Quote from: melodiem on January 30, 2014, 02:00:28 AM

I am seriously uncomfortable with the entire thing, to write for Devtome forces me to become a currency trader, something I wouldn't do in any other environment to get paid for my work. I suspect a lot of newcomers are going to be challenged by it as well so a bot would be awesome and might make this just a little less traumatic for some of us

I look at it quite differently. Payment is in devcoins, and it's a payment for open source work. Pricing a devcoin is a function of assessing what value you think they bring or add to a world without them. It would be quite possible for an exchange of dvc to flow with less reference to fiat, if price could be efficiently aligned to effort.

Devtome and all devcoin payment methods should challenge recipients in realising returns. Price risk and implied value is what ties buyers, users and developers together in shared interest.

If for example a bunch of GIMP and mozilla developers were regular devcoin recipients, then I'd know that buying and using dvc contributed to creating and improving stuff I use and value. That in turn adds value to dvc. What those developers do with their dvc is down to them. They could for example, give them to blender developers or hypothetically pay their plumber if he accepted dvc.

Defining dvc as only a stepping stone to fiat misses the point. Before recipients received dvc they didn't receive anything, so devcoin doesn't owe them a easy guaranteed fiat return. Realising returns should be a challenge forced upon those people and the contribution of a devcoin economy itself.

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...I think though, that real success in trading means actually hoping and even being a bit delighted by fear/negative forces to help with that success. In the end, those who might not be as hard-nosed or cant afford to lose so they react to fear, are always going to be the losers. (IMO)

The first step of trading success is generally about having a view - whether that's simple direction, volatility, mean reversion, relative value etc - or any fortune is just luck. But I don't think the average dvc earner needs to be playing the markets. Put simply, if enough people think devcoins are worth more than their price then value will rise, and vice versa.

Frankly, nobody worries about the price rising. Worries about price falls by recipients can only be based on a fear that 1) I or others have been overpaid; 2) Other people think we've been overpaid. That means your currency exchange challenge isn't really about trading complications, it's because there's not enough price stability yet. And that's because (crypto speculation aside) payments aren't yet aligned to work value, according to those buying/selling dvc. That needs resolving by growing application and stability, not trading facilitation.