Re: [Crowdfund] User-issued assets, p2p exchange, off-chain transactions, and more
Be careful, we don't want to call our potential donors greedy and stupid 
Seriously, this should be an educational moment. The only way to make money directly off of a free, p2p, decentralized platform is to leverage the network effect to extract rent from the future economy and pay it back towards early adopters / investors. Unearned rent is evil, and extracting it to provide a return to investors is unethical behavior. We will have no part in that.
We thought this was obvious, but apparently it is not too obvious as other projects have gone on to do just that. In fact they have raised orders of magnitude more than we are humbly asking for, to implement poorly thought out and less capable platforms, in schemes where the anticipated return on investment doesn't make any sense at all. Why? Because any distributed, p2p network platform must be free and fair, or else it will fail. If someone is selling you an investment opportunity in a new open source decentralized platform, you should be very suspicious. Either they are scamming you or they are deluding themselves.
Let's compare the situation with bittorrent, Napster, and other companies of that era. How do you make money off of a free to use, open platform in order to provide a return on investment? You don't, as Napster and others found out. You can try to monetize it by extracting a rent, but then people will fork your code and remove your built-in advantage, or they will release a protocol which is free and fair and can't be competed against (bittorrent). Worse, when you try to make money from the protocol you inevitably introduce some level of centralization which can be exploited by those old industries you are seeking to eliminate. Look to the court cases which did in Napster, for example.
So how do you make money off of a new distributed, decentralized, free and fair p2p platform? You build new services on top of it, and monetize that. Freimarkets adds new capabilities which will be the foundation of hundreds of companies seeking to monetize asset issuance, smart contracts, and distributed exchanges. Many of these companies will go on to become worth hundreds of millions of dollars in separate industries, and the one thing they will have in common is that they will all use the same underlying free and fair, open-access network protocol, just as every bitcoin company today uses the bitcoin network without paying rent to Satoshi.
So here's a suggestion: donate some percentage of what you are willing to invest to the crowdfund address in the OP, then split the rest of your funds across various companies seeking to use the Freimarkets network once it is completed.
Seriously, this should be an educational moment. The only way to make money directly off of a free, p2p, decentralized platform is to leverage the network effect to extract rent from the future economy and pay it back towards early adopters / investors. Unearned rent is evil, and extracting it to provide a return to investors is unethical behavior. We will have no part in that.
We thought this was obvious, but apparently it is not too obvious as other projects have gone on to do just that. In fact they have raised orders of magnitude more than we are humbly asking for, to implement poorly thought out and less capable platforms, in schemes where the anticipated return on investment doesn't make any sense at all. Why? Because any distributed, p2p network platform must be free and fair, or else it will fail. If someone is selling you an investment opportunity in a new open source decentralized platform, you should be very suspicious. Either they are scamming you or they are deluding themselves.
Let's compare the situation with bittorrent, Napster, and other companies of that era. How do you make money off of a free to use, open platform in order to provide a return on investment? You don't, as Napster and others found out. You can try to monetize it by extracting a rent, but then people will fork your code and remove your built-in advantage, or they will release a protocol which is free and fair and can't be competed against (bittorrent). Worse, when you try to make money from the protocol you inevitably introduce some level of centralization which can be exploited by those old industries you are seeking to eliminate. Look to the court cases which did in Napster, for example.
So how do you make money off of a new distributed, decentralized, free and fair p2p platform? You build new services on top of it, and monetize that. Freimarkets adds new capabilities which will be the foundation of hundreds of companies seeking to monetize asset issuance, smart contracts, and distributed exchanges. Many of these companies will go on to become worth hundreds of millions of dollars in separate industries, and the one thing they will have in common is that they will all use the same underlying free and fair, open-access network protocol, just as every bitcoin company today uses the bitcoin network without paying rent to Satoshi.
So here's a suggestion: donate some percentage of what you are willing to invest to the crowdfund address in the OP, then split the rest of your funds across various companies seeking to use the Freimarkets network once it is completed.