OK - let me begin by saying that I have been holding MNE since the first time it hit ~60 cents, and I have not sold a single token. I also believe MNE has a lot of growing to do, both feature and price-wise. So I don't say this to FUD, but to genuinely ask:
Why the hell is it necessary to create an entirely new token to deliver on the original promise of MNE? MNE was always advertised as a "self mining" token, which I personally believe is a total misnomer, since only genesis addresses release "new" MNE. I have seen countless people expecting to "self mine" by holding MNE, which, honestly, isn't a crazy expectation given how this has been marketed.
Why do we need an entirely new token to allow staking/PoS/dividend payouts/whatever you want to call it, instead of updating the MNE smart contract/adding an additional smart contract to handle payouts? I can't see any incentive for a current MNE holder, let alone a genesis address holder, to trade their MNE for this new coin. You are essentially trading cash on hand now, for the potential of this new coin to someday be equal to or greater than MNE in value. Let's not forget the issue of it even getting on exchanges. I understand that we do not know all of the details of this new token, so I will reserve the rest of my judgement. However, this strikes me as an unnecessary fork at best, and damaging to the main product at worst.
I personally believe that expanding the token creation service and improving the distribution of MNE among the public is what will continue to give this project value, so I am happy that the dev is working on this and providing new ideas. However, I am genuinely confused about the direction of Minereum at this point, given this impending "fork" and the focus on the MNE world app. I do not see the current roadmap promises adding much value to Minereum, beyond the speculative purchases of people who see a low supply/market cap coin.
Am I missing something here? I want to see the vision.
I think the issue is Ethereum contracts are immutable. Minereum was hardcoded into the Ethereum blockchain as a smart contract and that means dev can't just go ahead and update. There's no Github on Ethereum. Smart contracts are immutable (unless you're Vitalik). Dev coded the token and Minereum is what it is until kingdom come. Now dev has some more bright ideas which they cannot accomplish using the token they coded into the blockchain so the only option there is is coding a new token that allows what they are trying to accomplish. Dev can just deploy the new token to current holders (we have the eth blockchain to track all of that) and you as a Minereum holder won't notice a thing apart from the fact that you now have 2 tokens instead of 1. Call them version 1.0 alpha and 1.0 beta.
Don't stress. Dev are hacking the Ethereum block chain (they're using it for things it wasn't made for, for example mining on top of the ETH blockchain) so the customer experience might not always be on par. At the same time any MNE holder should rest assured that dev is not trying to screw anyone out of their money. Dev could have ICO'd this but didn't,
dev has never asked the community for a single satoshi even though all the things they are doing are quite expensive.