@polpolrene Nope, they can vote on giving the funds or not but they have zero influence in how you do your business.
I mean, it is simply horrible to imagine how thousands of people would micromanage a company. They are not your board of directors.
You only have to convince them once to fund your project at your proposal.
Once you convince the mass, you could simply run away with your money BUT it won’t be everything since it doesn’t fund you the lump chunk of the requested funds, they will be periodically paid in installments.
Well done @dirvine@nicklambert - “and always, no matter what, out of everything bad, comes something good” - Building on one helluva quality team here with the support of guys like @lightyear@MrAnderson et al.
David, just to add one to the list I have already proposed earlier on, that is crowdfunding MaidSafes activities. I don´t really see the problem here - in the end this is paying for a company that develops a product people want to have. Isn´t that a feasible solution? What do you expect the monthly burn rate to be once you scale up? I think crowdfunding your expenses is a better solution than selling coins that were not meant to be there in the first place…
Agree completely. I want David and the team to keep control of the additional coins so that they’ll be able to sell them when needed or when appropriate. It’s all totally hypothetical, but assuming this is being done because we are much closer to an alpha release we could reasonably expect the price to rise. The people who should benefit most from this are the devs. Structuring the deal, so it’s not a loan they would have to pay back at a higher price will be important, as I think Blue Bird and Happy Being pointed out.
If there’s a crowdsale, I’d prefer there to be a long lock-up period to encourage long-term investors and discourage day traders out to make a quick buck.
Ohw, I thought people could write proposals as well. But even when it’s only one vote to get funds. The DAO Tokenholders want something back for it. So you need to redistribute some revenue to them or something. So you need to create a proposal, offer it to the DAO folks. People buy Bitcoin to exchange them for DAO tokens and after that Ether’s are distributed to Maidsafe. And they have so sell them for Bitcoin again to finally get money and pay devs. I know the DAO already has money in it, but still this line of steps doesn’t make any sense and costs quite some money due to the exchanges of coins. Even apart from price swings in ETH and BTC.
Well if you plan to get funded by the DAO, then you would be excluding people who aren’t already at the DAO.
The steps you mention (buying bitcoins to buy ether to buy dao) wouldn’t exist.
There are 130-ish million USD available at the DAO, any funding is coming from there.
You would go to the DAO if you need funding, not to democratize the access to safecoins.
If that is the goal, DAO is not an option
David, just to add one to the list I have already proposed earlier on, that is crowdfunding MaidSafes activities. I don´t really see the problem here
I’m not convinced. Firstly you need to put a lot of effort into a crowdfunding to ensure it reaches enough people, with an appealing enough offer (not to us, but to Joe public) so they are willing to put $1m+ into it, and that takes time and resources away from the project when the aim is to keep the momentum going and get it done.
I’m not an expert at how you do that - figuring outthe offer here - but I can’t immediately think of what that is. I don’t think David and Nick want, or see the need, to put time and resources into that route, so if it is going to happen someone here would probably need to step forward and create a convincing case that MaidSafe might choose to back. Having said that, I have no more idea than anyone else what the options David is alluding to might be
Still hoping the decision reached will not be one that lands Maidsafe company with serious debts. It may be that the best approach will be a mix of the suggestions offered in this forum. I admire the committment of the devs but don’t want them to hock their future.
I want to add that my understanding of The DAO is that the token holders can start up an agreement with a supplier and, importantly, they can fire the supplier if they are dissatisfied with performance. Token holders can then employ a new supplier. In such an event, the Maidsafe team would completely lose control of the project. I’m not saying it would happen but it could. Just something to bear in mind if consideration is given to DAO funding.
As @mvanzyl pointed out they are not the coins in question.
But if you were interested in investing in the project as you say purchasing coins sold by the company is how you would do so.
I would be honored if all my future purchases were directly from the company’s holdings, knowing my money has actually gone toward their coffers instead of some mastercoin whale.
By missing the crowdsale I have always felt the money I spent on MAID has unfortunately been wasted in terms of it not going to the company where I would by far have preferred it to be, now I hope that will change.
Disagree here. The currently proposed solution puts a massive debt on Maidsafe. How is that not binding resources in a completely uncontrollable way? (Alternative: instead of lending MSC Maidsafe lends the value in €£$) Also you have to calculate the cost of a negative backlash. As I have demonstrated earlier MSC holders complaints are essentially unjustified but fromy a PR perspective this can be entirely irrelevant and damage the project.
