Quote from: crazyideas21 on April 10, 2015, 12:47:14 AM

The cost of developing a new altcoin may be low, yet to make sure that others would start using it (e.g. mining and trading the coin), the marketing cost can be significant. Our research group is trying to quantify such costs. How much does marketing cost? How many man-hours does it involve?

Exactly. Estimating the value of the used time can be complex or even impossible. Generally speaking, the amount of work is somewhere between "overwhelming" and "nearly impossible". Grin

Quote from: crazyideas21 on April 10, 2015, 12:47:14 AM

I'm surprised that most respondents so far say that the revenue from creating altcoins is close to zero. If indeed it costs effort to create and market a new altcoin, a rational altcoin creator would expect to receive some form of revenue in return (in addition to feeling good).

It all comes down to definition of rational. This world tends to emphasize the point of view that only financial gain (direct or indirect) has the built-in potential to make doing something reasonable. However, the scene (not just crypto currency but the whole open source / privacy posse in general) is in most cases much more motivated by not exactly "feeling good" but perhaps "doing good".

Quote from: crazyideas21 on April 10, 2015, 12:47:14 AM

What would be the revenue? And how to generate this revenue? (You can respond to the thread or on the anonymous survey above. Thanks!)

For one, the joy of being able to live as a genuinely free human being, free of the fiat money fraud played by the banks.

At the moment, crypto scene is like the wild west in it's wildest: there is so much potential, so many different people with different backgrounds and motivators, that getting a precise picture of it all requires one to drop all assumptions and a deep dive into the murky waters of the geek semi-underground.

Naturally, people do need to live with something. I personally am an entrepreneur who went bankrupt in 2008 and has been more or less broke ever since. I too have used immense amounts of time, energy and resources (bandwidth, CPU and storage capacity etc.) to advance several crypto projects - without any financial gain involved in the equation. On the other hand, I am also working full time to get projects such as the Altcoin.Center CryptoShop (https://cryptoshop.altcoin.center/) take off.

This is just my assumption, but I do think that many crypto currency activists see the currencies as "just money" - i.e. just a tool for exchange, not a means to benefit in itself. In other words, the scene is trying to provide an alternative that would actually do the #1 task money was originally invented for, before the goldsmiths turned it from means to an end.

Quote from: crazyideas21 on April 10, 2015, 12:47:14 AM

Quote from: box0211 on April 08, 2015, 11:36:00 PM

just launch your own coin with NXT monetary system ... and you can even mine it yourself just to get an idea of how it works. no need to fork bitcoin.

Nxt may be a good choice moving forward. Rather, we are interested in a retrospective analysis. For the past two years, there has been a surge in new altcoins that are directly derived from bitcoin or litecoin. While some coins are created to make a better world, others may have a more rational motive. What's their business model? What are their costs and revenues? How do they maximize returns?

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In many cases, the driving force is clearly not financial gain. Therefore, not nearly all coins (or other open source software projects) have a "business model" to them. For many people and especially projects, it's just cool to have your own currency.

If you ask me, I'd say there's plenty of room in this world for crypto currencies. I do not mind the fact that there are so many 99,9% cloned coins. Most of them have no plans to "replace the Bitcoin" but to simply exist in their own niche of this newly born crypto wonder world.

-j.
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Altcoin.Center