TLDR: SOMEONE had to do SOMETHING, so here we are. The End.

It is October 31st 2023. The 15 year anniversary of Satoshi publishing the Bitcoin White Paper! Time flies!
I decided that today is the perfect day to publish this sort of establishing document. This document should be considered a living document and is in no way its final form. My purpose and goal today is to demonstrate intention. The things below are not presented in order of priority and I welcome any and all feedback especially from those I solicited it from directly. There are no doubt gaps in various categories about what BCH needs and I would love to hear what you think they are and where my/our limited time and effort is best focused.

When I originally wrote about "The Bitcoin Cash Foundation", I was not really planning to take it much further than that post. However it quickly became clear to me that there are many gaps in our decentralized front that "someone" needed to fill. If we are right and BCH is going to grow to become the global reserve currency we need to be ready for an influx of people. If/when that happens it will be abrupt and sudden and MASSIVE. We got a small taste of it when sBCH launched. We were not ready and we were quickly overwhelmed. It is important we set the stage and build the foundation NOW before we 10x or 100x over a weekend.

But who was going to do it?

Our current most popular node BCHN, are they Papa BCH?

Is it up to them and their development "warchest"?

Should node devs be handing out stickers and writing entire ecosystem news articles, making basics tutorial and organizing conferences?

No not really. I mean they can if they want and have the resources to spare. Every little bit helps. But some people want to push all the responsibility onto devs. Devs have a very particular set of skills generally. Maybe you do not even want them making memes to begin with.

At any rate you can not expect them to write the code, make memes, fund everything, moderate chats, plan meetups/conferences/hackathons, do outreach and .............

MARKETING

A while ago I surveyed many prominent people in the BCH community about what they would do if they have 1 million dollars to spend on helping BCH. You can read the results here. One thing that came up over and over again was "marketing". It is no secret we're are extremely lacking in that field. BCH is the "anti-hype" chain. On the one hand I think it is kind of good. There is no Pump n' Dump hyperbole going on in BCH land.

No hot air to fill your balloon with silly shit. Everyone seems hyper focused on making scalable global decentralized money.

But it also means fewer people are using BCH because they do not even know we exist.

When we think of marketing, we tend to think BIG like, viral videos or billboard trucks or Superbowl halftime videos. Which... again if you want hot air, are great. But what if we zoom very far out and think way way more basic? What is the point of "marketing"? At the most basic level it is to get you familiar with a thing. Getting the brand, the name, the slogan, the logo in front of people and hopefully generating some curiosity as well. In other words:

What have we tried so far?

• In the early days there was the "Bitcoin Cash Fund" (later renamed to the "Bitcoin Cash Association"). I do not know the details about their finances so its hard for me to judge how successful they were as far as the value they generated. But they certainly had some initiatives that I think were of great use at the time. They funded early meetups and provided stickers and shirts to give away. They also put together some of the earliest educational videos. I am glad these efforts happened. Without them I am not sure I would have gotten as involved in BCH as I did (ie creating the Osaka Meetup) if not for the support I had from them back then. The BCA faded out at some point after turning into a legal non profit and I assume losing most of their funds due to the bear market/BCH split price crashes.

• For a long time Bitcoin.com was similarly funding meetups and making videos and supplying swag as well leading BCH adoption and promotion efforts all across the globe which, for whatever reason, they no longer do.

• There was "Coinspice" which, while they were a marketed as a "crypto" news platform, they certainly leaned heavily towards BCH promo. They sponsored events and did regular news articles, videos and interviews. I think it is fair to say Coinspice died when the 2 founders found themselves on opposite sides of the eCash split and Coinspice sadly was caught in the crossfire. Somewhat ironically neither founder seems to be involved in either side of the fork any more which sadly is not an isolated case from the last split. It seems that fight took the wind out of quite a few people's sails.

As a side note: Just in case some of you who used to be heavily involved in BCH and had to take a step back are reading this. I understand and I do not blame you. It was a pretty brutal time. Thank you for all you did to help get BCH where it is today. I really feel like the stars are finally aligning. Your efforts helped get us here. Hopefully we have taken the baton and made great progress in the race. We are keeping the lights on for you. Come back any time you are ready.

• For the past 2 years Jeremy has been making the Bitcoin Cash Podcast and bitcoincashpodcast.com and the numbers of viewers, listeners, followers and readers etc keeps going up.

• Cashrain.com is no doubt getting some first BCH sats into people's hands.

• Similarly Read.Cash, Memo.Cash, Noise.app, r/btc, r/bitcoincash and other SNS have certainly been many people's first steps into BCH land.

