Reasoned discussion and balanced debate within a Bitcointalk thread? Wonders will never cease.
I'd like to make a suggestion, if I may. Solely with regards to the pre-mine issue.
I absolutely agree that people who are committing their time, energy and skills to developing a coin should be rewarded and, when their project is a success, rewarded handsomely. There is, however, the obvious problem of a large stash of SC that could potentially be dumped on the market or, at the very least, end up being cashed in over an extended period until there is little motivation for the coin developers to continue.
It would make most sense for the control of that pre-mine to be given to an independent Escrow and paid out according at a community-agreed rate for each team member, commensurate with the amount of work in any given time-period.
You, as the SC community of investors/speculators should agree a reasonable rate per hour/day/week that would permit the development team to earn an income corresponding to a FIAT equivalent in order to ensure they can commit as much time as possible and pay their bills and living expenses while they work for the coin project.
This would offer an opportunity for the proposed features to be developed as soon as possible, given the nature of the cryptocurrency world not being willing to wait too long for anything.
Incorporated into the regular pay/reward structure, should be team bonuses for project milestones accomplished.
A final bonus for each declared team member should be awarded for when the project has been fully released AND the price of the coin has maintained a predetermined level for a predetermined time in order to demonstrate that it has not been reached artificially. This final reward, to be honest, should most definitely provide for a significant reward for each team member, based on their workload and time committed to the project.
I would, however, recommend part of the pre-mine be allocated for an independent project-manager from outside of this coin's community, who can quality-check the work being done and manage the rollout stages to ensure successful releases.
Oversight is most definitely needed.
Having this coin's project managed by someone who is a respected IT/Crypto professional, would be worth every SC you pay them.
That is how you recover from the quality issues that were evident from the start of this project.
(Edited)
This is a wonderful idea!
It would be great if it was possible to set this up somehow.
I thought about it a bit more.
At the moment it seems that there is left (after bounties and payments):
367740.0064085
80253.65896604
631359.95182131
=
1079353.61719585
So approximately 2.4%
If 5 devs work for us$50/h 40h/w = us$10 000
If we take 1SC to be worth us$0.02
we would need 500 000SC per week to pay all of them.
Which means if they give us all of the premine leaving nothing left for bounties etc, we would be able to pay them for 2 weeks from it.
For the hassle of finding a reliable escrow server, getting dev on board with this, organize a way to audit their input and programming and set up a payment system, it might be more effort than it is worth.
I would expect it would take a couple of days just to get it sorted out, I have no idea how to even start it.
You raise an excellent point about how to keep decs incentivized though.
Someone else suggested a dev fund by the community (this was in context of a destroyed premine) and offered 25k SC.
I wonder if this is not still a great idea. Either something like that, or perhaps contributions from stake profit.
I would also be willing to donate into an escrowed account from where we can fund devs directly with an audited system and appropriate oversight.
IT people are used to timesheets.
I don't think the premine can be used for this purpose. Either it is too small or SC is still worth too little. Obviously if price shoots up things could change.
I have been staring at a PC screen for too long though and if I am making some obvious cognitive errors, please correct me.
