Why Decentralization Sucks

smartBCH is slowly bleeding to its death.

Since the CoinFLEX bridge locked the 101,000 BCH backing the sBCH coins the smartBCH network has essentially been held hostage. The future value of the sBCH coins are unknown, and that outcome relies on the decisions of just a few people. Those people haven't done or communicated anything of substance for well over a month now.

Obviously users and projects won't trust such an environment. So they have and continue to, understandably, abandon and avoid smartBCH. This situation has gone on for so long that major projects still in the ecosystem have started to question staying.

Who is ultimately to blame?

• Kui Wang, the developer of smartBCH, is at fault for not ensuring the coins backing his project would be secure from the beginning.

• Mark Lamb, CoinFLEX CEO, for not segregating the bridge funds from their regular business operations.

• The users for 'trusting, not verifying' - although it was always said that the situation was centralized and to act accordingly, but we could have done much better in verifying what was and wasn't in place to protect the bridge funds.

Full of rage and foaming at the mouth? Great - I don't care as that is not going to solve anything. If it were going to it would have by now. Multiple people made multiple mistakes. Let's move on to actually trying to solve something.

The bridge funds are in CoinFLEX's control and they have made it abundantly clear they will not give them back unconditionally. But there is still the problem of what to do with smartBCH here and now, regardless of the bridge funds.

After CoinFLEX appeared to hoist the pirate flag and indefinitely freeze the bridge funds Kui Wang released an update for smartBCH nodes on June 30th that removed CoinFLEX's ability to mint new coins on smartBCH.

Unfortunately no other substantive actions have been done, and the community has been left to squabble amongst themselves and speculate about what is going to happen. CoinFLEX and Mark Lamb have been the prime targets of anger, for good reason, but also because they are actually communicating in some form about their attempts to solve things (from their point of view, at least).

A typical point of pride of BCH users is that the network is decentralized. There is no centralized entity or foundation that controls the network and its goals like many other chains have. This is a good thing, but also a bad thing.

Other networks gained massive amounts of interest and adoption in short periods of time because they had a combination of funding and organization that was used to bootstrap their networks adoption. After the network effect is large enough it gains a life of its own - not unlike Bitcoin. The difference is that Bitcoin was the first of its kind, and today there are many other established competitors that offer a better total package than a new, empty EVM chain regardless of any theoretically superior maximum capacity.

Simply put, a new project will make more progress, faster and more efficiently, with an organized group than a disorganized group.

Instead, smartBCH has steadily marched down the path of not having a central group pushing things forward and a network mindset of 'someone else will do it.' This results in 'nobody does it' which is a recipe for failure.

The solution is to create a group, entity, foundation, or whatever you want to call it that takes ownership of issues and pushes things forward. This group should work in the best interests of the chain and its users with tasks such as:

• Community Management: people responsible for curating the community.

  • Chat channel moderation (Telegram/Discord, etc.) including things like bot creation, maintenance, and development.

  • Gathers community questions and concerns.

  • The first point of contact for users and projects, both within the network and those outside the network, to get people where they need to go and working together.

  • Provides regular updates to the community about the networks state, projects, and development progress in text, audio, and video formats.

• Development: people building the stuff we want.

  • Just let them build. Let others worry about all the daily distractions, and give them the peace of mind that things are being handled and will be brought to them if required. Give them some pizza, put some inspirational music on loop and lock them in the room. 😈

  • Incentivize the builders. Yes, this includes monetarily, whether it's direct donations, grants, hackathons, etc. But this also includes the boring tasks of creating documentation to make it as painless as possible to get into the ecosystem, including example code and walkthroughs in video format. Users will never use the network if there is nothing to use.

  • Foster builders. Good documentation and walkthroughs are great and all that most people will need, but an outreach program that actively helps new aspiring developers to build on the network could be invaluable in kick-starting user interest.

• Marketing: content creators and power users.

  • Nothing spreads adoption more than weaponizing your users. Seek out good content creators. Reward good content. Teach existing, interested users how to become a content creator.

  • This can cover everything from making memes, podcasts, and videos to how to host meetups and brainstorm ways to integrate crypto into their products/services/events.

For this to work these people must be compensated. Expecting people to work for free gives them no incentive and in the end is disrespectful of their time and effort. The Satoshi's Angels merchant adoption program is a great example of a way of 'weaponizing your users'.

In most other cases the funding for these types of groups is from the companies running the chain or investors in those companies - the small number of whales with skin in the game. 🐋 In others it is done by the community, such as public-funded bounties and decentralized funding - the swarm of minnows with skin in the game. 🐟

Ideally I would prefer a gamified DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization)-like entity that was opt-in and open for everyone. I have written about this before in the form of BCH.DO. Unfortunately nothing like this exists yet. My plan pre-smartBCH implosion was to begin working on this after finishing my current project, Fog of War.

Th other option is funding from smartBCH stakeholders/investors, but I'd expect something like this would already exist if they were willing so I don't expect that to be viable. Those people are now even less likely to be interested since there is now also a 101,000 BCH deficit staring them in the face.

At the end of the day I don't care where the funding comes from, but if it can be made sustainable it should be, and if it can't then the funding should be used for the maximum amount of network adoption to give the network effect a chance to take over.

I think we all wanted smartBCH to succeed as it would be an awesome compliment to BCH. Two networks, one ecosystem. I didn't know much in terms of coding so I threw together helpme.cash as a small way to help.

Over the months I became frustrated with the lack of projects so I finally decided to learn to code and (almost finished!) that previously mentioned project, a multi-DEX dual-farming and NFT staking project. And most of that was learning React, not Solidity...

I have a little more effort in me. As a final service, assuming nothing suddenly changes drastically, I will do the following:

1. Contact the remaining smartBCH projects and get their status on:

   1. Staying or leaving smartBCH

   2. Their chosen destination chain if any

   3. If they plan on still fully supporting smartBCH if going multi-chain assuming the smartBCH situation stays the same for some time.

   4. If they plan on still fully supporting smartBCH if the smartBCH situation gets worse.

   5. Any deadlines they may have on making these decisions.

If the smartBCH situation changes I will also continue exploring the idea of BCH.DO after FOG.

If there is any outside interest, since I won't attempt to do it alone, the following should also be investigated:

1. Implementing a new temporary, centralized, multisig bridge to allow sBCH coin minting again.

2. Updating smartBCH so all gas fees are put towards re-backing the unbacked 101,000 sBCH.

3. The feasibility of forking smartBCH if Kui Wang/Matrixport are not cooperative.

I quickly created the Super SmartBCH Foundation site as a joke just to host the questions Vin collected for CoinFLEX. If anyone would like to work through this with me feel free to reach out and become an honorary Super member with all the incredible perks it entails - like unpaid effort!