After six months of blood, sweat and tears, the PoC Consortium developers are taking a step back to assess what happened and what needs to happen next.

First, the state of the nation

Burst very recently became a much bigger and better coin. The successful 2-part hard fork (we will speak of upgrade) at block heights 500k and 502k brought Burst into a different league entirely.

Capacity

Before that, it had just one transaction per second, which made it in the eyes of many observers merely a toy coin that could hold up transactions for its own needs (pools paying out miners, faucets, some exchange interaction, etc.), but no one in his right mind could have expected this to be the foundation of anything with global ambitions.

Since the “The Burst Dymaxion” white paper you know we do have global ambitions. We do pursue that goal methodically and Burst did already enter the global league with the recent upgrade. We catapulted it to a transactional capacity that is beyond most of the mineable coins and the current “limit” of 80 tx/s is by no means anything that would be technically imposed on us.

This is important to know: We do have 80 tx/s on-chain, but – given community consensus – we could easily do 1000 tx/s too. “Easily” as in “next day on TestNet” and “within a week on MainNet”. There simply is no need for this at the moment, but we do have that option.

Cost

With the current price, the cost for one ordinary transaction can go as low as US$0.002 and the cost for a multi-out same transaction can go as low as US$0.0000014. This is micro transaction Sparta! A completely new domain for Burst, uncharted territory – please claim it.

Efficiency & Security

We are about 400,000 times more energy efficient than Bitcoin (more give than take) – while offering same or better security (BURST 192bit vs. BTC 128bit), better scalability and better decentralization. Since PoC2 we also eliminated a small but present time-memory trade off. All these features now inherent to Burst are not only intriguing concepts for users – they are particularly of interest for institutional entities and even governments.

Where to go from here?

We scaled the coin – now we have to scale the community. Fortunately, the community is almost ready for its inevitable scaling process. This growth needs to be both quantitative as well as qualitative. Think for a moment about what it really means “to become a global currency” and let it sink in.

The Burst community needs to embrace and adopt this bigger and better Burst. The processes we all were used to are due for an upgrade. Pools can be more efficient, faucets can be more efficient. As a community, we traded the club for a fully loaded Uzi, but we are still clubbing things with that Uzi.

We can grow with clear conscience now. The blockchain with its current capabilities is under-challenged and because of the facts about tx-capacity mentioned above, this will remain so unless the Burst users network grows to be a multiple size that of Bitcoin. Our user base could grow 100-fold and still no user would experience blockchain-imposed bottlenecks. So let them come… but can we – actually?

Even if the current Burst community is somewhere – best guess – between 25k and 50k people, we are at the moment absolutely not ready – one might even say “absolutely unfit” – to grow to Dymaxion levels where a 500 million people “community” could be served easily.

Our problem is not technology. Our problem is us – the Burst community.

Burst is a community coin, it has no CEO and hopefully never will. It should never be run like a company, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be organized. There can be teams, divisions or task forces. They can have their leaders or “champions”. We do not need to have a “corporate policy”, but that doesn’t mean we need to remain in some swamp of erratic non-organization. A more professional approach – while remaining a community effort – is the task at hand.

The time, when “the PoCC should do everything”, has come to an end. We need specialized people for specialized tasks. We need people who can build up and lead (a.k.a “take responsibility”) teams or even form sub-communities within the just beginning Burst ecosystem. And still, we need to do all this as if it was with one voice and to share the same vision towards a common goal.

Consensus

Now that we can do transactions faster, dirt cheap and much more of them than e.g. Bitcoin with a way higher energy efficiency – we have literally nothing to be ashamed of but everything to be proud of. Make yourself aware of this and let this spirit radiate when you propagate Burst. “Shitcoin? Darling – you’re living in the past.”

While everyone in the community can do something to propagate the coin, the focused effort of propagation itself should be in the domain of a “marketing team”. Right? There is development and marketing. Right? No.

Speaking of teams – we will need more of them and we will need people with the capability and the engagement to bear responsibility of building up such teams and drive them. Not just manage. These people might very well be the sole team member for some time and thus need to be able to do all it takes.

Let’s call these people champions. We will need at least one of each for the following teams:

GUI Dev/UX/GFX

– wallet frontend(s)

– landing pages

– design

– wallet frontend(s) – landing pages – design Packaging

– availability of Burst software

– various platforms

– availability of Burst software – various platforms Testing

– TestNet

– stuff before it hits the packaging team

– stuff after it leaves the core/app/packaging team

– TestNet – stuff before it hits the packaging team – stuff after it leaves the core/app/packaging team Support

– ensuring qualified user/noob support

– presence / response time

– writing documentation, translating

– ensuring qualified user/noob support – presence / response time – writing documentation, translating Apps

– building the software stack above core

– and eventually above infra

– building the software stack above core – and eventually above infra Evangelists Inc.

