Since this coin has reached it's Q1 first quarter today, I thought I'd give a mini update from a developer perspective. It's just my own personal view, and does not necessarily reflect view of others or the community.
I've been on this project for just over a month and first of all it's been a lot of fun. First of all thanks to everyone that has taken part, particularly coinsolidation, who I am amazed has not collapsed of exhaustion yet! The team is great to work with and everyone has their thing, it's a very enjoyable vibe. The project area has grown from about 10 people to over 80 in the last month, with some people looking in and some more regular. There seems to be quite a lot going on in the pipe line, and it's also seems to be operating in the way of a DAC (decentralized autonomous corporation). So it can be full of surprises sometimes, and everyone can choose their own level of participation.
Development seems to me to be going quite well. There's lots of things being worked on and a regular stream of releases coming out, small and big, on the topic of marking. I would say it's more on the smallish side right now, than the big, but that can change easily. Markpfennig has a big release in trello that can be tracked, so that is something we're all looking forward to. Poloniex did an excellent rollout of marking in the space of a few days. Kudos.
We now have prototypes of marking on a number of platforms:
- slack
- irc
- twitter
- poloniex
- cli shell
- web
- bitcointalk (yes you can mark here - shhh)
- browser based client side certificates (including android)
These range mainly from proof of concept to full production quality as in poloniex.
What I see as being in the pipeline is:
- email
- github
- android client
- soundcloud
- vimeo
- youtube
- much more!
And quite a bit more. At the same time maturing the existing work, scaling it, making it robust, security etc. It seems to get a little better each day, so hopefully that will continue.
Relationships seem to be going pretty well and we actually seem to be working well with lots of other teams. From my experience that's a rare pleasure in free software, so I think that's a positive.
Our web integration I think is getting really quite strong and we are well placed to be one of the leading coins in the world of REST Linked Data Web 3.0 Semantic Web (all those terms mean similar things) which some people believe is the next logical step for the web -- at least that's what we are betting on.
As with any new technology the transaction levels and users start slow, so the challenge is to increase that, over the next quarter.
I dont normally talk about price, but I think I will give what I see as guidance, take is as you will. The coin is up almost 1000% in just over a month since I've been involved, which is a pretty decent rise. Last I checked it was around 110k satoshis. It's been as high as 250k. I think a lot of the trading of this project is on *potential* and that's a pretty hard thing to judge, especially if you are not close to the technology at hand. From a neutral standpoint I thought that when we hit 250k the price was probably ahead of the development at the time and I thought 200k was fair. Since then imho dev has gone quite well, and I'd say fair would be around 250k sat. now. So it's a good time to buy or mine cheap coins, imho. A lot depends on the next 3 quarters, particularly the next quarter. Watch the metrics primarily of implementations and users, growing tx numbers (mainly off block) and I'd say to a lesser extent mining trading. I'd look to consolidate the 250k level then take stock of where we are again. Well I said more about price than I intended!
I've spoken to quite a few people (technical and non technical) about marking, from artists to geeks. Most seem to really like the concept. I keep hearing lots of creative ideas that are inspiring in the same way that bitcoin inspired me in the early days. For example I really like the mark to tshirt designs that have been discussed. Hopefully marking is an idea worth spreading and can attract creative people to get involved. Anyone can help out and make this project what you want it to be.
Just my 2 marks, hope it helps, looking forward to working with you all!
In fairness to the community I thought I'd give an update on this, as 6 months of the project has passed. Again it's my own take does not reflect views of anyone else.
The last 3 months have been a disaster. Core development has dropped about 90%-99% from its peak. Other metrics have followed such as daily active users (from c. 100 to about 1 -- me!), mining, (from about 100-200Ghz to 0.5 Ghz), price (from 250k peak to 4k trough). The link I think is largely causal. The supporting team have gone from highly optimistic to highly confused. On at least a dozen occasions the core code effort was ready to go from closed source to open on that day. Month after month this didnt not happen, with those involved in the project wondering why.
One bright moment in the cycle was the release of 0.9.3 which seems to have corrected some previous issues without introducing new ones.
My new fair value is 10k satoshi, reflecting a less engaged founder, but also other systems such as changetip poised to go viral in 2015. The market share of bitmark, even if it is decentralized decreases by the hour, and it's valuation is based right now mainly on the potential market. i'd recommend test driving the changetip facebook app which shows what is possible in this space, and also see that they very much have the idea of upvotes in mind. Tipping marking is something I'd love to see go viral on the web, let's hope decentralized and open source solutions get some market share from the fast moving centralized versions that have traditionally dominated web markets.
One other concern is the speculation aspect of the coin. Markp announced yesterday that bitmark had 'gone low'. There is a consortium of members looking to buy a large number of BTM, presumably cheaply. The promise is that a large number will be donated to the foundation and used for bounties -- call me a sceptic on this one. Fund have gone missing 3 times from the foundation, but thankfully have been replaced, allbeit at a lower valuation. Loans and donations have not been made good wrt the promised deliverables -- we should try and avoid going down this path again. So this strange new strategy I think is going to be counter productive. I only hope that it can be actioned as quickly as possible so that the focus can get back to an open source project.
Apparently there's 22 people that want to work on bitmark marking and an update is coming soon. IMHO, The focus needs to be brought back to open source, transparency, code and growing users. I hope in Q3 this project can get back to what it was doing in Q1, and less of what happened in Q2. 2015 could be the year of marking tipping (I dont see a huge difference other than context).
