On Mercenaries and Grifters.

Should you fund or support X?

First and foremost Bitcoin is for everyone. Literally everyone. For BCH to succeed it has to be for everyone, including people you do not like and even those that wish to harm you.

Your boss, clowns, the commies, the reds, the blues, the rainbows, the thin blue line, people that cut in line, your mother in law and even your ex-girlfriend that never returned your favorite hoody - are all people you have to be OK with using Bitcoin Cash.

You can not ban anyone or any group from using BCH, nor should you be able to. It does not mean you need to support, promote or amplify any group or individual that uses BCH that you do not see eye to eye on about other things. Someone using BCH in some way should not be seen as an automatic free pass into your good books.

There are people who very much want to free you from the burden of your BCH bags and your most precious resource - TIME. I think it is important to remain diligent and vigilant and remember that people have all kinds of motivations which may or may not align with what you personally want to see happen.

It is probably a good idea to focus on two types of people that often come knocking on the BCH community's door asking for money to better understand them and decide if you should indeed support them financially and otherwise.

Beyond people IN the community who actually intend to do the thing they set out to do, in the wilds of flipstarter you may encounter 2 other kinds of people.

Mercenaries and Grifters

While both kinds of people have no attachment to the community, they are actually drastically different.

The Mercenary

The hired gun, the "soldier of fortune". This is the person that knows how to do a job and can get it done........ for a price.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a mercenary or hiring a mercenary. It could be argued that the vast majority of the workforce of Earth are all mercenaries.

The person making your fries and burgers is not deeply ideologically aligned with the golden arches and what they stand for. They do a task that needs to be done and receive compensation for doing so.

There are, without a doubt, people in the world that can offer services that will benefit BCH and the community for a price while at the same time having Zer0 concern or interest in the future of BCH itself. This is totally fine and as long as they deliver what they promise, they should continue to be supported as participants in the peer to peer electronic cash economy.

If you think about it, the average person earns their wage in some fiat and most likely takes little interest in the economy of their nation as long as prices are relatively stable. If they are able to earn enough gold-pressed latinum to survive and it maintains its value they are happy as a clam.

This is the nature of business and you had better get used to it because if all goes well, you are going to see a lot of it.

According to your own morals or ethics however, when presented with 2 similar choices you may choose to support the option that lines up with your own views.

You see this with various business products as well. Ethical Fair Trade products etc.

Thinking in BCH land though an example would be choosing to support a merchant that only accepts BCH payments vs a more general "crypto" accepting merchant as they will have a more positive effect on the BCH ecosystem over all and it may even be worth it for you to pay a premium to support them. This is the same when it comes to deciding who to support. Do you support the less experienced person who is deeply involved and dedicated to BCH or do you invest in the person who has more experience and can get the job done but you can not count on to be around in the future?

A mercenary is not someone you can trust with keys to the kingdom.

At the end of the day the mercenary is best suited to short term projects that do not require upkeep or a long term commitment. They will be moving on to the next project and the next highest bidder for their time. For a one off project, a logo or a tutorial video, sure, why not? For vital infra? Maybe no..

The second type of person we need to discuss however is a bit more sinister .

THE GRIFTER

To put it simply the dictionary says a grifter is: "a person who swindles another out of money".

The thing about con-men is they are generally good at extracting money from others using all kinds of tricks. There are of course grifters of all levels though and some are quite easy to spot even from several hundred kilometers away.

Unlike a mercenary who actually delivers on their promises, a grifter will offer you the world for a seemingly reasonable price and then never deliver or worse will partially deliver... then say they delivered while then telling you the next big plan they have that will be even more successful!

There are several things I have noticed over the years that to me at least stick out as red flags and you should consider the following points when trying to identify whether this person who is asking for your time/money is or is not a grifter. (this is not an exhaustive list and I will update it from time to time.)

