How To Invest in AnonyMint's ProjectI suddenly realized I need to open up the communication more because there is difficulty with communicating with potential angel investors.
I had always wanted to release a project without announcing AnonyMint's involvement. I wanted a project that could succeed on its own white papers, marketing, and technical merits, in order to avoid politics (attacking AnonyMint or thinking I am using AM's reputation to push one project over the other). Unfortunately it is very, very difficult to achieve this goal as explained below.
It seems I am having difficulty communicating with potential angel investors in order to be sure the
innovations I design for anonymity (coin and network) and decentralization (solving the problems plaguing Bitcoin with scaling and also
making mining centralization very unlikely) are developed and launched, because it is difficult for a myraid of individuals to each individually implement the required computer security. I think it asking too much from individuals and it is also not a very secure paradigm to have myself communicating to numerous individuals all of which I have assumed are running a sufficiently secure setup. If any one of them screws up, then my anonymity (plausible deniability since everyone knows I am working on "something") and privacy (encrypted communication) is destroyed.
Also all this communication is eating away at my time for doing actual development work (coding, white papers, etc). Thus I need to make one very long message now and try to clear up all points so I can go back to my programming cave and be mostly undisturbed while others handle the community.
Thus I am contemplating a change in organizational and communications strategy, which I hope to coordinate and announce within a day or two (maybe three maximum).
I am trying to find one individual capable of implementing the required security setup and who is willing to be the communications hub for the controlling group of the project that will incorporate my innovations. I will be able to communicate securely with this individual and to make my contributions to the project anonymously and securely. Everyone else will be able to communicate to this individual using normal means of insecure communication. In other words, this anointed individual would become the public face of the controlling group of the project, thus relegating me to a publicly silent anonymous contributor role. My communications to the community would come in the form of math and text in white papers, source code, and contributions to text and concepts in marketing and communication communications. But never sent directly from me, and often copy edited to remove my particular writing style.
I'd still be there behind the scenes, but I would be doing my best to turn control over to others (who prove worthy and trustworthy) as much as possible, because a project like this can't be just one person in control. It must be a community wide effort.
So I can't pay the math PhD and do other development needs without funding. And the angel investors and the community needs communication about details.
Thus to move this forward, I have one individual in mind for this role if he will accept. If not, I will look for another individual. I might even have two, one as a backup to other. Again I hope to announce this within a couple of days or so. The individual must not be an US citizen, so we can sidestep SEC regulations. This individual may or may not attempt to remain anonymous when communicating with the community and angel investors other than myself (will discuss with that person).
So what I want feedback on now (in private message or in public post your choice) is who will be interested in availing of being able to place a small
BTC angel investment in this project with this new project communications paradigm?
I'd say investments should range in the $3000 - $20,000 range, but perhaps less than $3000 will be accepted. We don't need too much angel investment. If I don't need to go to Australia for fecal transplant before launch of the project, then that is perhaps $5000 - $10,000 less that isn't needed. My health feels fine today. Getting out to the gym yesterday seemed to rejuvenate me. My eyes are still a bit sore, but hopefully they will fully rejuvenate with more frequent gym days and less frequent 16 hour work days.
I'd love to see say 5 - 10 angel investors, so that there is a solid base of support and interest at the earliest stage.
Who doesn't wish they had sold that pizza for
BTC10,000 back in 2010. Taking on a little bit of risk in something that looks very promising is how you go from being average to wealthy. Speculators take small punts on projects with huge upside. This project fits that description in spades. Nearly no overhead. No manager leeches like Ethereum. Purely funding coding.
Angel investors receive a special offer. They receive M x their investment in $us dollar in terms of coins at the first ICO, where M is the number of months (divided by 2) that elapse between the placement of their investment and the first ICO. Originally I wasn't going to divide by 2, but the reality has shown me that development takes longer than I anticipated thus realistically we must divide else we give too great of a % of the project to the angel investors which would thus appear to be a premine which would kill the project. I am also wondering if the community thinks divide by 3 would be more fair than divide by 2?
In other words, let's say at the first ICO, the community values the project at $1 million market cap with 10 million coins projected, thus a price of $0.10 per coin. So someone who invested say $5000 in late August and assuming first ICO in January, would be getting a M = 2, thus $10,000 of coins divided $0.10 = 100,000 coins. Obviously I think the first ICO will valued more in the realm of $10 million market cap so the angel investor would get only 10,000 coins. I am hoping for that sort of result and am striving to make sure the first ICO will be very enticing.
