Opinion: My Motivation

Editors Note from Mike: I am adding this note after this piece is published to state that this is a personal opinion piece from Brendon.

This piece is not endorsed by Coin Fire.

Brendon has since resigned on his own accord after realizing from countless emails of concerned readers that this was seen as an “attempt to grab money via guilt”. While this was not his intention he has since realized that it could be seen that way by many readers and independently felt he needed to go back and better hone his skills at this time.

I have personally intervened regarding this situation and removed the links to our Bitcoin Starter project and sincerely apologize for the original links. Brendon is aware that is against our own internal policies governing editorials to have posted this piece and has since apologized.

Coin Fire’s editorial policies dictate that we are not in the business of selling a personal opinion –  we are in the business of presenting the news.

I have updated this piece with this note instead of just taking it down and sweeping it under the rug because the media that tries to cover up mistakes and isn’t transparent – is the media that should be frightening to us all.

Brendon and I have stayed up nearly the entire evening discussing this and he realizes while his heart was in the right place that he shouldn’t have written this piece and has since resigned to take time and hone his skills more. I have personally invited him back and he has accepted once he feels that he can better discern what is and isn’t appropriate for posting on a news site that doesn’t do these sort of things.

In the spirit of being open and transparent (a guiding principal of this site and our editorial policies), I am adding this note to this story and taking full responsibility that I have failed our readers and offering my most sincere apologies.

– Mike at 7:02 EDT, August 13th, 2014

I was recently messaged via Coin Fire by a reader who wanted to know what my motivation is for posting on this news site and not taking a penny for my work outside of tips.

I have spent the past several days thinking about this question and wanted to share the answer here publicly.

I write here because I love cryptocurrency. I write here because I love writing.

I’m not a professional writer, I’m not even a professional blogger.

I just write the news and do so because I believe in the mission statement of sharing cryptocurrency news without shit.

Does Coin Fire run advertisements? Absolutely, it incurs very serious and real expense to keep it online. It incurs very real and serious expense to have a paid business level CloudFlare account to make sure it stays online through even the worst extortion and DDOS attacks.

I write here because I believe in cryptocurrency. I write here because I believe in Mike’s vision of having a site that isn’t just a paid shill of a select few mining companies, a wide range of startups that believe they have to pay for coverage, an overwhelming belief that the news shouldn’t be paid reporting.

Mike recently launched a Bitcoin Starter after having received some messages from our readers. Many people had told him to just self-fund the entire site and not accept the easy dollars that I have seen placed as offers to sell this place out. Others have told him to reach out to the giving community and raise some funds to take this to the next level and truly be a voice of the people.

We’ve seen the criticisms from a certain IRC channel where he and the site is being put down for trying to raise some capital.

I know some of this stems from the fact the website contains advertisements. A great debate has taken place internally about those advertisements.

They barely bring in a dollar a week for this site. They can be distracting, they can be frustrating and even annoying at times but they appear because they do bring something in, no matter how little and Mike applies every bit they earn to paying the ever increasing bills this site is faced with on a daily basis.

Some have called this move of trying to reach out to the community stupid, they’ve said some pretty awful things about it and said he shouldn’t have started a site if he wasn’t willing to eat the expenses of doing so.

He didn’t and many of us didn’t expect this site to be such a success. When I wrote Mike an email asking him if I could write I had assumed this would be a place to polish my skills and hone them with some time so that someday I could write for a larger publication.

With time I’ve seen that this publication could be that publication.

Even more importantly though I’ve been convinced this idea of providing a quality product and improving with time will bring this site even more success.

The haters are going to hate. We are going to just keep doing exactly what we are doing even if others want to say we’ve gone stupid. For those that want to hate behind a shadowy screen name on IRC, I invite you to come here and fill out the feedback form. Keep us innovating, keep us on our toes and help us do better. We want to be a truly community powered and community conscious place to get the news.

I write here because I believe in cryptocurrency and I believe in sharing that with others on an outlet that is truly dedicated to being open, honest, and up front.

Coin Fire is that place and forgive me for the meta post about Coin Fire but I feel so strongly about this little corner of the Internet and the wonderful community we’ve been building.

Coin Fire will keep bringing exclusive scoops, Mike, myself and others will keep traveling the country to sit down with executives at companies to get the exclusive scoops, we will keep bringing the stories. We may make mistakes but we are learning and we appreciate this community more than I can even begin to state here.

Thank You.