This is exactly the point that needs to be spread. What we can do as individual community members, is try to grow the community. Every person we bring in, every comment in this thread, every reddit subscriber, every merchant like martins that begins to accept DigiByte - this is how we grow the currency. And we achieve that by making it known that DigiByte at least deserves a look because it has a competent and professional development team, and no shenanigans are in place. The funny part is, the fact that the coin is nearing 2 months old and no one has been scammed and the dev is even more vocal then on Day 1 - I mean this is a damned special case! Most altcoins that don't perform well as trading fodder, those that don't explode in price are abandoned and dead within a couple weeks. This community does talk about price yes, but I think unlike most altcoins people are mostly concerned about the future and whether or not they should continue to mine/hold their DigiByte stash. Not everybody that is concerned with price is planning on dumping ASAP.
So - if we want to succeed we need to grow, there is no other way around it. We especially need more merchants like martins, and we only get them by casting out our nets. There needs to be a marketing push both by the community and devs for a weekend so we can make it known that DigiByte is not like the rest, and here's why. The main sticking point we face, I believe, is this nonsense about the premine. Now, I personally scratch my head when people say DigiByte had an unreasonably large premine - because I see 0.25% being held whereas tons of popular coins that are trending have had 1, 2, 3, even 5% or more premine with IPOs and all this other garbage. I really am confused on how DigiByte has gotten lumped into this bad "premine crowd". I think DigiByte has one of the more sensible and realistic uses of a relatively small premine. I do agree with some detractors that the initial giveaway phase wasn't handled the best it could be, and perhaps half of the premine could've been used better - but wow, what other coin has open discussion about such a thing? NONE! By then the dev has cut and run, because most premines ARE get-rich-quick for the devs. This clearly isn't, at the absolute worst you can criticize the devs for selfishly trying to secure an income off of DigiByte's success - but my god, who doesn't get paid for a job? And even further, in order to get a nice paycheck from his reserved funds, he's gonna have to work his absolute ass off for years.
The held premine is worthless if the coin doesn't succeed. Even if he wanted to dump now it's not that much money. Even if he dumps at 200 satoshi, which he won't - it's still considerably less than he could make in salary doing even freelance development. There is no window for this man to dump into life-changing money until the coin has succeeded enough that his dump would be a momentary hiccup in the market. There is a very important reality check here some vocal critics need to piece together. Why would Mr. Tate cash out after 3 or 4 months and take home at best a year's salary? If I were a dev this competent and now had this sort of crypto experience, if I was looking to get rich I would just launch another coin that was built to make me rich, and the community would eat it up for a week or two just like all the rest. The fact that Mr. Tate hasn't disappeared, is so vocal, has shown his actual face (or so we're lead to believe ;P) - how much more proof do you need that he isn't planning to screw everybody over? There are much better ways to scam BTC, and trust me, this man has the skillset if he was so inclined. DigiByte just isn't a good get-rich candidate for this dev, plain and simple. Even the most stringent of skeptics should be able to settle on this conclusion. If Mr. Tate wanted to scam, he could. Instead, he's hoping to be rewarded for a lot of hard work. I personally am ok with this.
We have to find some way to settle this premine bullshit once and for all when it comes to DigiByte, because it does not belong in the same grouping as other premine coins. Premine isn't inherently bad, and I think aside from some minor criticisms about the initial giveaways, this is one of the shining examples of exactly how to do a premine correctly and to the benefit of the community and currency. How do we overcome this stigma? We need to figure out a way to address these criticisms once and for all, and we need to then push that message outward beyond our usual hideouts. We need to show people why DigiByte deserves some attention. We have a great name, great branding/logo, a transparent dev we know by name, the most evolved anti-multipool code in the altcoin market, and a wildly active and positive community. If we can push this message with competent answers to some of the popular criticisms, I believe DigiByte can see some nice growth very soon. But it depends on us to spread the word.
I personally would be happy to devote some time to joining an official PR push run by some of DGB team, if creativecuriosity would like to do something like this.