No, I don't think it is enough incentive, at least for me. That said, I dislike large pre-mines. I think it's better to have equity in a known legal entity that is distinct from the crowd-offering that can also appreciate in value. 

Hopefully this explains it:

Swarm reserves -> 8,000,000 SWARM (4,000,000 for founders, 4,000,000 for bounties)
Indication of Interest -> 500 Bitcoin -> 4,000,000 SWARM
Open Phase 1 -> 4,000 Bitcoin -> 20,000,000 SWARM
Open Phase 2 -> 17,000 Bitcoin -> 68,000,000 SWARM

Total coins issued is 100,000,000.

Target is 4,000 Bitcoin raise in the first open phase. After we will accept Bitcoins up until a 21,500 Bitcoin cap.


Happy to answer any additional questions.



 

It's true

One additional thing that we plan to incorporate is due-diligence that is also decentralized. We want to use eToro (http://www.etoro.com/) style dashboards where you can see what projects have been endorsed and what the track record of is of the people who are endorsing a project. We should have mockups available in the next week or so that show how this will work.

This is a slight mistake and is currently being corrected in the article. Our target is 4,000 BTC. We will accept an additional 17,000 BTC in a second phase at a slightly lower rate of exchange.

If we raise a larger amount these additional funds will be used to underwrite future coin launches.

For additional details see the booklet that was recently given out at our announcement in Vienna:   

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6qt7g20sgposayu/swarm-booklet-v6.pdf

We put together a whitepaper to address the issues around cryptoequity.: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qY0GCGKByXc8aeUaHIgggaSGzYjYHKCY0TeLKYt9b3I/edit#

The very short answer is that there are things that are legal, things that are illegal, and that some things that no one knows how they will be treated. We are doing things in both the legal and "no one knows" category.

At the moment we are planning to take BTC only. This could change if enough people express interest in buying with XCP.

Central banks will have a huge problem. Investment banks will have no problem. It's basically one more unregulated pile of money for them to profit off of. Why would they give a hoot?

From the conversations I have had so far, I see little to indicate that Goldman Sachs sees Bitcoin as a threat of any kind. There's nothing to prevent Goldman from speculating in Bitcoin and they can even accept it as payment if it is successful enough. If they can make money with it, obviously they will.

That said, Goldman is not in the business of making "early stage" bets. They usually wait until something is reasonably mature before moving in. Since I'm sure they have analysts working on digital currency happenings, Ethereum could very well be a good entry point for them into the market.

Fundamentally the "door is always open" with the current cryptocurrency model. When you distribute everything, you allow whoever wants to to play in the same sandbox you are playing in.

If this bothers you, you might want to seek out another model.

Philosophy has two major forms: metaphysics and politics. The former is no longer distinct from physics or mathematics. It is a description of the way things are. The second branch, politics, is a consideration of the "ought." Ethics essentially falls into this, as do all discussions of political order. They are all discussions of how humans can and should live together.

Bitcoin does not clearly make any statement in the former category. There are no cryptographic or mathematical innovations. Rather, all of the innovation of Bitcoin exists is applying existing technologies in a novel way.

One hypothesis, commonly held by participants in the Bitcoin community, is that governments are not necessary at all. There is a long anarchist tradition which has asserted this at various points in history, sometimes violently advocating the destruction of governmental systems, sometimes building up utopian and communitarian communities that presented their ideal of how society could cohere without coercive structures. Most of these eventually dissipate and die of their own accord, although there are also plenty of examples of governments crushing up those that took up arms.

Fundamentally, Bitcoin exists as an anarchist experiment along the same lines of these past movements. It expresses a particular ideal, the ideal of free individual action without a centralized and controlling authority. This is understandably exciting to many people, as it also has been at many past points in history. Whether or not Satoshi himself is committed to this ideal is less than clear, but it is clear that he has considered the important questions of this domain.

Can humans provide a public good (i.e. a currency) without any governance? Can governance evolve around a protocol? Can technology be leveraged and replace government all together? Should as much human effort as possible be replaced with algorithms? These are interesting philosophical questions. Bitcoin has, however, offered us a practical and not a philosophical answer.

That's the right way forward. As Plato reputedly noted in his own letters, political systems implemented from the top down tend to get borked quickly. People who rise to the top are usually concerned about threats to their power, not designing better solutions. But there are interesting exceptions.

Satoshi himself exhibits this, leaving a fair bit of Bitcoins for himself. I suppose in time we will be able to see what he uses them for.