Flipstarter is a new service based on an old idea to use crowd-sourcing as a means to fund actions healthy to the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem. While the concept is known in places like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Fundly, Patreon and GoFundMe, Flipstarter is a 100% Bitcoin Cash product.

Flipstarter was created out of need. The need was made clear by some: the full node development should be funded. The Flipstarter devs took this as a call to action and created a way to actually organize and crowdsource this funding in a voluntary, market driven way.

I am the founder of Flowee. Flowee is a family of products that together have the aim to accelerate the world towards a Bitcoin Cash economy. Flowee includes as one of the core products a full node implementation.

Like most teams that work on a full node implementation Flowee was approached to be represented in the first wave of Flipstarter fund-drives. In this article I will explain what kind of campaign I think will work best for us.

Any plan to build infrastructure starts with mining. We have used the Bitcoin Core client for mining for many years based on a proven track-record of stability.

Bitcoin Cash is meant to be a world class money, with the aim to scale to the world needs. With Tether moving some of its financial movements onto the Bitcoin Cash chain, we may expect blocks to get bigger soon.

When the market starts to require bigger blocks I want Flowee to be ready for this and be able to provide the mining-infrastructure and support needed.

Flowee the Hub is the full node implementation that is at the center of the Flowee family. It is directly descended from the Satoshi client (via Core and Classic). The Hub can do mining just like any other client, using the getblocktemplate RPC call. But I'd argue that we should aim to improve on this with an architecture that actually scales to the future. A technical description is here.

Building on Flowee's already available infrastructure will allow this to be built reasonably easy. The main goal is to have multiple implementations available to do mining on. Avoid a mono-culture as those are too easy to cripple by an intelligent attacker. The Bitcoin Cash entire ecosystem would benefit from a mining service like this.

It is useful to point out that only time will allow a great track-record to be built. It will take time (and a lot of good work) to create the confidence that miners are willing to bet the farm on this infrastructure. It is with this in mind that I think aiming for infrastructure that allows much bigger blocks is so useful. We will need to start building this well before the market begins to depend upon the capacity.

As the topic today is about Flipstarter, let's talk about the fund-drive here. We are talking about setting a goal of collecting money that will make this project a reality.

We do need another factor to make this happen. We need someone that is a competent developer to actually put the time in the project. This is easier when you pay that person, but let's do things in order.

We are first starting to look at finding a developer (or team) which is willing to take this project on. To write and actually ship the GPLv3 code as introduced here. Because without a developer the money is not going to help.

I would prefer a C++ developer that is happy to use Qt, has experience with multi-threaded systems, dev on Linux and is willing to learn blockchain ideas and mining specifically. Having past success stories available online is definitely a benefit to get the confidence and run a Flipstarter campaign.

I will be supporting the person with anything I can, the only goal is to make this a success. The persons applying will have to be helpful in running the Flipstarter campaign as they are essentially working to get paid.

Only when there is someone who can take on the project the collecting of the funds via Flipstarter may start.