1 Million Dollars

The question was simple enough. I asked prominent BCH community members:

If I had 1 million dollars to donate to BCH (the network not the coin) where do you think it would be best spent (projects, infra, etc) to help the network?

I did not tell them beforehand I intended to publish their answers (though I asked after) so these are unpolished and mostly unedited (removed some identifying info). Their anonymous answers are below.

1.

Probably split it between projects and marketing

BCH has never aggressively marketed. I would probably hire PR firms, craft a cohesive brand identity, get articles in the media, etc. PR firms do all of that

2.

Hiring people full time to shill.

NOT A PR FIRM OR MARKETING FIRM, OR A GEORGE

training a team of people who can shill on TG, Reddit, twitter, and send cold emails/dms to rich people all day long

3.

Wow hmm that’s tough. I really like the idea of cash fusion, seems to not really taken off, needs to be easier to use like in mobile wallets. Smart BCH could be something, maybe even marketing, we badly need better optics. I feel like node devs have gotten a lot of money over the years already. But sponsoring protocol devs should always be something that is done too.

4.

I would focus on new marketing combining the features of BCH/smartBCH. Unified high quality messaging ready at the same time we complete shagate.

That and more high quality projects

5.

Simplest answer: investing in businesses that have a BCH-specific use case.

There are longer answers though, especially re: infrastructure.

The HAAAARD part is finding or developing businesses that benefit from BCH. This is the largest challenge of crypto. Non-speculative use cases are a relative desert.

6.

For me, I think we need to fund projects/companies that will increase BCH usage as payment on all levels of the supply chain.

1. Fund payment processors and/or wallet projects that will facilitate paying / accepting BCH payments both online and offline.

2. Fund aggregator services (e.g. food delivery services) that accept BCH payments in behalf of partner merchants.

3. Fund projects/companies that make it easier for brick and mortar businesses to integrate BCH payments (e.g. POS & accounting systems, incentive programs, etc.).

4. Fund farms that produce fruits, vegetables, and meat that will accept BCH as payment and let these farms provide produce at a discount to BCH-accepting establishments.

Depends on BcH or sBCH? I think I’d generally put the money towards a marketing DAO, and some funds towards development of NFT infra

I think bch general is harder I guess I would just spend it in smartbch

I feel the issues on L1 bch are very hard to solve, eg if nodes don’t deliver

Not much more money can solve 🤔

7.

I personally still think the developer infrastructure (libraries and communications protocols mostly) is one of the weak links today. New developers who come in look at things and it looks quite bad - they might try bitbox only to learn that it's unmaintained, they might try some rest API and find that it's unstable, or they try something like libauth and find the documentation difficult. There is also a lack of good open-source wallets. Those can be tackled in two ways though, either reduce friction to make it enjoyable to work, or increase adoption/utility/value to create stronger incentives. Might be biased as lately I've been doing a lot of development and not a lot of other things, so that kindof colors my perspective.

8.

Marketing

All of it

That one million dollars in marketing to attract a 100 million

And then you invest 9 more in to marketing and another 25 in education

And you still have 64 mil left.

9.

Interesting question. I think I'd say building novel *online* applications on top of BCH would be the best thing. There's currently not a lot of projects / companies that have the funding to work on it full time so there's a lot of side projects but not a lot of main projects.

I also think the infra is lacking, but from what I've seen with GP, they've contributed a lot to the infra because GP needed to have certain things in order to build product. If there are more skilled and well funded teams that are building a specific product on BCH, they'll most likely also contribute to infra.

So I don't think that having dedicated infra companies (besides the node teams) is the way to go right now, but having more companies like GP would be very beneficial

10.

Bounties for devs porting over projects from BSC/ETH/AVA/SOL to SmartBCH (projects we dont have yet, like abracadabra.money, olympusDAO etc)

maybe

11.

I would put it in SmartBCH marketing / promotion - draw in new users (as that will lift up the entire network)

I would love to see a project that has the goal of delivering (and maintaining) something equal to this:

https://ethereum.org/en/

so we get a central point of information, for all users / devs etc.

Everything is really sharded atm, new people are struggling to find their way around I feel. Also we could use a bit more professional presentation (think whybitcoincash) - "you can only make the first impression once"

of course we need more infra etc - but I think the lowest hanging fruit is on the marketing side

12.

80% infrastructure, 20% UX

wait

no

51-49 UX and infra

but yeah

good infra means people can make good ux

good ux means more users

more users means better infra

13.

Advertisements, social media campaigns, etc.

Online, algorithmically targeted advertisements

Backed by a solid social media campaign

https://fifty.io

Probably ads through these guys, along with boosted posts.

And very competent social media managers/writers/strategists/a digital artist or two

You could fund a solid campaign for a couple months.

ROI would most likely be immense considering the current interest in DeFi and the speed/cost/robustness of SmartBCH

14.

Put down seed money as the start of an investment fund, go to roger and co and declare you want to lever up on that. get 30m total, make a grand announcement, and start screening startups to invest in.

if you don't want to go through the hassle of lawyering, possibly even just set it up as a big multisig.

then voila you have an onchain foundation.

recruit entrepreneurs. if you wish, nudge them to in turn fund infrastructure they think are important.

----if the lever up plan doesn't work, maybe the whales don't trust you or w/e----

start a networking organization. networking as in people networking, not literal computer networks. aggressively pursue talent and coordinate their capture entrance to bch organizations and companies. organize events to facilitate these as necessary.

note that if you can hit the magic number of 50m you can prolly single handedly cause bch to pump just by announcing the fund.

no other event can cause that.

15.

I think we have the biggest growth potential from getting real companies using BCH. SmartBCH has the best ability of doing this now, since the biggest grey-market market BCH can fulfill now is for borderless financing of projects. Projects that work towards a future where companies can raise $ outside of normal fiat is imho the best. So dexs, launchpads, and similar systems that bring us closer to that future.