– not quite marketing

– civilized zealots

The PoC Consortium will help here and there in the domains mentioned above, but it will focus its activities on:

Brainz & Experience Team

– brought you this nice text

– strategy

– ideology

– brought you this nice text – strategy – ideology Core Development Team

– core technologies

– wallet/node development

We also have – kind of – various groups that want to do marketing so something like that is forming:

Marketing Team

– promoting Burst the formal way

– doing marketing stuff

– turning our tech and culture into awareness

But… what does it all mean? No Binance? When Dymaxion?

By now, the phrase “to become a global currency” hopefully had a chance to finally sink in. Even if we had 50k people and every single member of our community would dedicate his full time to Burst: a growth to 500M people would mean almost 10,000 new people per community member. Infeasible at the moment. Surely our growth will be an incremental process – but how to do it right?

It cannot be too slow because other currencies might take that place. It cannot be too fast, because we could collapse under our own growth. How does such a collapse happen? Dilution.

If a new Burst enthusiast basically not knowing much about the coin rather than it “being better than sliced bread” attracts a new community member and this process repeats… we might very well end up with lots of people not even knowing if Burst was PoC or PoS or what the hell that even is. “When Masternodes?”

How to avoid this dilution? Well, a good concentration to start with and a well designed inclusion process. Some may be aware of the type of “support” PoCC member rico666 gives… not very user friendly, or is it?

“You give a poor man a fish and you feed him for a day. You teach him to fish and you give him an occupation that will feed him for a lifetime.”

– proverb from our Chinese friends

Remember (consider the numbers) that we all are currently not more than the tip of the needle. If we do not actively seek out to build a community of strong, competent and well-informed individuals to start with, dilution will get us. Yes, give support – but always encourage/demand people to DYOR (Do Your Own Research), to read more – to become knowledgeable in all things Burst, so they can competently help including others.

In the current evolutionary phase of Burst, it is very important to attract only people with the potential to help grow our community, else high danger of failure. You have been warned.

So where does all that leave us?

As mentioned above, the PoC Consortium will of course also work on core technologies and you will probably spot a BDD (Burst Dymaxion Daemon) on TestNet in 2018, but no warranties.

However, for the next few months we will focus on getting this community professionally organized. Together with the “App Team”, we will focus on market adoption. Merchants, ATMs, payment gateways etc. We will make use of formidable but still largely unknown Burst features. These are just examples, as we will work on more things to make Burst useful in the real world. We want to ensure that all the new technical capabilities are used to their full extent and the community has grown into its now-large shoes, before enabling the Dymaxion on MainNet. We reckon that we have to fully complete each step before taking the next, otherwise we will trip over our own feet.

The Ideology and Strategy Part

“We need more marketing. Marketing is important. Adoption is futile.”

We agree that Burst could now use more of propagation and there certainly is a lot to shout out to the world. At the end of the day, however, marketing is a tool while adoption is the goal. This is not an “either-or” – marketing helps adoption, adoption helps marketing.

“But Binance… look at Bytecoin! Or something!”

We strongly believe there are many smarter ways to spend 20 BTC than to give them to some exchange to be listed. If you feel the urge to crowdfund 20BTC, make sure they stay within the community. That is, are spent on efforts and support of the community itself (app development, conference presence, maybe even ads). Other than that, we all should work towards Binance listing Burst – for free, because they cannot afford not to.

“Yes we need more money to do marketing!”

No, we don’t. Because we have the moral high ground. Throwing money at a problem is the easy, the weak solution.

In this world of preposterous ICOs and overvalued blockchain companies, many projects rely on the hype they can generate by paying their way through advertisements and marketing campaigns. The vast majority of the propagation about cryptocurrencies fed to the masses by media is effectively paid for. We are opposed to this short-sighted ideology that values buzzwords above fundamentals.

Our goal is to be featured in mass media, not because we paid for it, but because we are bringing true innovation and value to the table. We don’t consider decentralization a brake to our growth because it prevents us from buying ad spots on Forbes, we consider it our inherent strength because it is the only respectable way to build the future’s economy.

Strip everyone from their contrivances, and the true viability of the project remains.

While there may be coins worth billions without the substance to back this up, it is not our way. We are aiming at the perfect ecosystem: the right mixture of technology and network/usage/application. Right now we, as a community, need to work on the latter. In its current technological state, Burst is a coin worthy of at least top100 inclusion and there really is no valid reason not to be up there.

It is now up to all of us to make this happen. We, at the PoC Consortium, are looking forward to a productive second semester in all conceivable metrics. We hope to see as many Burst enthusiasts as possible join this brewing revolution for economy and mankind.

– The PoC Consortium members