Friday, June 26th, 2020
The read.cash team recently announced the end of featured communities and the handing out of points to moderators of those communities. Another way of putting it is that the incentive structure of the site has changed yet again. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. In fact I find it refreshing that this team has been willing to try new things until they get this right.
But I'm not here to talk about the read.cash points system. What I really want to talk about is what I've witnessed about my behavior each time there's a new change. It astounds me how with every change in their incentive model, I find my behavior quickly changing in tandem.
When the site first started you primarily earned BCH through tips or affiliate fees, so I was writing article after article and promoting them on Reddit and Twitter because that was the best way to earn BCH. When the tips slowed down and the read.cash fund was launched along with the points system, I subtly changed my behavior to doing whatever earned me the most points and therefore the most BCH. I still wrote articles, but I was also commenting more, and tipping more since that earned points as well. Finally, when they started handing out points for moderating a good community, I found myself spending more time moderating than I did writing.
Now that the incentives for moderating have ended, here I am writing again, tapping away on my keyboard like some trained monkey.
What this demonstrates to me is the power of incentives.
It makes me think about people at their jobs and how much more motivated everyone would be if even a portion of their pay was based on getting things done. Imagine if you earned small amounts of money for every task you accomplished, for every problem solved, for every question answered. I'm convinced everyone would be working a lot harder and faster if that was the case.
I'm sure it's a lot more complicated than I make it sound, but I believe that giving people the opportunity to earn money this directly, and with as little friction as possible, is why Bitcoin Cash has the potential to change the world.
But in order to change the world, the network must first scale to accommodate as many users as possible. Here I'm going to mention something that might be somewhat controversial, but I believe the lack of, or misplacement of incentives in the BCH community is what's to blame for our stagnation these last couple of years.
People constantly complain about not fixing the DAA, or the chained transaction limit, or the lack of progress on implementing Avalanche, the list goes on. But what incentives have been put in place for protocol developers to work on each of these problems? You might argue "number go up" is the incentive. But I don't think that's enough. It might have been the case for the earliest BTC investors who were able to mine cheaply and accumulate thousands of coins, but despite all the talk of BCH being the real Bitcoin, the truth is that the BCH community is fairly new by comparison. What about those developers who only just discovered BCH and want to help it grow? Are they supposed to go out and buy a thousand coins and hope that their work is enough to make number go up? I don't think that's realistic. As much as people want to tout the recent flipstarter campaigns as being a success, I don't think raising ~$500,000 spread across four different node implementations is as big of a win as some want to claim. That's an average of $125,000 for each team, or roughly the equivalent of one entry-level engineer in silicon valley working on each node.
If we want BCH to scale, we need large teams of people working to solve these problems, not just a few people here and there working in separate silos. And in order to achieve that, the first problem that needs to be solved is the funding problem.
If you are a large BCH holder of a BCH business that is willing to fund development, let's do it right. Communicate with the people that can get the job done so there can be no ambiguity about what's being asked and what's being delivered.
Let's fix the incentives in Bitcoin Cash the way read.cash is trying to fix them on their site. It's not going to be easy, but without doing that first, our community is just going to keep wandering in the desert like we have been for these last couple of years.
Now if only I can figure out a way to earn BCH to be a better father, husband, son, brother, friend, human.
very well articulated, thanks for this