A little bit about me

Saturday, August 8th, 2020

My recent articles have focused on trying to get to the core of what differentiates those who support ABC and everyone else in the BCH community. I've hypothesized that those who support ABC are individualists, while those who oppose them are collectivists.

Both terms have many connotations. For example, individualists might be seen as selfish and greedy, while collectivists might be viewed as being selfless and altruistic. At the same time, you could say individualists are people who aren't afraid to hold an opinion that isn't pre-approved by a larger group. They tend to be leaders who aren't afraid to take risks and go against the tide. By that same token, collectivists might be seen as favoring group-think over personal opinions, and they'd rather follow the majority rather than blaze their own path.

As you can see, there are positive and negative associations to both characterizations, and I wonder if this is really the heart of the matter. Maybe your ideal world is one where people are less selfish and more selfless. Maybe you want people to be less greedy and more altruistic. Therefore, you can't help but reject what ABC is doing because you see it in this negative light.

As much as I like to consider myself as an individualist, I wouldn't say I'm only driven by profit and nothing else. Like many of you who disagree with my position, I want BCH to become a tool to help people from all over the world, those who live on less than $2 a day, or are currently unable to participate in the global economy.

Here's a little bit about me. I immigrated to the US when I was five. It was me, my parents, and my little brother. None of us spoke English, and my parents didn't have jobs, but they took a chance and came here with the hope of finding a better life.

My father eventually found work as a machinist while my mom stayed home to take care of me and my little brother. But less than four years after arriving in this country, my father died of cancer and it was just the three of us.

As you can imagine, we struggled mightily. My mom had never had a job in her life, she was living in a country where she could barely speak the language, and she had two young boys to take care of.

My father's older sister was the only relative we had in this country, so she helped us as much as she could, but what helped us the most was the various social programs offered by the US government. For much of my childhood we lived on welfare. I remember every so often my mother would have to take us to visit the social worker to prove she had kids. Both me and my brother ate lunch every day using those yellow lunch tickets given to the kids who couldn't afford it on their own.

Because of these things my mother was always grateful to the US government. We weren't even US citizens, we were immigrants with a green card, and it amazed her that this country still took care of us anyway.

Eventually my mom got her citizenship, and since we were under the age of 18, my brother and I were granted our citizenship as well. Ever since, my mom has always made it a point to exercise her right to vote during the presidential elections, never mind that she sometimes makes her decision for the most random reasons.

My point in sharing my story is that I don't want you to think I'm someone who thinks it's all about the individual and nothing else. I believe in charity, I believe in helping others, I believe in setting up programs to give the less fortunate a chance to succeed.

Having grown up the way I did, I never saw the government as the enemy. Mostly I just accepted our system as the way things were. But the more I've learned by being a part of the Bitcoin Cash community, the more I've come to realize that there can be a better way, a system that results in a world where everyone has greater economic freedom.

I believe more economic freedom not only means a world that offers greater opportunities, but can also change our thinking by incentivizing each of us to become more productive members of society rather than looking for ways to exploit the system for easy handouts.

This doesn't mean I think the world should be void of charity. In fact I believe that Bitcoin Cash can incentivize us to be even more charitable. This is because BCH will make it easier to directly help someone in need, peer to peer. BCH will also make it easier to track where our donations are going and how they're being used, making it less likely those funds will be wasted, or fall into the wrong hands. I also believe that a free market will lead to the faster rise of new technologies, technologies that can make it easier for us to tend to those in need.

But before we can do all that, we must take Bitcoin Cash to the next level. We need real investment. And I don't mean raising $4 billion when you don't even have a network like EOS did. I'm not even talking about $42 million like AVAX. We're talking $8 million at today's prices, which should be enough to allow ABC to hire some new people and assure them that they are not going to run out of money in a matter of months.

I'm in favor of helping others, but we must first help ourselves. I'm happy for all the Flipstarter campaigns that have been funded so far, but I find it hard to have faith in a system that relies on handouts to keep it going. The way I see it, ABC wants a system that enriches its supporters, while those on the other side have created a system that could impoverish theirs. Would you rather support a group that wants to enrich you, or one that's always begging for your money?

There are still many details to be worked out regarding how the 8% is to be distributed, but let's assume for this exercise that all of it went to Bitcoin ABC. Let's also assume they would hold most, if not all of it, in BCH. This means they would be just as incentivized as the miners to try and make the coin more valuable. They are incentivized to use their funds to hire the best people they can find and scale up as quickly as possible. If they do their job, the coin should be worth more, attract more businesses to leverage the network, which will in turn bring new users. If that was the case, I would see no reason to not continue the fund for another year or longer. But should ABC fail to use the funds in a constructive way, the miners could choose to fund another team or stop the fund altogether.

On the flip side, let's take a look at the version of BCH without the $8M in infrastructure funding. We have 4 separate teams working on their own nodes. The aforementioned Flipstarter campaigns raised raised anywhere from a couple hundred BCH to nearly 1000 BCH. The largest successful campaign was for BCHN, who raised 978 BCH. So far they have released 2 financial reports indicating they have spent a total of 83 BCH over the course of several months, or about $25,000 at today's prices. While I find it admirable they are being frugal with their money and trying to make the most of what's been donated, I have trouble believing that this team can advance a multi-billion dollar network in any reasonable timeframe with so little funding. On top of that we have yet to see a clear message of what their roadmap is, and how they plan on achieving their goals, whatever that might be.

I respect their passion and their voluntary spirit, but I just don't want to rely on altruism as my only option. What's wrong with having two options? Why not try this other experiment of funding with the coinbase reward and seeing what happens?

If ABC should succeed and make Bitcoin Cash a censorship resistant, permissionless network that allows the entire planet to transact with one another directly, cheaply, and reliably, then we can tackle fixing the rest of the world.

I don't want to live in a citadel. I believe BCH is a tool that can help all of humanity and have a monumental impact on our lives, and I don't believe it has to take decades in order to do so.

I don't know about you, but I'm tired of wandering and waiting. I've only been in this space since 2017, so I can't imagine what this must be like for those who have been part of this community from 2014, or 2011, or even earlier.

It's time to try something different, which isn't to say you can't continue doing things your way. Like I said, I plan on holding both coins to some degree, but I'd rather have two shots than one, especially when one of those strategies is the same strategy that's been tried for the past 3 years.

People have this perception of money being evil, but I see it as a tool. And I want to be able to use it to enact the change I want to see, both in my own life and in the lives of others. I want to help people as much as you do. I want to work on creating programs to help those in need to realize their own dreams, to be able to look back on their own lives and see how far they've come, and everything they've gone through, and pay it forward.

I don't see anything wrong with that. Do you?