Quote from: Explodicle on March 04, 2014, 01:37:48 PM

Quote from: maaku on March 03, 2014, 05:53:07 PM

Unearned rent is evil, and extracting it to provide a return to investors is unethical behavior. We will have no part in that.

Says the man sitting on a huge pile of Freicoins he earned just as much as any pre-mined coin developer. Of course, this time it's different because charity is good and lending capital at great risk is evil. You're entitled to seigniorage because you hold a moral high ground - you're a better person than those evil Bitcoin speculators.

Gee where do I send my money.

Of course he's not entitled to seignoriage. As explained many times, if we used that money to directly fund freimarkets or to pay for freicoin websites domains or hosting, it would be trivial for miners to deploy a softfork that impedes those coins to ever be moved again, thus the coins would become destined to be destroyed by demurrage, with the only side effect that it would take more than 3 years for inflation to disappear. Your opinion is that the seigniorage should be burned in mining subsidies and I respect that opinion, but you have to face that it is not shared by the majority of the freicoin community. Like I was told when I wanted Bitcoin itself to have demurrage: go ahead and fork freicoin to create an altcoin with demurrage and 100% issuance through mining subsidies.
Apparently we made a terrible choice with the name of this proposal. We hoped that "free markets" would be something appealing for the cryptocurrencies community, but people seem to interpret it as if the proposal were coupled with Freicoin, which is not. So, please, go to a freicoin thread or to the freicoin forums to criticize the freicoin foundation since as maaku says this is off-topic for this thread.

Going back on-topic, even if I considered that using the seigniorage of a new currency (it would have to be another one, not freicoin) to fund development (like mastercoin or etherum) as something reasonable, legit and moral; I would feel bad asking people to "invest" in something that I consider a terribly stupid business model.
Being free software, nothing prevents other people from forking ethereum from day 1 (maybe with some more sensible choices like changing the PoW to SHA256 to enable merged mining with Bitcoin), thus relying on currency speculation for profits is far more risky than most of these "investors" think and developers are not being clear about this (to be fair, maybe they don't understand this themselves).

Venture capitalists should look for more clever ways to monetize an open network like freimarkets: issuing gold deposits crypto-certificates, becoming a fiat or bitcoin gateway, selling smart locks or smart cars, creating a p2p lending site on top of freimarkets smart contracts, acting as an internet notary for legal contracts behind the issued assets, providing a secure storage service for windows users...
What I think is that these "investors" are in fact risk averse but they just don't understand the real risks of their "business model".
Freimarkets is not a business and thus lacks a business model, but there's many potential business models to be built on top of this infrastructure.