Then why did you let a third party determine the exchange rate?
Because it's their responsibility to exchange the coins for BLOCK.
We'd have a conflict of interest if we determined the price.
This is pretty glaringly obvious IMO.
How would there be a conflict of interest? Coingateway takes a percentage of the value of the transaction. They could value this transaction in terms of the tokens and have no uncertainty. Then you could set the exchange rate. And if you had done that, you could share the valuation function with us.
There'd be a conflict of interest for us because we could set an algorithm that guaranteed we'd rake in the maximum amount of altcoin per BLOCK.
What? If you shared the algorithm later, people could verify it with their own transactions and see if they got shafted later.
The incentive would be for you to be fair because any unfair algorithm would hurt the value of the coin later when the algorithm was revealed.
[edit]Hiding the algorithm or claiming that you have no control over it appears as if you have something to hide.