What does being an advisor mean?

I recently was asked about being an advisor to a new platform being built called WeTrust at the Construct 2017 conference in San Francisco and I accepted. WeTrust is about to begin raising funds through an ICO and considering my long standing position, which is that ICOs are something I personally don’t conduct and that we have no plans to support for OpenBazaar nor OB1, I thought it best to explain what this means for me to be an advisor to the WeTrust project.

First of all I would like to make very clear right up front that I receive no compensation for any assistance I have or will provide to WeTrust and you can confirm this with their core team.

I was offered compensation for my effort and decided to turn that down, because for me the main value I hope to derive from this process is something more intangible.

As you can see from the email I sent to them above I declined and hope to learn more about what these types of platforms go through during an ICO and try to wrap my head around something I’ve typically avoided and often get asked about with no real world experience.

The second thing I want to clarify is that advisor type roles may look optically to outsiders as a clear vouching of technology or a team. I did not join this advisor team as a way to convince you to buy an ICO token that I own a lot of (I own none) or to pump up someone else’s holdings. I was asked to provide any relevant insight or help to Patrick and his team if they so wish to ask for it. If this gives you more confidence that this project will succeed then that’s fine, but I am not simply inviting you to invest or join based on my participation. You should still give the platform a strong, skeptical eye and do your own research.

As Travis from UBER says “some people just need to take responsibility for their own shit…”

I hope this clears up any confusion around what my role with WeTrust is and I would also like to say that I plan to continue to entertain advisor requests where I have the bandwidth to help. We have received a lot of assistance through advisors we solicited over the last few years at OpenBazaar and it helped us immensely so I feel it is my obligation to try and help others when they need it and ask for it.

I am also always happy to listen to new ideas and projects (even if they’re stupid or I’m too stupid to understand them) and I think this makes the community stronger, not weaker.

That being said I think WeTrust’s idea of building off of a real world use case around sharing circles with families and other local communities is interesting and also is going to wrestle with some similar online trust and reputation issues that we struggle with on OpenBazaar. Hopefully some positive work comes out of this and we all benefit.

If you got all the way here and still think I’m a scammer, I can’t help you son. We all scammed ourselves at some point in crypto currency so I’m sure you got blood on your hands too.

Here’s a picture of someone advising.