Jason King Responds to Sean’s Outpost Transparency Questions

It can be very uncomfortable to be criticized. Especially in the context of what we have accomplished here at Sean’s Outpost.
My first impulse is to be extremely defensive. After all, we have accomplished so much. Sean’s Outpost is active pretty much everyday. We are the largest provider of meals to the homeless in Escambia County Florida. And in our FIRST year of operations we outpaced the second largest organization by over 6,000 meals. To date, we have fed over 130,000 meals to the homeless and seven months into our second year of operation, we are on pace to out perform our closest “competitor*” by over 70,000 meals distributed, more than doubling their output. Note: The word competitor is a point of contention at Sean’s Outpost, we do not look at other homeless outreaches as being in competition with us. However, do to the finite grant and public resource dollars available for most traditional homeless outreaches, they tend to view other providers in their area as “competitors” All of those meals are in addition to the value provided to the homeless community thru our 9 acre homeless sanctuary, Satoshi Forest.
We have accomplished those feats and MUCH more with a small fraction of the budget of every other homeless outreach in our area. In fact, I believe Sean’s Outpost is one of the leanest, most effective homeless outreaches in the state of Florida and the entire United States. We are privileged to have earned the trust and respect of our local homeless community. And equally, we are humbled to have been given so much trust by the bitcoin and cryptocurrency communities at large. These statements would be very hard to refute. And on their own merit, many have said and continue to say, that we owe no explanation for how we operate. Our deeds, simply put, speak for themselves. And in truth, my first inclination is to rest on that laurel. We are doing more, for less. However, upon reflection, there is a deep flaw in that reasoning. Myself, and the other members of Sean’s Outpost have NO INTEREST in simply being incrementally better than the next guy. We want to be exponentially better. And there is no way to do that by defending poor decision making. And, as I have stated before, no one should have to trust us. The point of bitcoin is that it is a TRUSTLESS technology. And for an organization that so publicly espouses the use of that technology, we have done an abysmal job of fully embracing it’s utility. I apologize for that. Sean’s Outpost should have moved to a a multi signature wallet as soon as the technology became stable and readily available. That’s pretty ironic (or maybe hypocritical?) since I have been advocating the use of multi sig for charities for over a year. In fact, we have been talking about implementing it here at Sean’s Outpost for about a year as well. The house painters house is never painted. This is being rectified IMMEDIATELY. If you will notice, we have moved no funds from the Sean’s Outpost wallet since November 3rd, 2014, eleven days before Ben’s “Open letter”. That is because we have been working on a solution to provide total transparency and security to our donated funds.

This post was published at Lets Talk Bitcoin on November 20th, 2014.