• We can not forget all the effort being made in Townsville but the BCH city crew. By far the most grassroots adoption and strongest circular economy we have.

• Meetups

• Conferences

• Moleculars Reddit tipping

• Sunny’s St.Kitts efforts

• Hackathons

• Daily Satoshi Doodles

• Bitcoin Cash TV

• BCH Meme group on TG

• There have been at least 5 LARGE "marketing" focused flipstarter campaigns. As far as I can tell they have been overall, at best, expensive disappointments and at worst outright scams.

One of the most common things I hear on general crypto sites/chats is surprise that BCH is still around, or not connected to CSW etc. General awareness is low. For the most part we have been hunkering down for the last few years. When survival is the priority it makes sense that the push to raise awareness would go by the wayside. I think we have worked hard to become more harmonious as a community and the developers have certainly worked really hard to improve BCH and make it even more useful and the inward healing and focus period is coming to a close.

That being said we exist in the dark. There is little information outside of our bubble about BCH and a lot of it is incorrect.

Even the BCH logo and NAME shown across many major sites and apps is wrong.

Well someone should make an effort to correct that! Someone needs to reach out to get these logos corrected. Someone needs to publish BCH news outside of our bubble. Someone needs to compile information into an accessible place. Someone needs to make sure that stakeholders upgrade their nodes annually and a long list of other efforts that need to be done.

THE SOMEONES!

All of the above does not need to be done by one person. But if everyone waits for someone to do something no one will do anything. That is not to say no one is making any effort. That is far from the truth and not at all what I am trying to say. There are however many little (and big) things that no one has put on their plate but many have on their to do lists, perhaps because they are too busy being a DEV or have a meatspace job or family obligations or any other of the myriad of reasons these things are not a priority. Ideally this is where the BCHF will step up and be able to fill in these gaps.

Current and Possible Future Activities of the BCHF

Again please note that all of the activities listed below are POSSIBLE things the BCHF may work on in the future and not a final proposal or mission statement. The BCHF is committed to helping BCH grow and this is research as how to best assist that goal. The purpose of this article is to solicit community feedback similar to a CHIP proposal. Eventually, after evaluating all the feedback, I will expand and then whittle this down and make a more formal proposal.

Also worth noting I plan on consulting any previous donors to my previous efforts as it is my intention to fold all the public good works projects I work on into the BCHF including the “Bitcoin Cash Network Discussions”, “Build.cash”, and “Flipwatch.org”. Some donors were anonymous but if anyone who donated to my previous projects would like a refund I am happy to do so. Please contact me. The total is not a lot of money (hundreds not thousands of USD) but none the less as it is a change of scope and I would respect the wishes of anyone who would prefer a refund vs assuming they would like to forward the donation to the BCHF. I have not yet spent a single satoshi of any donations to projects I have worked on.

The Faces/Conference Crew

Up until now Roger has been THE face of BCH. Roger has expressed a desire to take a step back as the public face and rightfully BCH needs to be able to survive without the help of any 1 person.

BCH however is lacking presence. We are virtually unknown in most circles and in many crypto circles only as a joke (Bcash lol) or a footnote because they do not know any better and have only heard a distorted version of historic events. One way to combat that is by getting out there and increasing visibility. People still associate BCH with people long gone and in some cases ejected from the community or infinitely large blocks. One simple thing to do to raise awareness is just by being present and visible and welcoming non-combative conversation. There is a major difference in tone and culture in the bitcoin and larger crypto space today than the battle grounds hard fought in 2015-2018. If you go to ANY bitcoin or ethereum or general crypto conference or meetup today you will find every flavor of project imaginable represented. All manner of silly scammy things mixed in with the big serious projects as well. The days of overwhelming maximalism are long gone. But what you will NOT find is any BCH or BCH centric project presence. We have been building quietly in the shadows and I think it is time to come out.

To that end I have already been in contact with some of the major global conference organizers (on behalf of the BCHF) to attempt to get BCH on stage or at the very least represented. I wish I could say I have been successful but as of yet they still mostly seem to ONLY want to get Roger.

What I propose is having a crew of well known, knowledgeable and non combative BCH experts who are ready to take the stage or man a booth to help spread the word and help people get to know BCH for what it truly is and not the caricature that exists.

As we grow we could also create a list of local vetted people capable of repping BCH in their continent/country. These ambassadors could be provided with BCH swag or a budget to locally create their own to do presentations in local forums. Or at the very least provide them with the latest information they need to do presentations.

I have already talked to 3 respected community members and asked if they would be willing to do the above and what it would cost to have them do so plus travel expenses.

