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.
That's a really good point (about the devs wanting something stable). However, they will be able to immediately sell their MSC for BTC and cash out to fiat if they desire, which is not true of startups paying stock options.
What it comes down to is that if the foundation is going to hold money in a wildly unstable crypto-currency, I'd rather it be MSC than BTC. If we want stability, it should be USD in our bank account, not BTC.