The problem with this coin is that there is no reason to buy it. You can't actually DO anything with this coin except exchange it for btc. Therefore the only reason people would have to buy it is if the price were going up, which it isn't. And the price will only go up if people are buying it. It's a catch 22. I suppose this is the problem for most of the alts until they get so big that you can exchange them directly for USD, and then the price stabilizes.
Unfortunately I'm not sure what the solution is.
The good thing about this coin is that buying it supports cancer research so it does have some buy appeal for people that want to be charitable, but don't have the computer know-how or the video cards to fold themselves. But how many people in that category are on exchanges trading crypto alts? My guess is the number is close to zero. The anonymous transfers do seem to be the hot thing right now but it doesn't really make sense for curecoin. People using curecoin because it's anonymous so that they can use it to make shady or illegal transactions would be counter-productive for the image of the coin.
Mobile wallets and debit cards would make it useful as a currency and a lot of alts seem to be trying to go this route. Also getting merchants to accept it as payment. These are the only two things I can see that would reverse the trend of this coin for the long-term. In the short term it also just needs more exposure because I think a lot of people just don't know about it and overlook it. The lower the price goes though the harder it will be to get miners to point their rigs at folding. They are in it for profit so folding has to be more profitable than mining. Asics being developed for other mining algo's helps in a roundabout way, not by increasing the profitability of folding, but by making the profitability of mining all other coins decrease.
Are there any plans/ideas for getting more buy support for this coin? I like this conference idea. Is there anyone that can tell me when the conference takes place and the cut-off date for donations?
I think we need to build an exchange that allows to to exchange directly with USD. The anonymous transactions are big but I agree we shouldn't do this. We should focus on increasing profitability - I'm in between on the conference, it could be great if handled correctly but with how little the devs have done any marketing I doubt it will be as of now. We should focus on getting some merchants.
I've done a fair amount of thinking about Curecoin to this point and I think the price drop, frankly, is justified. Here are my thoughts and recommendations. The Curecoin team can do as they please. I am not planning on selling any of my coins in the near term but as a large stakeholder, I hope that the community gives this some thought.
- New projects are fundamentally about people. And we know nothing about the Curecoin team. While it's true that the lead dev, Cygnus has outed his real name and Google+ account, that is, for all practical purposes meaningless. The dev page should be updated to reflect resume details about the developers: their skills, and past projects.
- To date, the developers have done a poor job of communicating with the community. I applaud "lasershunt" for taking on much of this burden, but the devs should be in the forums a minimum of 1-2 hours/day. There are many good & concerning questions from interested parties here, on Reddit & Overclockers, but none are being addressed by offical reps. That is a huge miss.
- The team needs to surrounds themselves with professional advisors/business development folks who are connected in the industry, can assist in speaking gigs at conferences, and manage PR. These people need to be official on the website to inspire confidence in the press, miners and investors.
- The big incongruity is that there is an imbalance in the professional aims of the project and the seemingly amateur voices supporting it. Long-term this project will not succeed without the support (and potential integration) of Stanford University/Pande Labs and the team has not inspired the market with confidence that such partnerships are on the horizon (not to mention the comments from Pande Labs that the developers ignored their concerns). Many of the forum voices are well meaning but ultimately misguided. Spending $2,000 on a booth at a conference is probably not the best use of money. Right now the only investments should be made in recruiting phenomenal people to work on the project, and building stronger ties with Pande Labs. I can promise you that if you're able to steal 2-3 devs from Mastercoin, NXT, even coins like XC or whatnot, or find equivalent talent willing to work on Curecoin (and prove their skills) the market will respond very positively.
- The reason why this matters is that the structure of the coin requires a lot of community trust. There is a reasonable pre-mine (5% including dev & IPO) as well as a centralized distribution plan. Curecoin is a potentially game changing idea - connecting economic benefit to social purpose. But as folding is not encoded into the blockchain, and is not decentralized, much of the market will lose interest. Those who are interested will demand legitimacy and credibility which is what I'm advocating for in this post.
Overall, it's still early, about 2 weeks since release. I do think there are some significant issues, but a lot of upside as well if the team is willing to adapt quickly, accept help from highly qualified people, and re-focus 100% on moving faster than other coin on the market.
I agree I would like to see what the devs are doing especially with the dev funds that they have said would be used for marketing. I'm kind of bummed out because I purchased a few hundred at 10x the current price but that's my fault - I still believe in the long term it will rise above this. In the mean time I will build myself up a nice stock pile at the low price. However, I agree we need to get active devs.