If development takes longer than anticipated (which can happen because of all the issues), then angel investors in August or September might end up with a M = 3 multiple by the first ICO. Does anyone feel this is insufficient motivation for the risk of investing early?
Angel investors can also get early insight into details so they can be better poised (i.e. prepared and informed with ample time to think over) to make a decision to buy more coins in the early ICOs at lower prices than latter ICOs.
The plan has been (unless we receive severe admonishment to do otherwise) to launch a coin with a series of ICOs, not just one. Each ICO would follow the prior one by a month or perhaps two (needs to be decided by the community). Each ICO would be 2X more coins than the prior one. Each ICO will be an auction format, where participants place a bid & qty in a transparent auction and then at the close of the auction, the top bids are filled and the rest refunded from the escrow agent (of course the community must select a trusted escrow agent who has a great reputation or perhaps we can design some sort of block chain escrow that is automated). The point of this is everyone can see the bids and adjust their bids during the auction period, so that there is a market pricing effect. We want an honest market result. This also insures the controlling group can not get any of the funds until after each (monthly or bimonthly) auction closes, thus the controlling group can not bid in the auction using other bidders' funds. This provides a mathematical proof that the controlling group can not own more than a certain amount of coins by the time all the planned ICOs are completed.
For example, assuming there will be 10 millions coins sold in ICO, the ICOs might be:
32,768 x 10
65,536 x 10
131,072 x 10
262,144 x 10
524,288 x 10
-------------------
1,015,808 x 10 = 10,158,080 coinsThe calculation for the maximum coins the controlling group could retain if they used all the proceeds of the auction to purchase their own coins of each subsequent auction is as follows.
Assuming the market driven auction price of the coin was constant across all ICO auctions, the controlling group could purchase 0 coins in first auction, 32,768 x 10 coins in 2nd auction, 65,536 x 10 in 3rd auction, 131,072 x 10 coins in 4th auction, and 262,144 x 10 coins in 5th auction. Thus the controlling group could own at most 491,520 x 10 coins or 48% of the ICO money supply.
Assuming the market driven auction price of the coin increased by 100% of each subsequent ICO auctions, the controlling group could purchase 0 coins in first auction, 16,384 x 10 coins in 2nd auction, 32,768 x 10 in 3rd auction, 65,536 x 10 coins in 4th auction, and 131,072 x 10 coins in 5th auction. Thus the controlling group could own at most 245,760 x 10 coins or 24% of the ICO money supply.
Assuming the market driven auction price of the coin increased by 300% of each subsequent ICO auctions, the controlling group could purchase 0 coins in first auction, 8,192 x 10 coins in 2nd auction, 16,384 x 10 in 3rd auction, 32,768 x 10 coins in 4th auction, and 65,536 x 10 coins in 5th auction. Thus the controlling group could own at most 245,760 x 10 coins or 12% of the ICO money supply.
The point is that no matter what happens with the prices of the ICO auctions, the maximum stake of the controlling group can be mathematically calculated.
The above calculations assume that the controlling group offers no bounties and pays for no development from the time of the first ICO until the last, which is not going to be the case. The controlling group is going to be attempting to spend the funds as quickly as possible to distribute the capital back into the community and drive the development of the coin and related ecosystem network effects as much as possible in order to drive up the price of the coin. The controlling group ideally wants to end up with about 1% or less of the money supply (and be abundantly wealthy enough from that). Selfish ecosystems don't scale and thus the controlling group would be the loser. I am not going to participate in any scam nor pump and dump. One of the reasons for doing ICOs instead of distributing the initial coin supply via mining, is so the capital of the community doesn't go to electricity and hardware manufacturing companies which return us no network effects. Instead the funds will be spent on development! So we have all the ease-of-use wallets, decentralize exchanges, etc. that we need. We can also integrate with other ecosystems such as Bitcoin and any others that have a large base (Nxt may still have a large base of investors for example).
I think one of the issues that plagued Monero for example is they don't have a lot of funds to spend on development, because the didn't raise any funds in an ICO. Thus no one is in charge and thus nothing really gets done fast in terms of new innovations, GUIs, etc.. Monero is starting to get some of those developments now, a year after. And there are much bigger developments that need to be accomplished that I presume Monero can not afford to develop, for example replacing (or improving but realistically replacing is what will happen) Tor, I2P, and Bitmessage with anonymity networks that are provably anonymous. That sort of development is a huge scale project that Monero could never afford to fund.