1. They talk about "crypto" all the time. Their flipstarter or pitch will probably talk about BCH a little but in general they will mostly talk about "crypto" and how their plan will enable people to use "crypto". I read this as "please bootstrap my thing and then once it is ready I will drop BCH like a stone and pivot my thing to the wider 'crypto' market to get more hard money". Kiss your money goodbye.

2. They offer no accountability. They will have fuzzy or no dates of delivery. They will also offer no timeline for updates.

3. The expenses they list do not really make sense. A dev probably already owns a PC and relevant software. A photographer probably already owns a camera. A delivery driver probably already owns a vehicle. Unless the point of the flipstarter is to fund the education of a person or a career change, I would expect a professional to already posses the basic tools of their trade and would not expect a flipstarter to include expenses for those basics. This can get a bit tricky and requires a bit of digging as well. If the personal/company/group is not already a professional with the basic tools for the task then you should probably have low expectations as far as what they will deliver in the end.

4. Similar to #3, the wages they choose to pay themselves and their team should line up with not only a realistic amount of work but with a wage that makes sense for their location. This also takes a bit of research but if for example the flipstarter is for an onboarding campaign and it includes a budget of $300US per person per day and the average wage of the country is $1 an hour... that is a red flag.

5. There have been several instances now as well where a new person comes to the community with a splash of something that looks good for BCH, just as quickly they fire up a flipstarter and ask for a bunch of money to continue their efforts...... then PooOooooof! They disappear. If they are new to the community and are asking for money before talking to anyone... do not expect them to stick around.

6. They interact with the community at large but only to talk about and promote themselves. They may be on reddit/twitter or in some of the Telegram chats but they never interact with people or join conversations..... unless it connects directly to them or the thing they want to ask money for.

7. Similar to above not only do they not join ANY general conversations, they spam their campaign among all the channels including completely unrelated specific channels. The BCH Meme channel is not the place to spam your flipstarter... unless you are doing a meme contest and want to raise funds for it via flipstarter.

8. When they announce their campaigns they mention or tag people who are not involved in the project. Most likely to name drop or solicit donations from whales or people who have been generous in the past.

9. Anyone can use any name on a flipstarter for donations, if you see a whale's name on the list of donors... but the whale donated 0.0001%.... it is probably fake and just being used to give people confidence in the project. "Well if Mrs. Whale is a donor... it must be vetted!" (it hasn't been).

10. They are generally unwilling to answer simple questions about their campaign or worse they get combative when asked. If a person is coming to the community asking for money but then gets angry when you as for some clarification... stay far far away. They should be happy to answer reasonable questions without resorting to calling you a CIA agent hellbent on destroying BCH with your incessant need for basic facts.

11. They are biting off more than they can chew. They promise the moon but have no realistic way to deliver or worse misrepresent what is possible. If the campaign is to "Pump BCH price 10%" or some other similar statistic but the meat of the campaign does not address the steps needed to make this possible.... what are you actually paying for?

12. They bathe in the drama. If the influencer that raised money to make BCH content is ignoring the good news and developments but is quick to report on make content that is negative about BCH, they are probably mostly interested in getting clicks and views to grow their followers above all else and not actually interested in helping BCH grow.

13. They post low effort memes and content on reddit usually with a mix of "What is chain tip?", "is chain tip down?", "Roger/Mark de Messel are gods" type posts with a smattering of chatGPT text for good measure.

14. They avoid publishing their flipstarter in major community spaces like r/btc and the BCH TGs to avoid scrutiny or feedback but specifically tag whales when announcing.

15. No prominent / influential community members are supporting it. If no one wants to touch this thing... there may very well be some history or good reasons as to why that is. It is possible the person running the flipstarter has not reached out or marketed very well. So this is not a great indicator. But if they are out there spamming their campaign across every channel and tagging Roger, Kim Dotcom, Elon Musk, your mom, and yet no one wants to contribute...
    

The above points do not equal a guaranteed scam/grift but are yellow/red flags especially if you see multiple of the above points connected to the same source.

If you think of any other RED FLAGS please feel free to comment them down below.

Be careful out there.