The Resolution of the smartBCH Experiment.

Following in a long line of poorly aged posts proclaiming the resolution of various bitcoin experiments I shall continue the tradition with this post about smartBCH. I hope that this post will also age poorly and that I will quickly be proved to be wrong.

Where did we go wrong?

The very thing that people warned about and were most worried about happened.

Whether through incompetence or malice the central point of failure failed.

It was not unimaginable. Many people warned about it and rightfully so refused to move funds over to smartBCH from mainchain. Others, like myself, moved over a manageable risk amount hoping and trusting that people smarter and above us in the food-chain did their due diligence.

They did not.

There has been a long string of failures that lead us to where we are now. If smartBCH is going to survive it needs to overcome and move beyond the thinking that lead to these failures. If smartBCH does not survive then it is important the broader BCH community reviews or learns from this experience.

Smoke filled rooms

SmartBCH is of course a project built on top of BCH. This also of course means that any major issues or failures connected to smartBCH do not necessarily harm mainchain in meaningful way.

Bitcoin's history is filled with drama caused by "meetings" where only certain people were invited to decide the future of the project. "The Hong Kong Agreement", “New York Agreement”, "the dragons den", the CTOR CSW explosion meeting and the IFP pre-approval meeting.

Mainchain has thankfully moved onto the CHIP process where everything is discussed and workshopped out in the open.

smartBCH has yet to develop immunity to these kinds of smoke filled room agreements.

At some point coinFLEX and the smartBCH team agreed to do various things, the details were never public and we collectively trusted the people we thought would do their due diligence to make sure all the pieces were in place to keep the network safe and secure. As far as I can tell no one ever did.

The coins were held by "fireblocks" which as far as I understand is a fancy term for "custodial multisig wallet". Who were the signers? No idea.

It did not end there though. When all the BCH backing smartBCH was moved, Mark said he informed the smartBCH team but of course this was not made public and when all the coins moved a small panic ensued. We still have no idea why they were moved.

According to coinFLEX, they had a secret deal with Roger Ver to allow him to make special trades that the public would never be allowed to do which is what ended up allegedly tanking coinFLEX. This agreement is also not publicly available.

We all learned fairly recently about the existence of a "smartBCH Foundation". Its members, goals, purpose, power and funding all shrouded in mystery. Mark is dealing with them on some level and they seem to not be directly connected to the smartBCH team. I have nothing but questions as to how all of this is going to work.

Development itself seems to be done in a similar way with what is being worked on and why and the status of things opaque until randomly a tweet or Telegram message appears that some new thing is done and out.

While there are several smartBCH groups focused on the current crisis, as far as I can tell things are still mostly decided somewhere else in private. There are several possible solutions to the current smartBCH crisis. I have heard rumors and speculation and even plausible accounts from people with first hand knowledge. But suffice it to say, I have no actual idea what the path forward is, which goes to one of my main complaints:

Communication

For the past year I have suggested then asked then pleaded and finally begged for something to be done about communication. I think while I have had direct contact with the team, its not fair to say that I have been an "insider" as while I may have been privy to an extremely limited number of things going on in the background, the vast majority of the time I too have been clueless as to what is actually going on even learning about most things at the same time as the public. I made several proposals to the smartBCH team as to how we/they could solve this issue. But as far as I know none of those suggestions have been taken to heart.

As far as communication between the development team and the moderation team:

Generally speaking we were not given advance warning of anything until the moment of publication. Obviously the community has some expectations about moderators being able to answer some basic questions about things and we were often caught off guard.

At some point in the early days a very vocal critic was unhappy about the moderation of the smartBCH community channel and complained directly to the smartBCH development team. Which in itself I have no issue with at all and in fact I recommend anyone do so when they see what they believe to be corruption. However the result was that a new moderator was added with no warning or communication with the rest of the mod team. I am sad to say the addition of another person without any warning was not an isolated incident. Of course at the end of the day the smartBCH project and its community moderation should be decided by the leaders of the project. Dr. Wang is the owner of the channel and he is free to add or remove anyone he pleases. I do however also think that a successful moderation team needs to be on the same page and haphazardly throwing in new random people to a position of power can cause more issues than it solves and should be discussed with the people that are already on the team.

For smartBCH to succeed, users, developers and investors need to have confidence in the network.

I do not believe there can be any level of confidence if even basic information is not available.

At the moment there is no one to answer those questions. For smartBCH to be treated as a serious project it needs to put a much stronger emphasis on communication.

Among the things I proposed to help with communication I proposed the following:

1. The creation of a paid community manager position with the following responsibilities:

• Leadership role in community moderation duties, including the selection of other moderators for both volunteer part-time and paid full-time positions.

• Tipping community members who do something extremely helpful.

• Co-ordination with other smartBCH projects for promotional efforts both off and online.

• Outreach to crypto media and projects.

• Expanded social media presence.

This person does not have to be me of course. Anyone qualified should take that role. But I think it is super important to take this project and its community seriously.

2. The creation of a comms channel on TG or Discord where the smartBCH dev team and both English and Chinese community leaders can share information and general updates and status reports on a regular basis as well as coordinate.

3. The establishment of regular meetings with the above parties either weekly or bi-weekly so that communication is consistent across all channels and teams.

4. The expansion of the mod team for the smartBCH community group. At the moment, with the loss of Peter, there is no one in the North American time zone.

