I follow plenty of crypto influencers, and they all have one thing in common: none of them ever talk about eCash.
Whether it’s Cobie, or the Bankless guys, or Laura Shin, no popular crypto podcast has ever mentioned eCash during one of their episodes. I know this is disappointing for many in the eCash community, and I can see why some might see this as a problem, but it might not be the problem you think it is. While I agree that it isn’t good for eCash to fall too far below the radar, I also don’t think eCash needs to get too much attention before it’s ready.
If you account for the new denomination of the XEC base unit, the current price of eCash is the same as it was for Bitcoin in early 2013. I don’t bring this up because I’m saying the price of XEC in 2023 will follow the same trajectory as BTC in 2013, but because I want to make a point. You see for me, XEC is in many ways a reboot of the original Bitcoin, much like movie studios reboot comic book franchises like Spiderman and Batman.
If we take a look back, it was in December of 2013 that BTC broke $1000 for the first time. That same month, a clever college football fan put up a Bitcoin sign during a televised game and made $20K in donations from people sending coins to a QR code. The following Spring, Newsweek ran an article on the origins of Bitcoin and the unknown identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. I remember reading both of those stories. They may have been the first two times I’d ever heard of Bitcoin, and I’m guessing it was the first for many other people as well.
While Bitcoin was certainly gaining more attention, the actual usage of the network was still well below capacity. Anyone who wanted to send a BTC transaction could do so without having to pay high fees or having to wait for the mempool to clear. But it was also becoming increasingly obvious that the 1 MB block size limit would eventually have to be dealt with. Basically, the network needed to scale in order to prevent the user experience from deteriorating as demand for block space went up.
Over the next several years the number of Bitcoin transactions steadily grew. But rather than focus on removing bottlenecks and improving the network, the Bitcoin community spent most of their time arguing about the best way to deal with the issue, and when Bitcoin mania hit a fever pitch in 2017, the network simply wasn’t ready.
Though more and more people were finding out about Bitcoin, the network itself had barely made any technical progress. One way of looking at it would be that there was plenty of hype, but the hype wasn’t warranted.
By the time I finally got around to buying my first coins in July 2017, everyone was talking about it. Bitcoin had become mainstream news. Only instead of capitalizing on all the attention it was receiving, I believe Bitcoin missed a golden opportunity.
Imagine if everyone said Tesla was the future of the automotive industry, but when you went to test drive one, it wasn’t fast or reliable but super slow and half the time you weren’t even sure if it was working. Well, that’s what it was like for me when I made my first BTC transaction. What I expected was a magical experience, but what I got was not only underwhelming, but it made me question why people were excited by this technology to begin with. For over an hour I had no idea if my transaction had gone through, the fee I paid was more than I expected, and the entire experience felt anything but magical. Compare this to the first time I test drove a Tesla where after only a few minutes I knew I wanted to buy one.
It’s no wonder that more than five years later, the industry itself hasn’t made much progress. If anything, we’ve gone backwards as BTC went from once being accepted by companies like Microsoft, Expedia, and Steam, to not being accepted by any of them.
The point is that attention isn’t everything. Just because everyone’s heard of your project doesn’t mean it’s going to succeed. Everyone in crypto has heard of Luna, Bitconnect, Safemoon, but where are those projects now?
Like I said, I see eCash as a kind of reboot of BTC, only this time, I see a community focused on solving problems so that when people do find out about the project, it won’t disappoint them the way BTC disappointed me.
I believe eCash definitely deserves more attention than it gets today, but I also think what matters most is that when the time comes, eCash doesn’t disappoint people discovering it for the first time but instead opens their eyes to what crypto is truly all about.
I’m looking forward to a big year of building for eCash, and when eCash finally gets its opportunity to shine, it doesn’t waste it by having to move goalposts or marketing itself as something it isn’t, but capitalizes on the moment by demonstrating to people what Satoshi Nakamoto had always envisioned.