I do have a question about how this whole thing works in practise though. Do clients buy the FCT themselves? If so, are they supposed to go to exchanges? I assume that is not the case. I have never understood this completely. For example: I own a company and want Factom to help me storing data on the chain. What am I suppose to do as a non technical person? Is Factom helping me with this? I guess Factom is not sending me to some exchange with a troll box to buy FCT, are they?
Secondly, what is Factom's aim regarding the amount of unburned FCT out there at any point in time? Do they have a desired ratio for this? For example. with the current price you can get 17.5 billion EC's. Is that close to a desired status quo or not? Can they influence that and if so, how? Isn't it a problem that so many FCT are in the hands of people who never would use FCT for buying EC's?
I would like to see an answer from Factom on questions like these..
Not from Factom, but I can take a crack ...
Clients don't need to buy FCT directly. Given the price swings, this would be impractical for most big businesses/organizations/govts. Instead they can buy Entry Credits directly from Factom and soon, from other third-party EC stores. Clients can buy EC now (at a fixed price of 1/10th of a cent) from Factom here:
https://shop.factom.com/For the second question, this get more complicated, but basically the EC price is kept constant at 1/10th of a cent, for the sake of businesses/etc that need to plan for future usage. However the FCT price is dictated by the market. One token (EC) at a fixed price, and one (FCT) dictated by the market, means that the FCT -> EC exchange rate remains dynamic.
For your question about the FCT supply if investors don't want to sell ... This would push the FCT price up, so that fewer FCT would be required to generate the same number of EC. The supply is dynamically self-adjusting, so that the system can never run out of EC, and FCT has a base price that's a function of Factom's usage (beyond which it can't drop w/o risking a depletion of FCT supply). More about this is here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/factom/comments/4zxi6e/fct_ec_and_the_factom_financial_ecosystem/You also ask about what the supply-equilibrium point is. I'm not sure, but ... FCT supply will be reduced until M3, after which 73K FCT will be generated each month. The new supply will help ensure the supply equilibrium (that FCT supply doesn't drop to 0), and b/c this will be coming out around M3, my guess is that that equilibrium level will be slightly lower than the current supply todayor basically, whatever it drops to before M3's release.
Hope this helps! And hopefully someone from Factom can weigh in more authoritatively about where they expect supply to stabilize ...
whats the point of FCT if one can buy EC from Factom directly ? or does it mean that Factom must hold FCT and burn it for EC and would be just a middleman in such a case ?
Because if it doesn't work like this, then FCT has no purpose and value at all