Anyway, I am not entirely opposed, I am also not a Maidsafe shareholder I only hold coins. However, it costs barely anything to set up a sustainable structure to support Maidsafe and I don’t see why we shouldn’t at least try. I am not talking about raising a million (btw. I am not convinced that this will be enough), I am talking about raising the monthly burn rate Patreon-like. Even if we don’t reach the 50k-80k-ish £ Maidsafe needs - say we only reach 5k- that’s still something to pay off parts of the staff. While others have suggested to install a donation address, I believe it’s better to install an infrastructure that turns donations into calculable funds. And this is just one solution beyond many others one can look after instead of selling coins that are highly debated.
You’re missing my point. Whatever the impact of that debt (and as I’ve said it is something I really don’t like), it is in the future, whereas the objection I raised to crowdfunding or DAO like solutions is that their impact is now, it takes resources away from MaidSafe unless it is done independently.
The latter I have no problem with, so if that’s what you are proposing that’s fine. I agree with you that every little helps, so by all means go for it, but $5K / month or thereabouts is not going to make much difference - MaidSafe will still have bit the bullet somewhere else, though they may get away with a smaller bite, which is of course good.
I think the other point here is that while being in debt is something that we don’t like they would be in debt for SAFEcoin not the $$$ value of the SAFEcoin when being repaid.
It will come from the 5% core dev rewards and if paced right will have much smaller impact than repaying other types of loans to 3rd parties. From what David said the core devs would get a portion of the core devs rewards and the rest to repay. So its a future hit on core devs rewards. And as I said before if paced correctly and the higher the SAFEcoin $$$ value then the less the impact.
Yes it still affects the devs later on, but not nearly as much as it would with a business loan or any DAO loan (which has strings attached for continuing funding)
I know I didn’t address that directly, but that’s because I believe it doesn’t make a difference eventually. We need to think long term here. A solution that has Maidsafe ending up with a massive debt isn’t a sustainable solution imho.
Maybe you are right and an abonnement-style crowdfunder won’t reach the needed numbers, but maybe not. We won’t ever know if we don’t ask people to fund Maidsafe directly. I’d be surely willing to contribute on a regular basis with full transparency on expenditure (which is not much more as what we have seen until now). I also love the idea to have a crowd sale on a patreon style app to raise money. As I said. Many solutions ahead. Too early to focus on just one in my humble opinion.
PS just to prevent confusions: I am also against the DAO proposal
@Artiscience I don’t think we disagree at all here. But we can see that David is willing to accept that debt.
Depends. Depends on whether the value of Safecoin rises or not, and if dev rewards are ever going to generate sufficient revenue to repay debt, we have to assume it will have risen a lot relative to just about any other currency.
So I think you are wrong to draw the above conclusion, and that’s the entirety of my difficulty with them paying back in Safecoin. Without that I’d be much more comfortable with it, both for MaidSafe Limited employees and shareholders, and the knock on effect that the impact on them has on the project.
Or crowdfund Maidsafe’s 1st killer app. Terms can be made so that participants know and agree to funding Maidsafe activities and a portion of the app rewards can be paid to token holders as an added incentive.
This community is ready and willing to help fund this project. Look at what happened with Project Decorum that depends on this project’s completion. The crowdfunding landscape has changed and doesn’t appear to be as resource intensive as in the past. Terms can even specify that the tokens will remain off an exchange until after launch to avoid that hassle or a “long lock-up period” like @MerkleTree suggested.
Crowdfunding is my favorite suggestion by far and I trust the dev team will be surprised at how much is raised (just as seneca was). At the very least it will buy us more time to pursue other options. Why should Maidsafe go into debt with questionable coins as many have expressed? Let the VC and private investors throw their big money into the pot with the rest of us IMO.
Sure, and they don’t even need to be very well though out apps; a preliminary sketch might be enough. And they don’t even need to have a fully-featured SAFEnet: a network of vaults that operate efficiently (i.e., no Safecoin) might be enough. An app that functions on such a network (freemium model and using payment by traditional means) would be capable of later upgrade to a Safecoin system of payment.
