This was finished. http://blog.swarmcorp.com/2014/08/01/swarm-financial-audit-complete

Exactly. Counterparty team fixed the problem rapidly and the SWARM distribution went out as planned. First distribution of COMICCOIN should also be received by the time you read this message.

https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/counterwallet/issues

Short answer is that Counterwallet mysteriously fails with some addresses. I hope and expect this will be resolved in the next 24 hrs.

Great article published today about what we want to achieve for the Bitcoin community with the comic book: http://www.examiner.com/article/will-bitcoin-reach-consumers-through-coin-academy-and-bitcoin-comic-book

AlexP from BitcoinComic.org

Thread unlocked.

Swarm updates:
     

      Weekly video updates from our new office here.

      Sprint I Review

      Swarm.co


First campaign:

     Ever tried to explain Bitcoin to your friends? Now you don't have to. The Bitcoin comic explains all in an easy approachable format. 120 pages of pure fun, guaranteed to excite and enlighten.

    

    Get your copy of the Hunt for Satoshi today. Order now and get your copy by the holidays

Rest in peace Hal.

We've done an initial distribution of SWARM to SWARMPRE holders on a 1:1 basis.

The specifics of the remaining SWARM are now available for a vote, explained at length here.



We've also completed a full financial audit and better explained cryptoequity.

If you are interested in the Swarm idea you can also read some related writings.

By popular request, we will also soon be discontinuing our bitcointalk presence and moving all comms over to our own forum.

As for the specifics of our legal infrastructure, we are operating out of multiple legal entities and plan to document this when everything is setup to our satisfaction.  

This would be simple if I was the only decision maker, but our founding team has very different views on the matter and hasn't been able to reach consensus yet. Besides somewhat different ideas on the optimal situation (e.g. the relative importance of the coin market cap), we also disagree on how the community feels about this issue. As you can see I spend a lot of bitcointalk where the majority of posters so far have said they want us to go forward with the original plan, but there was only a single negative comment sent back after our newsletter went out to approximately a thousand people.

Right now we have no mechanism to resolve our disagreement and this is one reason why I think a swarm coin holder representative is extremely important.

That's right. We originally said that we would do a typical one shot takes all fundraiser, but then people voted to lock some coins and make them available for future fundraisers. I think it was assumed by some of the Swarm founding team members that we would distribute all of the 24mm coins to whomever participated in round one on the basis of their SWARMPRE holders, but this wasn't discussed as a team and so our communication on this point was not  consistent.

Although it seems nice to have more coins, it's not clear that this positively affects the value of the coins either in the immediate term or in the long term. There are various arguments to be made about having a higher coin market cap, and the potential negative price movements that can happen when you have an asset split (which is effectively what we we are doing). So some founding team members thought we should work out some other solution.

Since Counterparty now has an asset burn feature, this was proposed as an option. Obviously it's not fair to burn unsold coins but leave the founders with a larger share, so we also discussed and agreed to burn our own share.

That said, it's still not overwhelmingly obvious to me at least that this is the best option. Among other things, there's a clear communication gap since some people were expecting us to distribute more coins at the end of the fundraiser. I'm not sure what percentage of the overall coin holders thought this was going to happen though. I assume it is higher here on bitcointalk since these issues were discussed more throughly and since I was primarily handling the communication and assumed (perhaps naively) that this was the best solution.

As for my part, I was never completely convinced of the burning proposal, but I don't think it is unreasonable if the founders burn their coins in the same proportion to the folks who participated in round one.

That said, I think any shift in direction this complex requires a lot of discussion and a vote.

The best option I see at present is to actually shelve this discussion for a bit and focus on building the platform and our next couple coin launches. The team is gathered, our office is nearly setup, budgeting is set, accounting is nearly up to date, and we have our first few launches lined up.

Btw, this also brings up the larger goal I wrote up on one of my longer pieces on cryptoequity, of having an elected representative of swarm coin holders who participates in the decision process of swarm and periodically audits our books to make sure we aren't doing stupid things with the money we've raised or violating the interests of swarm coin holders.

I'm not sure if there is anyone here who is interested in volunteering for this role at present, but I think it would be good if there was someone who served as an interface for the interests of people who have swarm coin. This person would also be responsible for shaping any proposal that goes up for a more general vote, so that we don't inappropriately structure a proposal to serve only our own interests.

Oops, fixed.

Actually, we've been considering burning the swarm reserves as well.

Here's what we have as far as various possibilities:

https://docs.google.com/a/swarmcorp.com/spreadsheets/d/17moCJBIDkIGyvnKGuU3coJkGPnoAL4Bb2eeysptTwfA/edit#gid=0

As can be seen in the spreadsheet, the actual value of the coins doesn't vary considerably in any proposal, but some of them create a considerably larger market cap for Swarm, which presumably benefits all Swarm coin holders.

btw, had a great long conversation with Swarmpath this afternoon. I actually didn't really appreciate the burning plan myself before, but he showed me some complicated pie charts with the various options and why that one might be the best. Looking forward to an open discussion about this once all the details are put together. 

It's going to be a major focus of ours over the next months.

One thing we've discussed but not yet implemented is a multisig lock on the founder shares and future funds so that they are only released via a vote of swarm coin holders. Although it's unlikely that this will implemented any time in the near future, its' an interesting way to prevent anyone from running away with funds and/or flooding the market with coins.

Ok, this afternoon we are swarming the official FAQ. All questions welcome. Leave as a comment. We will answer until we get exhausted.

 
Answers will be provided by Swarm Agent X (fractastical) and Swarm Agent Provocateur (David Babbit, chief-cryptoeconomist).

One thing that I think is worth some open discussion about is how we can engage folks on a continual basis. As many people noted, there's a fair bit of overhead and lag time in doing a vote, so it's basically impossible to vote on every issue.

I was thinking about some sort of more periodic opinion polling instead, to see how people think we are doing with respect to our goals. Obviously this doesn't include any significant shift in direction, so we have to see how we can handle this efficiently.

Another major issue is how we directly engage with people. Right now our highest volume activity channels are our Skype channel and bitcointalk, but both have enough activity that it is difficult to keep up if you aren't looking at them every day.

Anyways, advice and input always welcome.

I hate to seem pessimistic, but the real problem as I see it is that the more value we provide to people who have swarm coins the more likely we are to be sued by the U.S. government and shut down. So in order to provide the most value long term, we actually have to provide less value in the short term.

I don't blame anyone for thinking this is a bit ridiculous...

So am I. Swarmpath is in transit right now but hopefully we'll have something soon to chew on.

I believe swarmpath will put together a writeup as to why he thought it was better not to issue the dividend as originally planned.

Good points. I can see we'll need to have a larger discussion about this.

Keep in mind that as stated in the last adopted proposal any future round would need to be approved by current coin holders, and it's unlikely that any proposal would be adopted that is clearly against the early participants.