BCH: designing a roadmap, part 1

I have been looking at the financial system that this world uses, and I think we can do better. A peer to peer cash system that eliminates the need, though not always the wish, for centralized decision points and clearing houses.

I believe I found this improved system in Bitcoin Cash.

If you want to go fast, go it alone. If you want to go far, go together.
— African Proverb

Bitcoin Cash is at a point where it needs to grow to become what I and many others feel it can be. As long as it stays small, it can be pushed around by the much bigger central banks. Likewise, while Bitcoin Cash is small investors can cause quite large price fluctuations that are unhealthy for our ecosystem.

Yes, there are metrics we can look at to conclude that Bitcoin Cash is really not small. The economic activity on the BTC Lightning Network is a fraction of what BCH does every day. As this is the platform that "the other" Bitcoin wants to use to grow, this is relevant to compare and we are clearly doing well here.

More technical metrics also give a positive picture. From the number of innovations going on, via the amount of full node implementations ending at and just general ability to scale. 30MB blocks (2.2 million tx/day) on a testing day a year ago, and on private networks there are nearly a magnitude more impressive results.

At the end of the day, scale comes from people using it. Yes, you need the ability to handle it for those people to stay, but scaling is first and foremost about having actual people using this in a way that adds value, that uses the network-effect.

Any roadmap for Bitcoin Cash is going to be about growth. How can we grow and how can we sustain this growth.

How can we grow our userbase?

The shortest answer here is to give users what they want. But, we need to qualify this a little as we could grow fast by giving away money or power, but we would not grow for very long. So the way to grow is to give users what they want without compromising on our core values and strengths.

What do users of Bitcoin Cash want? This question could give a large and complex set of answers, we could come up with new ideas and state that this is what users want, or say that we need a new transaction design that allows more features, because that is what users want. While not specifically wrong, this is also utterly unhelpful. If you believe so much more in selling cars, don't be part of the bakery business. We already have a product to sell. It is money that is fundamentally improved over all other versions of money that humanity has tried.

A good idea and great fundamentals don't automatically lead to a succesful product, though. Users get value in daily use. User experience is a huge part here. It is likely where our greatest strengths lie and where the most work can be done to improve the value proposition to user.

Improving the user experience attracts and retains users.

There are several categories here which are relevant:

• Payment experience.
  Merchants and customers need to have a predictable and simple experience where the amount of (difficult) steps is kept to an absolute minimum.

• On-Boarding experience.
  A new user (can be customer, merchant, etc) needs to get started easy and fast while feeling her money is safe.

• Business-integration experience.
  Practically all systems the world uses do not support BCH, this needs to change. They need to start integrating with BCH because its profitable, because it makes sense. To do this, old and often closed software needs to start using BCH libraries and infrastructure.

Each of those categories should get its own post, focusing on the strategy for success for each. If you have ideas for any of these, please do leave a comment below!

To loop back on the saying at the top of the post, growth and long term success happens when we go in the same direction together. Ignoring distractions that pull us in alternate directions.

I would like people to consider that the implied effect of growth is that every single section of our ecosystem grows. More users also means more merchants. More of everything. Growth at the top (or bottom, depends on your viewpoint) is obvious. We want more users, so we expect the userbase to grow. Growth at other levels is less obvious. But this is not a company. This is a movement and a fundamental ecosystem. As the number of users grows, we will also see more developers join and I'm sure we will see more companies too.

As our ecosystem grows it would be nice if our innovation rate grows too. After all, more developers can do more work. More companies can try multiple different ideas. Just like the economy at large. The main thing here is that people should be able to join forces. Everyone re-inventing the basics, for instance, will undo the swelling number of developers completely.

How do you think that Bitcoin Cash can improve its user experience of being a better money?