So how much has to be invested before you will build me a house with the concrete printer. Or boobie prize, send me a new 3d printer ( I just want the self duplicated one)
A really rough estimate to to develop a new class of printer with another deposition method or size would be on the order of 100,000 USD. This is only the money for a prototype good enough to start a business, the business would then have to sell a lot of printers, putting some profit back into research, to finally make a reliable, fast printer of that class. To make a house you would need a printer for cement, metal, ceramic, and you'd need big printers, cutters and microprinters, overall, you'd need at least 10 new classes of machine tools, for a total of 1,000,000$.
Printers are one of many things that devcoin would fund, assuming that printer development would be 10% of the total development funding, the total development funding would be 1,000,000$ / 10% = 10,000,000$. Devcoin is now a beneficial corporation, so development of stuff which does not make money for devcoin can only be on the order of 10% in the long term, so the total market capitalization required would be 10,000,000$ / 10% = 100,000,000$.
Devcoin currently has a market capitalization of about 40,000$, so the capitalization would have to increase by a factor of about 100,000,000$ / 40,000$ = 2,500. The market capitalization will naturally increase because of coin generation, in 70 months (about six years) there will be roughly five times as many coins, so the value would have to increase by 2,500 / 5 = 500 times. Assuming an equal increase in value of devcoin versus bitcoin, and bitcoin versus the USD, that would be about a 22 fold increase, so devcoin would be at about 0.000031 BTC, and bitcoins would be at about 220$, working out to a devcoin worth of about 0.007$ (0.7 cents). Note, I'm not predicting that kind of growth for devcoin or bitcoin, it is just a calculation of what would be required to fully fund printer development. Also, funding printer development is a long term goal, possible only if devcoin value rises a lot.
A single 100,000,000$ investment is not expected. However, what can be done is to grow the devcoin ecosystem in every way possible. Every new use, exchange, pool, business, article, etc.. increases the value of devcoin, which can then fund more projects, which then increases the value of devcoin and so on.
If anyone wants to fund devcoin, investments are appreciated, but devcoin is very volatile, and you should only invest in it what you can afford to lose. If it goes up, you win, and open source developers get a lot, if it goes down, you lose, but at least the developers got something.
Another way to help devcoin is to add devcoin as a payment option for your business. Devcoin market capitalization is much smaller than bitcoin capitalization, so you would only get a few devcoin purchases, but there is still a remaining bounty for devcoin businesses, so hopefully it would still be worth your time. Otherwise you could help out and earn devcoins by writing articles:
http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Earn_Devcoins_by_WritingIf anyone would like to write a wiki article, but is not sure of the formatting or whatever; send me a rough draft and I would then copy edit and format it for devtome.
If anyone wants to help by developing, the only thing needed for the devcoin application at this time is a windows executable:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34586.msg1141147#msg1141147Otherwise, developers can help and get a devcoin generation share by working on the Open Transactions project:
http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Open_Transactions