Outreach/Contact

As it is now BCH has no “official” representatives. This is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand no one has the authority to speak on behalf of the chain. On the other hand there is no one on hand to answer questions. Worse still, if you were developing your business and intended to integrate BCH or a mining pool that wanted to switch nodes and wanted to get an answer various questions where would you go?

The BCHF has no intention of becoming the official representatives or official word of BCH. However the BCHF would like to be available to the world to contact so at the very least you can be pointed in the right direction. This would of course be voluntary. No one needs to deal with the BCHF if they do not want to. It would be nice to have the option though.

Beyond the passive role of “being available” the BCHF would like to take a proactive role and become a contact point for players in the industry. The BCHF can proactively contact all the major players in the overall crypto space to remind them to upgrade their nodes when necessary. The BCHF can contact all the major players to let them know of any new developments like CashTokens that may interest them. The BCHF can actively encourage players to integrate BCH into their platform and applications. The BCHF can continue and expand its effort to make sure that BCH is presented on various places in an accurate and up to date manner (branding, information, links, statistics etc.).

The News

At the time of writing the BCHF has been publishing the weekly BCH news for 5 months now expanding the news from only read.cash/Twitter/Telegram/Reddit (though at the moment the BCHF reddit account is blocked by reddit) to publications like medium, publish0x and coinmarketcap.com as well as creating video versions of the news published on Youtube and Odysee. Soon we will also be publishing an audio version to all the major podcast platforms as well. The effort may appear simple however it currently takes more than 8 hours per week to get it all done.

• Gathering the stories

• Vetting them

• Writing the news

• Gathering or creating graphics for each story

• Creating the graphic for this weeks price and power usage

• Publishing the story across 7 platforms

• Recording the video

• Editing /Rendering the Video

• Publishing across 4 platforms

• Ripping the audio

• Publishing Audio to all the major podcast platforms

I believe this service to be valuable to BCH so I have donated my time to keep the news alive but it would no doubt be faster if a team were working on it.

The Stickers

“Bitcoin Cash Accepted Here” stickers are not easy to get your hands on and they are expensive even if you can find them. Generally a store needs less than 5 per location and that means they are not going to go to the trouble of getting some professionally printed. Larger chain places may, but the majority of BCH accepting retailers are smaller “mom and pop” type single operations. The BCHF would like to help ease the burden of accepting BCH by providing BCH accepted here stickers free of charge. Satoshis Angel’s was generous enough to donate most of the stickers already and the BCHF only had to pay the shipping cost so we have literally thousands of stickers on hand already.

How the system works is that any merchant in the world that Japan post ships to can get (up to X# depending on weight) FREE stickers sent to them at no cost. All they have to do is go to bitcoincashfoundation.org/store (finalizing now) and select which stickers they want (there are a few different sizes and they are also available in English and Spanish) and enter their info and they are done. In the future we may then ask them to enter their shops info on a map site by including a printed “how to add your store to the map” info kit.

Ideally merchants would use a POS system like the one Paytaca has that can keep track of their in store use so that the map will reflect how likely they are to still be accepting BCH based on when their last BCH TX was. The BCHF will encourage all BCH POS developers to collaborate on this tech so that universal open source data is available for anyone that wants to integrate merchant maps into future projects such as treasure hunts and AR gaming. In the future the BCHF may take it upon itself to attempt to contact merchants who have not shown activity for some amount of time to verify if they still accept BCH or not but that will be determined by several future factors.

Flipwatch.org

The purpose of flipwatch.org is to bring some accountability to the Flipstarter platform. As it is today if you were curious about a particular Flipstarter campaign you would have to dig through Reddit or twitter to try to find the campaign and assuming the site is still up somewhere that would only tell you what individual projects had promised, not what they delivered. Flipwatch acts as a 3rd party to attempt to not only keep track and archive projects but to also research their progress / completion and organize and present the proof if any. This will have the double effect of giving confidence to potential backers in the people they are helping and also helping build reputation with a provable easy to see metric.

The Discord and Telegram

Partly to help organize volunteers (see below), partly to offer a newbie (and beyond) friendly place to go and get your questions answered, The BCHF has already created both Telegram and Discord groups. One aspect is to allow people to not only volunteer but also post job offers as well as advertise their abilities in case people want to utilize them. If popular this can be spun off to a service similar to what Coingigs had to offer and perhaps become another source of income for the BCHF. This would be a longer, far more involved project in that there would need to have a clear demand down the road but to start a simple forum to match prospective jobs/workers specifically for BCH projects and paid in BCH would not only add value to the space but would also allow people who are skilled in some way get work. This of course extends into the unbanked of the world who are able to do any number of activities that can be of help to BCH centric projects and people.

