Re: Proposal for Standardizing the Distribution Rate of Dev MSC via the MSC Protocol
I think perhaps it is time to convert more of our BTC to MSC. I'd rather have MSC in a rainy day fund than BTC anyway. As you say, giving away BTC attacts people more interested in BTC, and I'd rather the foundation hold MSC than BTC.
Here's my crazy proposal:
1) Keep only the 1000 BTC we've already moved into offline wallets
2) Use the remainder of our BTC to purchase MSC over the next few months on the distributed exchange
3) Pay all future bounties exclusively in MSC
4) Keep half of our MSC money for a rainy day and/or future distributed bounty system
5) If our rainy day fund becomes excessive, we can always vote to lower the ratio later
I realize that this would potentially make all of our existing investors absurdly wealthy, but, well, the stated purpose of the Mastercoin Foundation is to serve the holders of Mastercoins, and I'm having a hard time seeing this course of action as anything but a huge positive for them, as long as we do it transparently and over a long enough period of time that nobody who wants to sell to us is left out.
Also, MSC prices would probably go up to the point where I'd sell 1% and quit my job to work on MSC, which I hope would also be in the best interests of our investors.
Here's my crazy proposal:
1) Keep only the 1000 BTC we've already moved into offline wallets
2) Use the remainder of our BTC to purchase MSC over the next few months on the distributed exchange
3) Pay all future bounties exclusively in MSC
4) Keep half of our MSC money for a rainy day and/or future distributed bounty system
5) If our rainy day fund becomes excessive, we can always vote to lower the ratio later
I realize that this would potentially make all of our existing investors absurdly wealthy, but, well, the stated purpose of the Mastercoin Foundation is to serve the holders of Mastercoins, and I'm having a hard time seeing this course of action as anything but a huge positive for them, as long as we do it transparently and over a long enough period of time that nobody who wants to sell to us is left out.
Also, MSC prices would probably go up to the point where I'd sell 1% and quit my job to work on MSC, which I hope would also be in the best interests of our investors.
Brutal honesty: As an Exodus investor I love the idea, BUT.. it really gives me a weird feeling. Could this not be easily misrepresented as a huge pump and dump by outsiders and contrarian?
This proposal gives me a horrible feeling. This is too large of a deal to leave up to the board members. I'd prefer to take is slowly and delay and decision until we can vote on it. Or vote on alternative proposals. I believe a balance between msc and btc holdings can be found and potentially "managed", ie actively balancing a 50/50 position between btc/msc.
Likewise.
Is the purpose of the Foundation really just to "serve the holders of Mastercoins", or is it something broader such as shepherding the protocol so that it gets developed and adopted? This proposal might accomplish the former by bumping up the market price of Mastercoins in the short term, but I think it sacrifices the latter. It seems shortsighted as a bounty structure moving forward.
Right now in the main Mastercoin thread there is a parallel discussion about how devs with spouses/kids/mortages find BTC bounties scary enough. Isn't shifting to pure MSC bounties -- an even more speculative form of remuneration -- counterproductive?
Or, to put it another way: so many startups lack the kind of funding that the Foundation has acquired, by accident AND design, through its deep BTC reserves. Trading away too much of those BTC reserves for MSC is sort of like putting the Foundation back into the position of the disadvantaged startups that have to say: "sorry, can't pay you a real salary right now, but if we make it big some day your stock options will make you rich!"
Whatever the actual motivations, the optics are just bad. This smells like a decision motivated by greed.