How is the testnet working, can you give us a little update of progress,
can we expect the start of open beta for the beginnning of the new year?

Yes we are, we feel that the price was at a point that was unjustifiably low. By no means are we encouraging anyone to sell their coins.

We didn't put up a buy wall at the moment of the crash because we didn't want to see a crazy panic sell, and also because it was news that I had presented that caused the crash, felt dishonest. But then the price sat at a very low level for over a month and we felt that it was worth buying back some of our notes and driving the price back up. We feel that we've got enough cash to get through at least the beta, and we've only managed to buy 17 notes at our asking price of 2000. We were never planning on buying more than around 60, because that's all the money we're willing to spend propping the price up.

But it seems to be all the money that's needed. We are feeling optimistic and you guys should be feeling optimistic too.

In hindsight, I should have been more transparent about putting the buy wall in place. If I had said 1 week in advance that I was throwing up a buy wall (up to ~60 notes) at 2000 nxt each, you guys probably would have pushed the price above that all by yourselves.



The sianote directly derives its value from the volume of money being spent on storage through the Sia network, because the fees provide a payout in siacoins to the holders of the sianote. If we decided to make the fee 0%, but still keep 10,000 sianotes and give out the ~1200 that we sold in the crowd sale, that would be insulting to everyone. It's not the 1/10000 that counts or adds value, it's the 0.00039%.

Plus, as msin is suggesting, 10% might be too high, and we may need to lower the price back down to 5%, 3.9%, or even something lower like 2%. All of these price changes should not affect the crowdfund holders, because I've always stated that they will be getting 0.00039% per sianote, and that's the number that's most important when trying to put a financial price on a sianote.

Most importantly though, I feel very obligated to stick to the 0.00039% value that I've repeated many times. I've encouraged everyone to make decisions around that number and not any other number. Changing that number means we're altering what we told people to expect when they were making their investment decisions. People who chose not to buy may have decided to buy in the event that each sianote would actually be worth more than 0.00039%.  Furthermore, if we create a precedent for changing this value, you lose the security of knowing that it won't decrease. If we decide later that a 10% fee is actually bad (because Storj, for example, ends up being 10% cheaper) and we need to reduce it, do we also drop how much a sianote is worth? How will that affect people who have been investing in the sianote?

I realize that changing the total fee is a big move, but I am trying to do the right thing. If it ends up being a major source of contention, and you guys feel universally that you are being cheated because we raised our fee without including you, all that will happen is we reduce the fee back to the original 3.9%. I feel that this would hurt Sia overall because it affects the number of people that we can hire, that affects the quality of the product. But I would much rather set the total fee at 3.9% than set a precedent of adjusting the income provided by the sianote, even if the first adjustment was upwards. I don't  think that I would ever feel comfortable adjusting the number down from a previous amount (if I did decide to set it at 0.001%, I would never lower it), and that would back us into a corner if we suddenly realized that the fee was too high, because either we have to fully take the hit ourselves (to isolate our crowdfunders) or we have to lower the value of the sianote back down from 0.001%, which would violate expectations that we had set.

I'm willing to work with you guys on this, but I'm very nervous about straying from the 0.00039% value that I've repeated so many times. I don't think it would be right to adjust those expectations.