Sadly the Build.Cash Flipstarter campaign did not get fully funded. There are probably several reasons for this that can be explored.
First of all however a big thank you to all of you who pledged to see this happen.
A special thanks to Marc De Mesel has once again shown that he is fully committed to seeing BCH succeed.
There was enough interest/pledges to pay for the basic infrastructure of the project but not enough to pay for the work of compiling all the information needed to make it actually useful as a platform.
We will have to consider how to best go forward from here, but the project will go forward.
Bear Market
We are all painfully aware that we are in a significant bear market at the moment. There would certainly be more people willing to contribute if their portfolio's were not underwater already.
Forking
Bitcoin Cash will fork today. It seems unlikely there will be a chain split given the current climate. However until recently it was somewhat less clear how things would turn out. This probably made many potential pledgers weary of doing anything with their coins until they had a clearer idea of what was to come. This is perhaps the biggest reason more people were not pledging on Flipstarters in general. Build.Cash will attempt another Flipstarter once the hardfork has settled and there is far less chance of some unknown danger.
Advertising
People can not pledge if they are not aware of the project. Build.Cash would certainly have benefited from making a greater effort to get the word out about what Build.Cash is trying to do. The articles that were posted had all the relevant information in them. However reading a wall of text takes time. Time that people are not going to spend unless they have a good reason to believe it will be of interest to them.
A video would probably get that information across a lot clearer and easier. A video will be created to accompany our second Flipstarter campaign.
While it probably had little to no effect, someone who was either mistaken or had motivation to see the Build.Cash campaign not succeed, claimed (without any evidence) that Build.Cash is a scam.
A claim made by an unknown with 0 proof was unlikely affect the overall outcome. But it may have sewn seeds of doubt enough to stunt the easily persuaded.
Ironically this kind of attack is something that Build.Cash is designed to help combat by building trust in people and projects based on cataloging their actions. It is reasonable to assume that the kind of person to make baseless claims would prefer for public accountability systems to not be created.
Flipstarter Is Cumbersome
Our Flipstarter campaign was not without technical difficulty. At some point the server needed to be restarted. It is unknown if that prevented people from pledging or not. But at least one person had trouble increasing their pledge.
Flipstarter is brilliant. However it is cumbersome and difficult to use for laypeople. It is limited to a plug-in in one wallet at the moment. Meaning the need to do many extra steps compared to a standard Bitcoin Cash transaction. Each added step is bad for the user experience and is another opportunity to lose a potential user. Build.Cash hopes to make funding projects easier and the Flipstarter team also hopes to make it more user friendly as well. This is not something that can be solved in the short term.
Part of the Build.Cash platform will be allowing projects to submit their own self controlled donation addresses. This combined with the trust building we intended to facilitate should make supporting projects much simpler.
Failure to demonstrate what we are trying to do
Linked to the poor advertising above, the responsibility at the end of the day is ours.
We didn't convey properly, or to enough people, what it is that we are aiming to do. There is a lot of work to be done spreading the word and showing all the ways we can help build BCH into new money for the world.
To that end we will redouble our efforts to make it much more clear what we intend to do for our campaign next year.
Again thank you everyone for the time you took to read the Build.Cash posts and making the effort to pledge.
If you want to see Build.Cash become a reality please consider donating here:
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Thank you.
Good job