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Props to crowetic for all he has done for Burst, this would probably be completely dead if he was not here.
I know I'm new here but I read almost the whole thread and browsed the forum.
Yes, props to crowetic, no question about that. I do think there are more people who helped save and/or develop Burst into what it became (uray, Wulfcastle, dcct - just to name a few), and lately vbcs and CIYAM developers, who actually implemented something absolutely groundbreaking (but a lot must have gone severely wrong regarding PR - the "press release" is not even a press release and it wasn't spread).
Today we have some problems. I think mmmaybe have presented the best analysis of the situation
here in a post critical both of his own role and the community's.
I will quote two of his points (the other two are more of his own failures).
3) Lack of community involvement. Early on the BURST community was awesome, doing all kind of things, like creating tools and improving the infrastructure of the coin. It was an exiting time. Smiley But things changed. Less people contributed "voluntarily" to protect their BURST investments, probably thinking someone else would do it or they just selling those "free HDD coins".
It is of utterly importance that a wider part of the community gets active to be able move BURST in the desired direction.
Fortunately enough, a lot of the things that are required is mostly easy things, like building an attractive FB page, contribute with possible topics to tweet about, arrange a thunderclap, do fun stuff to get attention, working on an new and improved OP, or using your social network to try to get more devs on-board. Sure, the PR Team today is relatively large but the members are recruited for their special skills and work on quite restricted projects. BURST is nothing without the community helping each other out instead of have seemingly endless personal vendettas.
2) Lack of funding. I used to be against all forms of pre-mining and IPO/ICOs. The fact that BURST was "clean" in this respect was one important reason that I got involved in the first place. Today I think differently, although not completely the opposite. To develop a coin technically and at the same time be able to do decent promotional work does, simply, require some sort of funding. The PR team has asked for donations and ran an AT to get the means for improving our PR efforts; however positive it is in one aspect, a sad and troublesome fact is that we now have more than 20,000 registered BURST accounts while only a handful from the community have contributed in a substantial way to the funding (and ironically, the main contributers are found in the PR team).
I fully understand that not everyone can donate 1mil or 500K, but small sums like 500 or 1K BURST from like 18,000 community members is not unreasonable to ask from a miner to further develop this great project. The Team clearly haven't been able to explain the importance of funding and what "micro-payments" can achieve. To spread a single press release in a proper and efficient way costs several hundreds dollars. Hence, the Team, and I had an important role in this, have failed also here.
Basically, it is up to us. We can't ask the devs and the PR Team to do everything. Burst needs us, both for voluntary work and, what he calls, "micro-payments" (preferably in BTC). Burst has so many holders, yet are the only a dozen doing work and regularly donates.
It's like the rest just mines and think the technology itself will bring Burst to 2000 satoshi. The technological breakthrough with ACCT proves this is not the case, technology itself will not bring Burst anywhere. Burst needs funding to do promotional work and be active on the markets (buy wall).
The idea with micro-payments is fine, many raindrops will eventually create a lake. So lets try that
Can't someone in the PR team post the donation addresses and everyone of us donates some mBTC or satoshis for Burst. I think the coin has so much potential we should try it!
We should not forget 3) of mmmaybe's points. Those who can't donate may contribute with ideas and some work.
If I may come with an own suggestion here I think Burst really needs an idea of where we want to go and how. I think it is important to create a roadmap, where the items are ranked due to their importance (creating the roadmap would be no. 1).
This has been mentioned before. However, as I understand the dev teams use the Slack platform for their work, which is like IRC 3.0. I would suggest open one channel up for every community member who wish to contribute. As we live all around the world, such a channel could prove very active.
To create a vital coin is not to organize a P&D, just to make quick money. Without a main funder,
we need to "create" Burst by many, many, many small donations and our joint work force, directed by the dev-teams.
To try this out is not hard: everyone supporting the coin could have the donation address in their sigs and remind each other to donate, say, every week; and as I understand Slack, it's not difficult to create an open channel for brainstorming and organize work on simple projects.
That's my two cents.
My one cent goes to the webmaster of burstcoin.info: Please do not code all by yourself, use a platform with some nice template. Those can be customized nicely, but foremost Burst would get a funny functional and easy-to-update site in a day or two. That the coin does not, after soon one year running, a proper site is just silly. No hard feelings here I hope, I only thinking about benefits for the coin. If I was in charge, I would also merge the excellent burstcoin.eu and burstforum.com with the mainsite, but that might not be possible.
Thanks if you read it all