So there is a ton of content here and I don’t have the time to go through it all but let me add some of my thoughts:
- BitcoinZ is all about decentralization. This is a completely foreign concept to everything you know. You may think you get it, but you don’t… because it’s as @rizzman1000 said, the wild west… the new frontier… It’s impossible for us to understand it because there’s still so much to explore. As BitcoinZ ages, we learn more about what decentralization is, how it works and how it can be applied to our centralized lives.
- As mentioned in my previous point, we live in a centralized world. This means we can’t be fully decentralized because the two don’t work together very well. This means until we can reach true decentralization, we have to build bridges towards decentralization. What are these bridges? Here are a few I can think of:
- Our main website (https://btcz.rocks). It’s a centralized source of information. What would a decentralized website look like? This forum is a step in the right direction. Here, you can speak your voice, people can vote – agree as well as disagree. Is this forum decentralized? Unfortunately, no. Not yet, at least. It runs on one infrastructure so it’s still centralized – but the content within comes from many sources and people are free to choose what to believe. We’re constantly working on figuring out how to further decentralize everything from the codebases, to the wallets to the information resources. This is our goal, to learn from our mistakes as we explore this new area of life.
- Communication channels – sort of… We have slack, discord and telegram. Having three services connected to each other is great. It allows people to use the medium they choose and still be connected to the others. Unfortunately however, the connection between the three is a centralized bot that copies messages over. The bot is centralized because it runs in one location.
- Pools – sort of… We’ve fought this fight since day one, trying to keep hashpower decentralized over many pools and not to let any one pool grow to large. This has been a very hard struggle because running a pool is very time consuming and most people who start a pool will shut down within a month if they don’t gain traction. Beyond that, Suprnova has held about 50% give or take of the network since nearly day one. This is also something we continue to work on.
- So what about marketing? BitcoinZ lacks in marketing. Going door-to-door is great but is also very time consuming, slow and expensive. Social media has helped tremendously and I think it’s a great way of getting the word out. I also think we need people to write content. Search engines love text so the more blog posts there are out there written about BitcoinZ, the better. We need good content that when non-technical people read, they’ll understand. The website can probably use a redesign, but we need someone to invest the time into drafting a new design and they themselves or someone else can take that design and make it a reality. I’ve recently rewritten the site to be considerably more lightweight so updating the design shouldn’t be a problem at all.
- But which social media posts or which design is best? To answer this question, we go back to decentralization. It’s really hard to satisfy everyone. Scratch that, it’s impossible. No matter how amazing you think your designs are, someone out there is going to hate it. Because BitcoinZ is about decentralization and it’s impossible to please everyone with one single design, we have to be willing to have multiple sites. https://btcz.rocks is maintained by some members who have been a part of the community since the beginning but that doesn’t mean we can’t have other versions of the site. This is the nature of decentralization. I’ve seen plenty of social media posts out there that I didn’t care for about BitcoinZ but that’s OK! For us to reject them is to centralize. While those posts may not appeal to me, they may appeal to others.
OK, this is far beyond my ability to keep track of what I’ve been saying (I have a terrible memory). My main point is cool design. The purple is definitely different. I like the roundedness of it. I’m also completely against “one marketing entity” that has full control. Also, I noticed there was no mention of what this will cost in the proposal. Is this being donated? Lastly, I think I speak for everyone when I say If you’d like to help, please do. We’d love help. But we’re not willing to give up decentralization and freedom – even if it’s just about marketing.
GL