they need that time to actually deliver their projects! I expect this is particularly symptomatic in BCH because so many things are run on part time hustle, perhaps when BCH does a 10-100x in price then there'll be more full time BCHers that can spare the time for some more esoteric scene discussion.

Conclusion

With these take-aways in mind, future Bitcoin Cash Podcast projects will operate on a privately organised basis with individual collaborators, subject to my own available time and resources. The first public example is the Bitcoin Cash Podcast Meme Competition https://twitter.com/TheBCHPodcast/status/1497678893477679104 , with others to follow.

Thank you to everyone who watched and commented on any of the BCH Builders sessions. To anyone in future complaining about a lack of BCH roadmap, I expect a link to this document will be insightful prior-art.

Let's keep building Bitcoin Cash.