There was a lot of confusion from people who incorrectly thought the repayment plan was a fundamental change to the business model or that ICN no longer represented a share of the profits from Iconomi platform.
It
is a fundamental change. The whole sales pitch of Iconomi was "You bring the $$, our crypto expertise will do the rest!" The project received an absolutely unprecedented amount of fiat funding during the ICO, indicating a large number of investors who are novices to the crypto world. The idea of accumulating dividends in ETH is far different from having to periodically take profits by selling off small amounts of ICN. Plus ETH is
substantially more liquid (and reliable) an asset than ICN.
Second, it means no voting on major issues by ICN holders. This is because if you were able to distribute voting rights (i.e. "ballots") to ICN holders, you could just as easily distribute dividends to them.
Third and relatedly, (and I have brought this up on Reddit several times and still
nobody has explained otherwise), stocks in traditional markets that don't pay dividends
have other characteristics that ICN does not have that provide actual rather than solely speculative value to shareholders.
Traditional stocks actually let you exercise voting rights. ICN does not.
Traditional stocks are entitled to transparent accounting and information about how the company is being run. ICN does not.
Quick list of broken promises, just off the top of my head:
- Team fund to be moved to segregated account in January
- Change in service operator (and subsequent refusal to even provide proof that it exists)
- Periodic "probably bi-weekly" AMAs on Reddit
- Quarterly expenditure reports showing amount and area of expenses (Iconomi has divested 2000BTC in just the last month. Where the fuck is it going/has it gone?)
Add to these that we've got no idea on the terms of the Cofoundit spin-off. Separation payments? ICN retained?
Intellectual property transferred? You can tell me that ICN still represents an ownership share in Iconomi. But when IP and employees start walking out the door to "spin-offs" and we have no clue what the terms were, that doesn't feel at all like ownership.
Traditional stocks can get paid out if a company is purchased or liquidated. That can't happen with ICN.
ICN is opaque and powerless compared to traditional stocks. It needs to provide dividends in ETH, which has real and established value. It feels like the team is trying to ensure ICN liquidity (nice timing...) more than it's trying to return actual solid returns to its investors.
The buyback change is like abandoning gold-backed currency in a banana republic.
You make some very good points here. It will be nice to see these points addressed by the team. In the meantime, here's another perspective on some of them:
It is a fundamental change. The whole sales pitch of Iconomi was "You bring the $$, our crypto expertise will do the rest!" The project received an absolutely unprecedented amount of fiat funding during the ICO, indicating a large number of investors who are novices to the crypto world. The idea of accumulating dividends in ETH is far different from having to periodically take profits by selling off small amounts of ICN. Plus ETH is substantially more liquid (and reliable) an asset than ICN.
Looks like many of those big fiat investors are still holding their ICN on the platform after the repayment change:
https://etherscan.io/token/ICONOMI?a=0x29d38fdf26d64fa799276e6615759d27db1f1fcdI would be surprised if any investors sent 20k+ EUR soley "because ETH dividends". The whitepaper mentions "profit-sharing" 3 times and lays out a plan for how they will generate the profits. Dividends are mentioned 1 time in the whitepaper, so it wasn't the main focus of the initial ico pitch.
We are staying on ETH. Lisk could be another option we would consider. However, in current state is not yet ready.
For sure we're not gonna build our own blockchain. This is not our game. We as well didn't build our own data center for our servers.
During the Ethereum ddos attack in October, it was stated that they would even consider switching to a completely different blockchain if that was necessary to make the profit-sharing plan work.
Quick list of broken promises, just off the top of my head:
- Team fund to be moved to segregated account in January
I will wait to see what they do with the team fund when it unlocks at the end of April before counting this one as a broken promise.
- Change in service operator (and subsequent refusal to even provide proof that it exists)
It was explained on 25 September, while the ico was still ongoing, that Cashila would create an Iconomi legal entity.
https://medium.com/iconominet/legal-part-1-42fa72e1f157At this point I would like to clarify that for the sake of complete transparency and clear-cut separation, ICONOMI will seek its own juridical personality — Cashila OOD s.r.o. will only be providing a part of its substratum (economic element) to ICONOMI during the time it acts as a service operator, but not its legal personality (legal element). The partial substratum of Cashila OOD s.r.o., joined by additional elements (people, intellectual property and capital, for instance) will together form the substance of ICONOMI, which will acquire its own legal personality. Should the service operator be replaced at any time, its part (for example: people) in ICONOMI shall be replaced, while the rest (for example: capital, intellectual property) continue to exist unobstructed. Cashila OOD s.r.o. as a juridical person will have no ties to ICONOMI, other than ICONOMI using Cashila (cashila.com) for the processing of payments, completely equivalent to all other Cashila users.
A foundation (“Stiftung”) is broadly defined as “assets dedicated to serve a specific purpose”, which in turn translates to a set of dedicated assets acquiring legal personality with a specific purpose, outlined in the founding act. Since, as we have concluded, there is no viable option for ICONOMI to mirror its shareholding structure (based on ICN ownership) directly, it is best that the assets of ICONOMI gain legal personality on their own, while true ownership is managed internally.
- Periodic "probably bi-weekly" AMAs on Reddit
Another AMA would be nice at some point.
With Lisk, we had to wait 7 months for them to setup a Lisk legal entity in Zug before they started publishing monthly financial reports. During this time there was also a lot of "where are the financial reports?!!" "show us the money!" demands coming from investors.
https://blog.lisk.io/financial-report-2016-7e68cdd13b12Maybe there is something similar playing out with Iconomi, so I will also wait on this one before counting it as a broken promise.
Traditional stocks can get paid out if a company is purchased or liquidated. That can't happen with ICN.
Using Lisk (a fork/spin-off of Crypti) as an example again. Crypti holders were able to exchange their XCR to LSK for a big profit when Crypti was liquidated. So you can still get paid in such an event. Although, this is unregulated crypto which relies more heavily on reputation/incentives/trust rather than signed legal documents like with a stocks.