5. Renewed focus on creating and establishing a presence on Discord.

6. A revamped smartbch.org with a FAQ section. SmartBCH is a project that has centralized development and an “official” webpage. While it does link to the whitepaper, it does not however present information in a user friendly way. SmartBCH also suffers from a lack of clarity as far as sharing of information. Updating the smartBCH.org website to include a FAQ as well posting all the updates Dr. Wang makes. At the moment if you want the latest information you have to search read.cash or telegram. The first impression of people evaluating smartBCH is most likely going to be the .org website. It needs to be great not just OK.

Potential questions for a smartBCH FAQ

• How does one run a node?

• Do nodes get fees?

• How does one become a validator?

• Do validators get fees?

• How do validators make proposals?

• How do validators vote?…...

7. Make binaries available for smartBCH. Making things as easy for people to run smartBCH should strongly considered.

I have no idea if any of the above suggestions to help with communication will be taken seriously but these are all just 1 example of many of the suggestions that I have made over the past year.

Staff shortages

There seems to be a trend of rushing to release things in the web 2.0 way of thinking. “Move fast and break things” worked well when VCs were pouring money into centralized platforms. In my opinion this way of thinking is a disaster for the P2P economy, when your “investors” are also your end users. SmartBCH relies on the end users putting their very real limited funds into the platform.

If users can not trust smartBCH to be reliable, the project is dead.

My understanding is that when the project was launched, coinFLEX volunteered to be custodian and promised to do many things that were never done. My own interactions with Mark both publicly and privately follow the same pattern of him promising to provide information and then because of trust no one followed up and deadlines passed without question. Of course the breaking of promises and trust lays squarely with both Mark and coinFLEX however there was also a massive failure of the smartBCH team to hold Mark to his word, follow up and verify. I can only assume that this was not seen as a priority and that the team was already overworked with technical development, or was more interested in making small tools and innovations that the task of trust and safety was not assigned to another party or no other staff was available.

As far as I know the smartBCH team currently consists of 3 fulltime developers. For smartBCH to succeed the team NEEDS to be expanded. Dr. Wang may be the most brilliant developer in human history. I am not a developer myself so I can not judge that. I do however know that he is not able to be lead developer, project manager, webdev, quality control, Telegram moderator, Discord moderator, spokesman, PR person, promoter/marketing, tech support, biz dev, accountant, lawyer, security, writer, coordinator, dapp dev, social media manager and spiritual leader all at the same time.

The mess we are currently in may have been prevented if there had been more eyeballs available to ask the important questions like "who controls what?" and act on them in a meaningful way.

SmartBCH needs to have room to grow. It needs fertilizer. It needs help. Help can come in the form of more help. Help like:

A dedicated project manager.

A dedicated community manager.

A dedicated PR/Media/Spokesperson.

Or at the very least someone who can 2 or even do all three.

The chain doesn't matter at a technical level if the users (projects, etc.) aren't taken care of and this area is largely ignored.

At some point in the future the fate of smartBCH can be decided by a DAO or foundation or similar. But at this juncture I really feel that the social and perception side of smartBCH has been ignored to an almost suicidal level and it has to be remedied as soon as possible. This goes along with what I wrote about communication above.

Ass out of U and Mption

We all fucked up. By that I mean the royal we. We all assumed someone bigger and smarter was doing due diligence. We assumed that Mark and coinFLEX were going to put all the checks in place to ensure that our money wouldn't be included in a melt down like it is. We assumed that the smartBCH team did its due diligence and was part of the multisig etc. We assumed funds were safu.

We were all wrong and without a massive cultural shift at smartBCH H.O. smartBCH is doomed to repeat the same mistakes it has before.

I forget who it was, but when I was much younger someone said to me:

"You can't date the person you hope they become, you can only date the person they are now."

I extend that advice now to people in general. I HOPE the people at the top make the choices that take the project down a better path but at the moment I see no evidence of that.

I do not write any of this with any intent to hurt anyone, my only desire since day one has been for smartBCH to be a huge success.

On a Personal Level

For the last year, since smartBCH launch, I have dedicated almost every waking moment to smartBCH as a volunteer sanitary engineer and to help facilitate and coordinate between teams and people. I never intended for "modding" to become a full time job. There was 1 community moderator who was clearly overwhelmed and almost no policies or countermeasures in place to combat the influx of spam and bots and scams. So similar to BCH channel, I saw "someone" needed to take care of the "mess" and I volunteered to Dr. Wang and he accepted. I was not alone and soon a team of volunteers formed.

Obviously it is impossible to make everyone happy and there have been some people who very vocally were not happy with how I carried out my volunteer duties. But I am pretty confident in saying that despite what ever flaws I may have, few if any other people would be willing to spend the amount of time I did basically non stop 6-12 or sometimes more hours a day for 365 days for free.

I do what I do because I want BCH to succeed and rightly or wrongly believed that in the moment helping smartBCH and smartBCH projects succeed was the best thing I personally could do to help BCH.

I made the choice to turn down lucrative job offers and even to not work on my own various projects because I thought in the end my time would be better spend helping the community, much more so than making memes or NFTs or even my more serious and ambitious projects. I am 100% responsible for my own actions and blame no one other then myself for going down that road. I did so hopeful that my limited energy would be best spent doing what I did.

As far as I know, the fate of the entire smartBCH project is up in the air and I am no longer convinced it is the optimal use of my time especially as far as what will help BCH the most.

Baring some significant changes, I am no longer interested in being a mod of the smartBCH community and have resigned. I have turned over ownership of the smartBCH developers TG and Moderators TG to Dr. Wang and wish him the best for the future and truly and genuinely hope that smartBCH is able to succeed.