Quote from: MalReynolds on August 25, 2016, 02:25:12 AM

You are echoing my own private musings except the number of companies would be 27 not 40 if you think about it. And I still don't know if a quarter million a day is accurate for the main company we've got. Somebody was suggesting federated servers could mod the EC / Factoid exchange rate from a fixed 0.001 cent - is this true? Very bad for Factoid investors if true.

Who knows what future data rates will be. Nobody - and it's the key to whether owning Factoids is the deal of a lifetime or only fools gold. There's enough data out there to make us crazy rich that NEEDS to be secured on a blockchain - for example, daily torrents of illegal HFT bids (google the book Flash Boys and the company Nanex). WILL it get secured? We'll see.

Here are some quotes I collected awhile ago from Paul Snow on just this questionwhether or not the price of FCT necessarily reflects the success of the Factom system. A couple aren't 100% relevant, but I'm including them just to provide some context. The conclusion, which becomes clear in the last quote: The price of FCT will be directly correlated to the extent of the use of the Factom system.

Paul Snow: The Federated Servers set the exchange rate of Factoids to Entry Credits. They do so to maintain a constant real world cost for Entry Credits, around 1/10 of a cent today.

Snow: By allowing servers to set the conversion rate from Factoids to Entry Credits, Entry Credit value can be kept absolutely stable relative to dollars (or some other currency) in the real world, no matter what happens with the Factoid token. This is important for applications, because it allows them to plan their costs over time without worry about currency value fluctuations.

Snow: As we onboard a number of sizable applications next year, and as we flush out the rest of the protocol, I believe the token price will take care of itself.

Snow: But to build a decentralized protocol, the incentive must be paid out by the protocol itself. As we have built it, each server gets paid the factoid token, and they can in fact never hand them to anyone at all, and sell Entry Credits by converting said tokens into Entry Credits as they make their sales. But notice they cannot sell more Entry Credits than they earned, so they cannot abuse the rest of the network by overselling Entry Credits. But if a server didn't care to go into that business, they can transfer the right to sell Entry Credits to someone else that does. How? By simply selling their factoids to the aspiring Entry Credit store. And again, the store cannot oversell Entry Credits, since the factoids naturally handle the accounting. This is because Factoids neatly represent the right to obligate the protocol.

Snow: The token supply can grow (if speculators drive up the price) until the price stabilizes. And the token supply can fall (if speculators drive the price down) until the price stabilizes. But in both cases, the stable price is when the value of the token matches the money real applications are spending to buy Entry Credits in order to put data into the protocol. That is because the 73K factoids generated each year naturally trends to the value of the factoids drained from the supply to write into the protocol. If people are spending 1 million dollars to put data into factom per year, then 73K factoids should be worth 1 million dollars.

So ... it appears that the price of Factoids is directly related to the extent of their real-world use.

It should also be possible, I think, to induce from the last sentence ... if people were spending [q] million USD to use the Factom system in [y] years, then in order for the price to stabilize, FCT would need to be worth [z]. I have to crash for tonight, but I'd be curious if anyone wanted to take a swing at that ... Based on X / Y / Z usage projections in whatever arbitrary number of years, the price would have to be A / B / C. (This is of course excluding the effect of speculation, and would basically just be the "base" price.)