Moving on from Dogecoin Foundation
Moving on from Dogecoin FoundationHi folks,As one of your most vocal and transparent foundation members I have decided that it is time to move on. I am no longer on the foundation or a moderator on the subreddit. Dogecoin started as a little hobby of mine back in December. I initially built a gaming PC so I could test out a friend’s gaming product Forge. I almost dropped serious $ on one of those amazing Origin custom PCs, but at the last minute another friend told me he built a cryptocurrency mining rig out of spare PC parts. I also learned that the nVidia GPUs Origin used weren’t very good at mining. So I decided then that I would build my own PC from scratch. If you factor in how much time it took me to install/configure/tweak/upgrade fans I greatly overpaid, but it was all mine. I initially started mining litecoins as those were the only viable alts at the time. One thing I hated is that it would take me all day to mine 0. 1 LTC. I eventually switched to a multipool to learn more about alt coins. It was here that I mined my first dogecoins a couple weeks after dogecoin launched. I will not forget seeing those first few thousands of doge! I realized quickly that the goofiness of doge is where I wanted to spend my time. So I switched to mining full time on Rapidhash. Fast forward a couple weeks and I’m buying a pizza in Hawaii for dogecoin, I even donated to 4 or 5 non profits while I was in Honolulu. I gave dogecoins to students I met with and spoke to about internet humor and cryptocurrency. I also was an early twitter tipdoge tipper (shout out to ol’ fidotip). I tipped all my friends in the startup world and helped raise awareness. I even tipped the CEO of cheezburger. It was fun… but then I had a crazy idea that I should join the foundation. I wanted to provide my experience managing and growing communities and get to learn about a topic I had little operational experience with: charities. A couple direct messages on twitter, and a few skype calls with Ben Doernberg and I was added to the foundation chat room. From here a random chat with Jackson about a fun charity idea morphed into a play on the words faucet and water. And doge4water was born. That turned into quite a spectacle. @doge4water was the recipient of the most valuable tweet, ever. Our community helped build water wells in Kenya… people, it’s a coin with a dog on it! ! I still can not believe this happened. Thank you for all the rallying, support, tipping contests, moonhat (I ordered 2) proceeds donated to the cause. My family and friends were ready to unfriend me on facebook… that’s how much I pushed and promoted it. I owned it and took full responsibility… even if I chose to use USPS to ship $. Here are some other crazy things I did with and for dogecoin:And now here we are… post nascar buzz. Struggling to figure out what is next for our community. Only, now I will be rejoining you in the community as a member, and no longer functioning as an official member of the foundation. I don’t know what is next for us, but I want to suggest some ideas to keep the community strong:Stay Skeptical – hold each of the foundation members you elect and business leaders you respect, and with utmost scrutiny – do not take their claims at face value. At the end of the day Dogecoin is money. And even if 10% of us don’t think about the price, and tip because we love tipping… there are still many people out there with massive wallets, better math skills than you. Be careful. Don’t get caught in groupthink. Ask for Help: be inclusive, it’s okay to ask for help when you need it. I like to believe people are naturally inclined to help others. Maybe I’m foolish, but that’s the world I want to live in. Decentralize power: if one merchant system, funding site, payment processor, mining pool, moderator, company or service has more than 25% of the subreddit user base, then work on introducing a new one to compete. Aim for at least 2 of a service…Support new services and ideas EVEN if they are janky, or run by amateurs… granted, don’t deposit all your coins into one service, but allow for experimentation. I love getting in on things early… and people having fun, goofing around on the internet is what attracted me to both I Can Has Cheezburger? and Dogecoin. The parallels within the community are very similar. Don’t lose this. Communicate Openly – if there is a flaw, point it out and show that to the community. Think one-to-many communications. Embrace Diversity – we need shibes of all different types and makes, genders, and races. I’m a japanese, filipino, hawaiian, white guy from Hawaii now living in SF. And even I am not diverse enough! (added this after +/u/all2humanuk asked about # of females on board)Demand Transparency – be open in what the projects you are doing, shine light on things that seem fishy or that concern you, and request more from the people in this community. Finally, and most importantly: stand up and lead your own projects – we need more developers building software for dogecoin, coordinators rallying people toward good causes, and more people acting interdependently. Do not be lazy and wait for someone else to build something… YOU build it. This is the only way I believe dogecoin will continue to grow. So, I’m off. I will be spending my time doing what I like to do: advising, founding, fundraising for startups, working on side projects, sharing what I’ve learned with charity organizations, hanging out with my kids, and helping talented people in hawaii get and share hawaii startup jobs. I’m heading to Hawaii next week and judging at Maui Startup Weekend. I love meeting with developers and founders. If you’re in the area hit me up on twitter. I’d like to thank Jackson and Billy for taking a joke way too far. I’d like to also thank Ben for agreeing to speak with me on skype after barraging his twitter (he’s a good guy with good intentions). my respect and admiration to the dev shibes like +/u/voidref for working on getting 1. 7 out and ready, and a big shoutout to +/u/langer_hans for leading the charge. high five to +/u/42points for moderating the community up until recently. and by shiba, +/u/mohland … please keep dogetipbot running! Finally I’d like to recommend Jens Weichers +/u/jwiechers for the foundation. He is a good person, extremely smart, german-shibe, and has lots of experience founding and running legal non-profit organizations (501c3). He and I are collaborating on a project we think you will all love. I will do as much as I can to make it a reality. Remember folks… it’s not about me, or you, it’s about us. Work hard, work together, and do good work. This post originally appeared on dogecoin
