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.
I do like the "eating your own dogfood" type ethos of this idea, but I share some of Kyune's well-stated concerns as well. This may make sense IF devs are willing to work for MSC (which I doubt, at least at this point, since it's so new and unstable, even compared to BTC).
On the up side, this action would definitely put the price of MSC way up...how much, depends on your buying strategy (e.g. constant, over X months, or managed/strategic where you buy on the dips to act sort of like a market maker of sorts and smooth out volatility, as well as get the best prices for the coins). Depending on the predictability of your acquisition strategy, the other risk is that other traders will front-run you (like exchange traders front run the fed QE/twist operations)...although I'm not sure of the impact in this case, as this is much more of a limited market than the stock market. (Maybe a more knowledgeable trader could comment.)
I think we've established that it's rising prices that attract press (at least with Bitcoin), not the other way around. In that event, it may very well kick off a virtuous cycle in Mastercoin's favor. However, we have to remember that most people are risk adverse, non-strategic momentum-chasers that will get in on a trend near its peak and cash out at the smallest sense of danger...mainstream media caters to that mania because it appeals to, well, the mainstream. This means that any raise may be short lived, similar to the earlier cycles bitcoin went though... Mastercoin will very well have a similar path of peaks and crashes along the way.
The other risk is that Mastercoin could be canned for manipulating their own market by some. Also, if the foundation favored MSC too much to BTC and the value of MSC plummeted in one of these fear-induced reactive sell-offs (as JR said, it could randomly go down 90% on its way up, like bitcoin has), then the foundation would find itself in that "impotent startup" pickle that Kyune raised.