Animal Farm

Thursday, September 3rd, 2020

Recently I tweeted a screenshot from the fountainhead.cash telegram channel.

Here's the tweet in case you want to see it:

https://twitter.com/BCHcain/status/1300112785544683521

At the time, it was a public channel, so I saw nothing wrong with sharing it with the rest of the BCH community. As a result I was kicked out of that group, and almost immediately afterward I was also kicked out of the BCHN channel despite that being a public channel as well.

I don't really care that I was banned from either one. People are free to do whatever they want. But by that same token, I also see nothing wrong with what I did. Was it a bit of a jerk move? Maybe, but I wanted to highlight what to me is one of the biggest things holding BCH back. This idea that we can expect to move forward when so much of our infrastructure is maintained by those who I refer to as hobby developers.

By hobby developers I don't mean less talented developers. I mean people whose livelihoods don't depend on the success of BCH. I'm talking about people who work on BCH projects part time while also holding down a real job that pays the bills. It's not meant to be a slight. It's just the reality of the situation. For example, I believe the person who maintains fountainhead.cash is indeed a talented developer. I've been following JT's work since the days of craft.cash. But I'm guessing he uses his talents running another business or a real job that earns him income because fountainhead.cash is provided as a free service. It's a hobby for him. And there's nothing wrong with that, but I think it's time for BCH to grow up and have more full-time developers who are properly incentivized to grow the network by not just improving the protocol, but building out reliable indexers, SDKs, wallet servers, etc., which is where the IFP comes in.

I don't support the IFP because I think I'm going to get a piece of the pie. I'm not even a developer, so that aspect of it has no bearing on my decision. I support the IFP because I've invested my time and money into the Bitcoin Cash project and want to see it succeed as badly as anyone.

Perhaps my recent behavior hasn't been to your liking. I've had some people tell me they were unfollowing me, or that they're disappointed in me, or that they used to enjoy my writing but not anymore. Well, my goal has never been to make people like me. My goal is to help Bitcoin Cash finally reach its potential.

Over the past three years I have used and written about practically every project that's ever launched on BCH. Whether it's yours.org, honest.cash, read.cash, blockchain.poker, lazyfox.io, memo.cash, stamp, electron cash, badger wallet, satoshidice, spice.casa, purse.io, cashID, cryptophyl, nakamotogame.com, cointext, SLP dividend calculator, the aforementioned craft.cash, and many, many more. You name it, I've probably tried it.

The point is, I'm not just some random guy trying to embarrass or troll the dedicated developers who work on BCH as their passion project. I commend all of them. If I knew how to code, I'd probably be a hobby developer myself. But after three years of watching this space, I think it's fair to say that we need a change, we need to evolve, or I can't help but believe this project is going to die. We need dedicated professionals who have expertise in cryptography, in scaling networks, in building infrastructure. And we need the money to pay these people and offer them the chance to work on a potentially world changing technology without bankrupting them in the process.

I know people have recently cheered the ~$1M that has been raised by all the various flipstarter campaigns, but $1M is almost nothing in this world. AVAX recently raised $42M. EOS raised $4B. A highly skilled software developer can easily make $500k/year in Silicon Valley including bonuses, benefits, and stock options.

But I'm sure you've heard all that before. As the BCHBTC ratio sinks to all time lows, don't you think it's time to try something different? To me, the IFP represents the kind of forward thinking that is badly needed in our community. And I don't see it as some hail mary. I see it as a revolutionary idea that could change everything. I've previously written about the importance of incentives. Not just in this industry, but in life in general, because that's the way the world works. Money matters. Money is the great motivator. And I see the IFP acting like a positive feedback loop that will spark the next evolution of not only BCH, but perhaps the entire crypto industry. There's a reason Charlie Lee and the Litecoin community was talking about using part of their coinbase reward to fund protocol development when the IFP was first announced.

The IFP is innovation. Up until now, miners were able to get away with just mining whatever chain happens to be the most profitable. But where has that gotten them? We are still so far away from mass adoption that to outsiders crypto is a joke. Miners allowed the coin with the biggest network effect to get captured by a corporation that wants to cripple the network in order to siphon the value to projects like Lightning Network and Liquid. I think it's time for miners to wake up before it's too late. It's time for miners to stop being passive income earners but investors, because if they don't, there's a very real possibility that Bitcoin will die. As Satoshi once said, "In 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume."

Bitcoin Cash could very well be our last chance at fulfilling the vision of the white paper, and to me that is something very much worth fighting for. I've invested too much of my money and my time into Bitcoin Cash to just sit on the sidelines and watch it fail.

People have recently pointed out how much I've changed. Well, it's true. A year ago I would have been the last person to make a meme to criticize someone, or shared a screenshot to point out another person's failure, but I've grown tired of the narrative being controlled by other people who don't see things the same way I do.

At the suggestion of Vin Armani, I recently read George Orwell's Animal Farm. To be honest, I don't think the book is a perfect allegory for our current situation because Bitcoin Cash is a voluntary system. Everyone is free to walk away, or sell their coins, or mine or develop on another chain. None of us are being forced to do anything under threat of violence the way the animals on the farm were. We are all free to do as we please, whether that's me criticizing BCH projects, or ABC coding the IFP into their software, or JT kicking me out of his channel.

But one thing that did strike me while reading Animal Farm was how the animals just seemed to let everything happen to them. They simply accepted what the pigs told them to do and didn't question their authority, or fight back in any way.

Well, I don't want that to happen to BCH. I don't care if I come across as a jerk at times. I'm not here to conform, or tow the party line hoping to curry favor with the same handful of people who fund 80% of every flipstarter campaign. I'm here because I want BCH to succeed, and I'm not going to just be another sheep on the farm waiting to get pushed around by the pigs. I'm going to push back.