The Homepage/ .org / .info Mirror

Time and time again the issue comes up of where to point people who want to get started in BCH. Devs should go here. End users should go there. People interested in the history of BCH should go here. Basic video tutorials are over here. It is great to be decentralized but it is also a mess. Efforts are duplicated all over the place. As it is now BCH.info is sort of the default landing page for BCH but it is bare bones and not actively worked on or updated. Bitcoincash.org is also sporadically updated because ownership of the domain name itself is unclear preventing people from making effort. One possibility is to have the BCHF work on keeping either bitcoincash.org/bch.info sites up to date and expanded by submitting constant PR requests while also mirroring the site(s) to another domain (bitcoinca.sh, bitcoincash.wiki and bitcoincash.help are all currently owned by me) for redundancy. If the BCHF is successful in making a great landing resource there is no reason why it could not be mirrored to all 3 assuming the owners agree and approve the merge requests to their independent githubs. This would have the benefit of having a unified voice and also decentralized ownership in case the BCHF dies or ownership of the others is lost. If structured properly I believe it would be possible to merge specific category data without taking the "style" of the site.

As everything is opensource and in the public domain, it would still be possible for any member of the public to volunteer and contribute if they so choose. The community would also benefit from having the data to pull from for their own sites/uses

This work is what I intended to do with my flipstarter for build.cash which was not funded. I still think having up to date and well maintained information is really important and so will refocus that effort onto this homepage effort to again avoid reinventing the wheel and duplication of efforts.

Bitcoin Cash Network Discussions

There is great value in having a platform for people to discuss ideas that perhaps they do not agree upon. The Bitcoin Cash Network Discussions has been a series of live discussions and later edited videos based on having a platform where people can come together to discuss possible future upgrades as well as the current state of the network and what people think IS working and also what IS NOT working and could be changed. It has been great platform for a meeting of minds and I would like to bring it back and have a place where people can discuss what they think about what is happening in BCH not only for future upgrades and CHIPs but also the philosophy and culture of BCH which separates us from our competition.

TXSTREET.com

The current owner of Txstreet has open sourced the platform and has also expressed interest in having someone .....contribute. I am not sure if they are planning on shutting down or if they just want to focus on other chains but at any rate they are not really inspired to update the BCH end of things including adding CashToken support and seemingly keeping the infrastructure robust enough to handle BCH’s full potential as recently demonstrated by Emergent Coding breaking the site several times. A transaction visualizer is another public good the BCHF believes is worthy of running and improving.

Bitcoin Cash Archive and Media

Sadly a lot of our history has already been lost. Sites go down. Discussions censored and removed, videos deleted. As far as I know there is no comprehensive archive of BCH history, nor has there been a detailed timeline created of all the major events both pre and post fork. The BCHF would like to conduct interviews with as many relevant people as possible to preserve their experiences in their own words and compile and accurate timeline of events.

Beyond interviews the BCHF will archive and make available important videos and media on our own sites and by submitting it to our archive.org account/collection as well as on our youtube channel.

The BCHF will also submit relevant BCH logos and branding to stock image websites under a public domain or creative commons license or similar to allow anyone in the world access to BCH logos (This will also include logos of major BCH projects, nodes, infra, wallets etc ) and similar that are up to date and in a greater variety.

The BCHF will also create and maintain a media kit, again for ease of access for anyone who is interested in obtaining relevant BCH branding materials.

Also, while some people may think the effort is silly, but the BCHF will archive, tag and categorize BCH memes. Memes have magic social power that can change minds and inspire especially through humor. That being said, the BCHF will focus on memes that lift up BCH as opposed to attempting to pull down other chains. However valid comparisons that contrast chains abilities are ok as long as they are not mean spirited.

The Help Swarm Volunteers

BCH has a wonderful giving community. There are so many talented and hard working people doing all kinds of things to help push BCH along in various ways and many of them do so on a volunteer basis which is admirable. A lot, if not most, of the effort is however scattershot and disorganized. It would be helpful if there was a way to help organize the swarm of volunteers in some way to help amplify their grass roots efforts. Volunteers can be focused and honed via either Telegram or Discord or both. There is certainly room to have contests with trivial rewards such as special titles in the group or donated Tokens/NFTs for those that create content that meets certain criteria however as with all things, high signal and low noise is the preferred way.

