Building bridges - An Open Letter to Amaury Séchet

Dear Amaury,

In the past week, a lot of things have happened and I want to try to build bridges instead of burning them down.

Many people, including myself, have accused you of being a malicious force in the Bitcoin Cash community in the way you have pushed forward with the IFP.

But I know that in your mind, you think that are doing the right thing for Bitcoin Cash's future. After all, you were there since its inception and a big part of its early success. Now, you feel that without being paid proper salaries, you and maybe some of your team cannot continue working on Bitcoin Cash full time. Unfortunately, the way you are trying to accomplish this funding is leaving you with very little support in this community. Trying to ram through unfinished, unreflected major changes to Bitcoin Cash's consensus rules is not the Bitcoin way. Neither is disregarding community feedback, not consulting with other client implementations, not offering any transparency regarding the unknown company that is supposed to get funded and not offering a plan for the usage of the collected funds.

Your clearly are a brilliant developer. But like many strong developers, you have a lot to learn in terms of social and leadership skills. That's ok, nobody can be a genius in all disciplines. The problem is that you are trying to solve a people problem with a technical solution and you don't seem to understand that people are what makes a project successful, not funding. If the community is so alarmed by your behaviour that within a few days a new ABC fork is created, it is clear that the community is rejecting having a self-proclaimed "benevolent dictator" as its leader.

Here is what I suggest: Motivate the right people and they will find easier ways to get you the funding you are looking for. Search for somebody you can trust who can motivate and inspire people. Somebody respected by the community. Let him or her be the project lead, let others do the team building, the governance, the marketing and the business development. Use your amazing talent to focus on coming up with new technical solutions to the challenges we face regarding scaling and adoption. The community will love you and embrace you for it and you will surely regain the respect that currently seems lost.

Bitcoin Cash does not need dictators, even if they are benevolent, it needs a ecosystem with positivity and many different teams working together in harmony.

In closing, I want to thank you for making Bitcoin Cash so great. For making it something worth fighting for. Please come back to the light side.

Regards, ZakMcRofl