I think crypto market is going to change drastically when reality of inflation hits much of world, still in honeymoon period where everyone thinks they are rich.

16.

Hmm, would prob have to better think about it but initial thought is lack of users is the biggest problem. Infra etc is important, but no point building the biggest, awesomest stadium in a town with 100 people in it. So probably focus on marketing and user adoption

that's almost a more infrastructure-level project, but the gamble could be worth it. just need to get off my ass and develop a time machine so i can do all this stuff. 😂

the bitcoin.com wallet + flexUSD for interest seems like a gem to draw average people into. some simple commercial-style youtube vids showing how easy it is to hold a 'dollar-pegged crypto' and earn bank-shattering interest rates on it for doing nothing - but also how they can get back to 'real' money. a million$ probably wouldn't go far in terms of actual TV commercials i'd guess, but youtube/streaming/socials/etc ads could use it and still reach a lot of people

we're trying to target twitch streams in a way that will get the viewers themselves involved in airdrop contests, rather than just giving the streamer donations, but requiring the user to be a subscriber so the streamer may get more $ from new subscribers just chasing the airdrops/contests. twitch viewers seems like a good audience - many won't be involved in crypto still (it's pretty niche overall in terms of actual users), but the audience is overall tech-savvy enough to help each other rather than walking grandma through backing up their recovery seed...

i dunno, more and more i'm seeing people discussing trying to organize to get projects going, finding funding, how to govern it etc.... a dao that took off could accomplish all that, definitely not a lack of people looking to fund things, and it would enable bigger companies like bitcoin.com, coinflex, etc. that want to help the ecosystem but not necessarily babysit the funds just donate 'to the dao' and have everyone vote on managing the funds.

that's almost a more infrastructure-level project, but the gamble could be worth it. just need to get off my ass and develop a time machine so i can do all this stuff. 😂

17.

setting up a physical city is hard and inconvenient and expensive

although that is part of what makes it so powerful when done

but the point is we're on a budget, and trying to build network effect among real people as cheaply as possible so instead of making a physical city, make a virtual one.

with 1 mil in budget, you can easily afford to hire 3 people in different timezones full time

their one and only job is to sit on a zoom call, which is a 24/7 BCH chat room

8 hours / day each

so that literally any time of the day or night, someone can go hang out and talk about BCH

whenever is convenient to their schedule

and anyone new to BCH can be directed by their mate who doesn't have time to go through everything with them to that link and they can check in at their own leisure

and have a friendly face to talk to and find out what's going on, get referred to more links and services etc.

you have 1 person on the payroll to kick it off, but that's just the seed

if the community know they can just be involved any time, they will be

the issue with meetups is that not everyone can fit it into their schedule or it's different timezones or whatever

with this it is 24/7

there is a ton of good things about this idea

1. very cheap to test. You can just start with 1 month, or even 1 week, and see if it works before committing to it further

2. organic conversations, ideas and commerce / interpersonal referrals will grow out of this

3. everyone in the community can feel a bit of community spirit any time they like

(get the employees to hang up a BCH flag in their room)

4. the 3 on-payroll employees is just to start and for simplicity

you can quickly incentivize participation and build up local crypto communities by taking the budget for that hour and sending it once per hour split among the people who have been there for at least an hour

so e.g. the hourly budget is $50 or whatever, if there's two people there then you each get $25 at the end of each hour

if there's five, it's $5

if it's 200, well this event is banging and paying out a few cents is the least of the issues

I'd do this for free, but people in poor countries looking to earn crypto literally could not have it any easier to get on the gravy train

and the incentive to join rises inversely to the number of people present, which is usually the opposite of conversation topics

or meetups or social events, which benefit from network effect

it would probably even be self sustaining, since it's easy enough to take community donations to keep it running

and I"m sure if it was popping off, people would

it's like a community airdrop or faucet

except without the usual airdrop problems, which is that people aren't engaged, and it's hard to stop spammers picking up all the cash

it's like face to face noise.cash

call it chat.cash

$20 / hour is $3360 / week

$174k / year

easily doable within the million budget

and you're not committing it all up front

18.

Ok so I’d get some crypto influencers to talk about bch on Tik tok, YouTube, etc

These things can create huge hype if done well and could bring awareness of the coin to a lot of people

Also hire some PR person for BCH itself

We need to look good, and make more noise!

19

Adoption, I will say. What would generate adoption from users not looking to make quick money, but become part of the ecosystem and stay part of it, increasing the network effect and generating value for everyone.

20.

It seems to me the infrastructure is being taken care of largely and wrap is lacking is good projects to build adoption, get new people to use the coin... which is not an easy task.

21.

Probably in projects that helps real companies move onto BCH. There is a lot of tooling to be built around this, this is one of the core components of MistSwap's long-term strategy as well.

There are basically 3 types of tokens now:

1. Financial products (like Mist token 🙂 )

2. Meme tokens

3. Games (ponzis included)

I think our biggest growth will come from #4 - real world companies. Like.. take a struggling hypothetical video game store, tokenize it, it gets a valuation of 1.5m.. they pay dividends and have shareholder meetings using DAO. I think once we can have this start happening (i.e. the tools are sufficiently well designed / made for normal people) there will be explosive growth and BCH is in best position to capture this market (the majority of real world market)

This is why I am excited about smartBCH, I think it has real potential to change the world in a positive way

22.

Marketing

23.

Projects or partnerships/integrations with existing platforms. User acquisition is most important imo.

There you have it.

Several people never responded. Several people have not yet responded when I asked for permission to publish, but as it has been several days I have decided not to wait any longer. I think the above answers are very interesting perspectives to consider.