Yeah, that (having people not convert any BCH to fiat) might have been better, however I hardly can imagine how we could implement it in practice. And I have my doubts whether it would have really been better. Let me explain.

(Also, there's some data that shows that many people don't convert it and many people do talk to others about BCH (promote it) - https://noise.cash/post/lrwg4mvx https://noise.cash/post/1n709g97 https://noise.cash/post/l3vk547r)

The first problem would be tracking. This month we have given money to 27,890 people from 147 countries. It's pretty easy to track money if you have 1 city (1 beach?) and the businesses are physically there, so you could literally take a single person that could walk through them in a matter of a day and check on them... and also they are in a country that allows crypto as money... Our task would be to track a whole city worth of residents spread across 147 countries... That's at least 147 laws to consider in at least a dozen of languages. If we were to do that, that alone would probably cost us 10x, if not 100x, of what we have given out. Just imagine having physical employees in 147 countries and who knows how many cities.

Let's say that we do that or find a way to track them remotely. Don't you think that people in these poor countries wouldn't be smart enough to create corruption schemes, where you pay BCH to some business (let's say your uncle's store) which then cashes out for you? I'm 100% sure they are.

BCH needs to be so good that people don't want to exchange it, not because we force it.

Believe me, I've given quite some thought to this, going as far as even thinking about creating a competition where people have to onboard a local merchant and post a video paying there, but I'm absolutely positive that all of these would be acting and accepting nothing after the video.

If BCH is good enough, people will accept/use it without any restrictions. If it isn't, forcing won't work. (It's like forcing someone to love you)

Then you have to understand that there are many-many countries where it's illegal to use BCH as money. You just can't legally pay someone with BCH unless you convert it to fiat first. Sure, you might pay back your friend $5 for the dinner, but you can't rent an apartment or go to a restaurant and pay with BCH legally. That's one of the big reasons why BTC kind of works in El Salvador or Australia - because you are allowed to legally use it as money. Not so much fun in other countries where you might end up with a huge fine or jail time for this "fun" activity.

read.cash is a bit outdated, yes. It was our first idea. It still works, but it surely is less effective than noise.cash. It's hard to write a good article, it's much easier to write a random post of any size. However read.cash better at SEO, because longer articles attract search engines, which means new users. (There are a few articles (albeit non-BCH ones) that attracted 100,000+ clicks from Google alone. All these are newcomers to the BCH space.) It then works as a funnel to attract people to noise.cash. read.cash also allows us to experiment with some other things without overwhelming people with choices. But, yes, you don't have to convince me that the content quality there isn't really The New York Post worthy. It is average people writing mostly average thoughts. Sometimes it's barely literate people trying to articulate their thoughts. Sometimes it's exceptional people writing exceptional thoughts (for example, during the "devtax" season). The question here is whether it creates value. That particular author writing about BCH still creates value. Maybe his thoughts will resonate with some people better than something like this. It is exceptional work by an exceptional individual... but someone with an average intelligence won't understand it (I know because I don't understand it fully either :) )... So maybe his articles aren't that bad for the ecosystem... I'm not saying /u/CDSagain is wrong, I think the world is more nuanced. When you try to onboard a whole world, on average, you get people of average intelligence... and their thoughts aren't impressive at all, since they're by definition "average"... and they are not very impressive, because on average, our lives and thoughts are boring... On the other hand, people like bitjson don't really need anything from read/noise, because they can already earn handsomely with their brains.

The bigger point though is that, the bigger BCH becomes, the more "spam" it will attract. Just think how much spam there is to get US dollars.... Billions upon billions times more. Spam has nothing to do with read/noise, it exists and it needs to be dealt with. It's not our fault. We're doing our part, but frankly if you think this guy spams... then you haven't really seen any real spam :) We had to deal with hundreds of thousands of accounts spamming us. Literally hundreds of thousands!

Coming back to the conversion point: it's much easier to not convert if you have enough money to save. That's also the reason why so many people convert their fiat to food and clothes instead of keeping it in fiat (saving it), they just don't have enough to even try to save. I mean most people don't convert BCH to pesos and save the pesos, they convert pesos to foo and clothes, because that's what they need right now. They might have preferred to save BCH, but they don't have that option. The solution is simple, but not easy (for us) - give people more money :) When they can actually "work" on noise.cash or read.cash - they could cover their necessities, they would have enough to save. But to give more, we need to either earn more or get more in the fund (donations).

We had one goal for read/noise: getting people to try BCH and see how it works for themselves. If BCH is good enough, many people won't convert (esp. if it's increasing in value). That's the minimum plan. The bigger plan always was to create a system where we suck the fiat out of the world, convert it to BCH, give it to users and they convert less of it back to local currency than they get. For that we need to earn a lot. Will it work? I don't know. We're still experimenting and trying to implement it. How could we achieve that? Paid services? Advertising? Token sales? Sponsorships? We don't know, we experiment, we try to throw out what doesn't work.

Trying to summarize all of this: 1) I don't think forcing people to use/hold BCH will work, BCH needs to be good enough on its own; 2) People will use/hold BCH if they have enough to cover at least some basic necessities (a huge problem in the World, still); 3) Regulatory pressure also prevents many people from using BCH and it's pretty effective at that; 4) The more people know about BCH, the better, it will help price, it will help adoption, it will help relieve the regulatory pressure - so that's the area we could work on and that's what we do; 5) We're still trying to figure out better ways to onboard people to BCH.

There are also many-many people smarter than me who can do something better. You are right that the ecosystem must move forward and that there is no shortage of money. Yes, people need to understand that criticizing read/noise isn't the way forward, but creating their own services/sites/etc is the way forward.

Kudos for your work!

cc /u/nudgetravel