Also distribution of the ICO by mining is not really fair at all. Those with the most technical insight get most of the coins. How is that a diversified distribution? For example for Monero, I read that the guy who optimized the hash algorithm, first mined $150,000 of XMR for himself! There are these GPU miner coders who latch onto the launch by mining and make a business out of making secretly coded optimizations. All this crap interferes with a transparent market! We need transparent markets that any JoeBlow can participate in. More wide participation means more popularity, more network effects, and more ecosystem.
Also note that on launch, the community will be skeptical and thus early ICOs will receive less interest than latter ones as momentum builds and developments proliferate. This is why the price will likely be higher of subsequent auctions even though the supply of coins is increasing. The first ICO will probably be with the coin on a testnet, so that will be for those who have more insight and confidence than others. The second ICO would be pushing it out to the public network and working out any kinks, so still there will be some doubters. Maybe by 4th ICO, the various GUIs have matured, decentralized exchanges have been integrated, etc.. Thus I am thinking bimonthly is better than monthly, so there is more time for developments to accumulate (aggregate) between ICOs.
The model for distribution of coins has been most of the coins distributed at the start and fewer and fewer later on. This means all cryptoland has been essentially a pump and dump! If we want to distribute the coin widely then we should increase the # of coins distributed in latter ICOs and work hard to accelerate developments and momentum along the way. In that way we show the community that we are about long-term investment and not quick pump and dump for the early investors. This shows we are confident in our superior technology and our ability to drive developments forward for an ecosystem and network effects.
There will be mining of course and debasement due to mining, but this will not be detailed now because it is somewhat different due to the different design of a proof-of-work system that has the attributes that I
mentioned in my prior post. The salient point is that the debasement due to mining will be very small, at most a few % per year. So most of the coins over the medium-term will be due to the ICOs.
If anyone can see a flaw in the strategy, please point it out to me in a public post or private message.
Investing as an angel investor at this time would be a way to diversify some of your investment out of
BTC for the coming collapse in
BTC prices. Your angel investment is locked in $us dollars.
Also note the first ICO is likely to come later this year or early next, thus the subsequent ICOs are likely to come after the project March/April bottom in the prices of gold and
BTC. Thus another reason the subsequent ICOs are likely to be at higher prices than the first and second ICO.
Timing is very important and looks like all the timing is falling right into place. We got lucky.
Hopefully the above message demonstrates what sort of rational, fair, analytical, mathematical, astute, insightful developer I am. It is time we do things smart in cryptoland.
P.S. Some practical advice about your
BTC. Apparently Gavin is going for a hard fork in March, so the chaos coming to Bitcoin land might contribute to the coming low which I am thinking will be back in the double digits, or at least below $150. Again I think
BTC is a private asset in Armstrong's model, thus will be roughly correlated with the coming final capitulation in gold down to < $700. It is everyone piling on short, that drives the extreme low and then the short covering that sets the bottom. The bulls will have been separated from their capital by then, so they will be hiding in some corner licking wounds. So my thinking is you want to sell or hedge your BTC about now. We might get one more run up to $325 +/- $10 at most or we might not. Hedging crypto can be done on Bitfinex or Poloniex. I won't vouch for the reliability of any exchange. A third option is to purchase Nubits. I studied the model and it seems it might hold up, but again I can't vouch for it. Or just sell and hold $us dollars.
I saw that someone linked to this link and I have to say that's it's interesting for real
http://qntra.net/2015/01/the-hard-fork-missile-crisis/I joined bitcoin and btc community in late 2014 so I'am not sure when all this happened but this quote really attracted me and make me think :
There have only ever been two hard forks of the blockchain in the history of Bitcoin, and both nearly killed Bitcoin. The first was overseen by Satoshi in an attempt to fix the worst Bitcoin bug seen to date, and an unforeseen fork in which BerkeleyDB was replaced with LevelDB to allow for blocks greater than 512kb to be accepted by the network. The latter fork however didn't disenfranchise older clients by forcing them to use LevelDB over BerkeleyDB – a one line workaround resolves the bug in clients still running with BerkeleyDB.
Are my concerns justified or not? could something bad happen , I feel that all this BitcoinXT story and the censorship about it on Reddit etc ... will make bitcoin die just like that
This is an open discussion feel free to post your opinions and comments but let's keep this clean and no need to start fighting and insulting other members .