The Mod Squad

The first income earning enterprise I hope to get off the ground is something I am calling “the mod squad”. As more and more projects launch on BCH more and more of them will need to interact with the BCH community and to also build their own. One challenge every project faces is the initial setup of things like Telegram and Discord as well as the ongoing efforts to moderate the communities they build. It would be lovely to have someone take care of all of that for you so you can focus on deving the thing you want to dev. It is of course possible to hire people but unless you know them personally can you trust them? Going through some crypto bro service will probably get you some low knowledge people that may or may not be reliable. What if you could just pay the BCHF to provide up to 3 aligned and high knowledge mods who are well vetted and established community members who would also set up your groups with bots and co-ordinate across all the other BCH groups with spam/ban lists and filter commands? There is certainly some advantage to having consistency across groups.

They would of course follow the rules established by the group/project owner and be as strict or relaxed as the owner wants. The owner would of course be owner and retain all abilities to remove the mod squad and any rule they wanted. They would also have the final say in all matter.

The Mod Squad will be available in priced tiers.

Initial Set up of a community.

Monthly mod fee per mod.

Monthly mod fee based on group size.

As a public good the Mod Squad would be available to the main public channels at no cost (assuming the owners would welcome them) these channels include @bchchannel, @bchprice, @cashtokens @BCHdevandbuilders as well as any BCHF associated channels (@BCHF_org, @Networkdiscussions @flipwatch @bchfnews and any future major community channels).

Mods would be paid a fixed monthly salary as well as an increase for every new group added and a 1 time rate for setting up a community.

I have advised these 3 people that in the case of the Mod Squad being formed it would be in their best interest to create a new account/identity so as to avoid any personal retaliation against them from their activities from disgruntled people they had to warn or ban for various reasons

The mod squad would be there to do a job and their presence would NOT be an indication of approval or vetting by the BCHF.

Social Media Management

Similar to running a project’s community moderation, a possible revenue stream could be managing a project’s social media. Finding trusted people who will not burn everything to the ground can be difficult. Finding trustworthy people who know how to manage all the platforms while also having a deep understand of how BCH works is even more difficult. The BCHF could fill in that roll to help both the BCH projects and BCH itself by using that income to help offset the cost of public goods.

FUNDING

All of the above proposed activities could be done slowly over time by a group of disconnected and disorganized random people. Or relatively quickly in an organized and ongoing manner. For the BCHF to do these things and grow it needs to either do an annual funding drive via flipstarter or direct appeals to whales/organizations or it needs to have its own income or perhaps a combo. The moment money enters the equation it raises questions and rightfully so.

Once you are paid by X it complicates things and objectivity. If the BCHF relies on XYZ person or XYZ project for the entirety of its survival the BCHF is beholden to XYZ and their desires or the faucet gets cut off and the BCHF dies. Hopefully BCH is done with contentious splits and is a non issue but it is impossible to predict.

Likewise donations are unpredictable. At the time of writing the BCHF has received about 4BCH total in donations. This does not even begin to come close to covering the cost of expenses I have paid so far for hosting etc, let alone compensating anyone for their time. Even if random donations were 10x in frequency and amount it could not be counted on. It is hard to hire staff when you can not guarantee a monthly income for them.

For this reason I think it would be best to do a hybrid. The funds raised in an initial flipstarter would go to ensuring 1 full year of work, which could be considered a “bootstrapping”. While at the same time developing both public goods for BCH that everyone can benefit from for free and also some efforts that can generate income for the BCHF to expand efforts and help with sustainability/stability.

Merchandising Merchandising Merchandising!

The BCHF can in collaboration with creators like Swagme.cash sell general BCH and BCHF branded merchandise. It is unlikely such a venture can fund all the activities above but it is an option that may help.

A fourth option is an ICO/NFT!

We sell BCHF tokens and you get a digital keepsake that has no utility or function or promise. Its just a souvenir! I am not a huge fan of creating a funding token/NFT but if people would feel more inspired to fund the BCHF knowing they can get a digital keepsake in the process I am willing to go down that road similar to PBS or NPR and the tote-bags they give out. The BCHF will however not be creating a dex or game or farm or other similar defi activities.

No matter what the way forward is, the BCHF is committed to full transparency and accountability and will commit to a regular report schedule of the collection and use of whatever funds we acquire. Many previous public good type efforts have failed due to the fluctuation in BCH price and/or exchange collapses. All funds raised to bootstrap the BCHF will be put into BCH Bull contracts. Every Satoshi spent will be accounted for a publicly available information published every quarter to start.

Thank you for reading this short novel. Happy Halloween and happy White Paper Day! I look forward to your feedback. Feel free to write below or contact me via any platform @cheaplightning.