Why was Maidsafe offered at a 50% discount when priced in Mastercoin compared to Bitcoin? Before the announcement, Mastercoin was just below 0.1 BTC. Surely it is not hard to see that once the IPO pricing for Safecoin was announced, Mastercoin will jump up to 0.2. Was this an attempt by the MC ppl to pump up the price/value of Mastercoin? It just does not make sense. Let's see If Maidsafe or Mastercoin foundation can give a clear & honest answer to this question.
It was thought by us all that as people seen MSC actually being used for the first time as the utility it was designed for that the price would climb quickly. So we thought it may be a bargain initially (if at all) and very quickly not be. So a balance early in sale, I told everyone when asked this was a BTC sale really, it needed MSC to run as that is how the protocol works. For a BTC sale we did have to set prices or have a dutch auction, then we wondered how to set prices each tx as there may be wild fluctuations and people thought it better to know exactly how much msafe they ere buying for their purchase.
I never realised the speculative nature of purchasers would be so damaging or would even work. I honestly believed that people would see MP as increasing it's value as it proved itself. In the short time the sale ran it never had that chance. People were using it primarily as a route to cheaper msafe. I cannot blame them for that, but we thought only a few tx and the price would be probably past 0.2 quickly.
It seems many used MSC as a mechanism to purchase cheaply and the liquidity of it was less than we thought. David Johnston of BitAngels and JR Willets posted comment as well. You can get soem info http://www.reddit.com/r/mastercoin/comments/23o60n/maidsafe_has_pulled_the_msc_payment_address/cgz6ag2 with links to David Johnstone who helped those MSC holders who felt left out. This all sounds bad for MSC holders and no way do I want that to be the case. I think MSC has a long way to go as many other projects have. I was very impressed by the MSC devs and team, very decent people, it's a shame to see some of the allegations they had to face. I hope it does increase in value as the MaidSafe foundation is holding a lot of it now.
We are having a public discussion to see what can be learned, obviously algorithms need to improve, guessing currency rates has to be better (can you ever get that right) and much more. It should be a great meeting for the projects that follow us.
I don't know how clear this is but it is honest for sure. tl;dr we got sidelined by a massive influx of support and had not set up for that speed of incoming MSC. The price was probably wrong, but hindsight exaggerates that for sure.
[edit some typos and bad grammar as usual, clarified MaidSafe foundation]