This will be added to the FAQ soon because I had to skim back a few pages to collect some replies I'd given, this thing moves fast!
Questions to the devs:
--how long have you been working on this project? And could you briefly describe your planned time commitment to this going forward?
8+ months, time commitment moving forward is as much time as we have outside of our normal day-job/lives and we are also on-boarding additional developers to supplement that capacity if/when needed.
--how does the coin production/distribution setup provide insulation from the risk of massive miner/whale dumps? Is there an estimate out there of the max # of daily BTC trading volume that might be needed to absorb mined coins?
If you check out the schedule here I think the values at the far right speak for themselves. Also keep in mind there is a 25btc limit per buyer in an attempt to insulate from an over-concentration of wealth leading to "massive dumps"
--how will delivery be verified. Is there a disinterested third party that will verify the guaranteed-or-refund features are 100% delivered (marketplace, certificates, name aliases, and data aliases) and work well?
Delivery is verified by the Syscoin team similar to every other coin released in today's market. The code will be open source at launch so anyone can review it for additional verification; but the initial delivery testing and verification of the features is the responsibility of the Syscoin team. We will have demo videos of all of these features working before launch so people have a better understanding of them. No third parties are involved in verification as none were involved in forming the requirements. There is too much room for interpretation here. If investors had sent BTC prior to us implementing/writing a single line of code and provided a requirements spec-doc then this type of approach would be more feasible.
The Syscoin team has developed requirements stipulating concretely that all of these services are implemented directly on the blockchain- meaning everything is inherently decentralized
and the coin can be merge mined (or regular mined) with the specs/schedule as advertised. Beyond that the design of the individual services themselves were developed in-house and as such will need to be tested/verified as functional by the team. We considered putting out a beta but the overhead of managing this would prevent the team from working on delivering things like the [additional] escrow feature by launch (currently being worked on).
--what immediate plans do you have beyond delivery of these core guaranteed features to further increase the value of the coin/network?
Collected funds are being focused on several things, primarily building partnerships with large players in the crypto space (I mean companies, not whales). We're also going to be spending some of the collection on bounties, although not all of it as we do have a small amount of Syscoin for bounties as well. Then of course, future development; we're already trying to push additional features (2) into the coin prior to launch, on top of the 4 that are already completed. Outside of that we will hold much of the BTC for ongoing costs that we can't currently predict. We already have some deals in place that look to exercise the BTC we're collecting and the deals we're working on aren't cheap, but will ultimately take Syscoin to the next level. That being said nothing can be "guaranteed to increase value" in crypto as its a highly experimental field and as such we make no such claims.
--along those lines, are smart-contracts/prediction markets/futures/options things you plan to implement, or can see being (fairly quickly) implementable into this framework?
Some aspects of what you're calling out could be implemented in Syscoin fairly quickly but we have other roadmap plans that supersede them in priority at the moment. Additionally we need to discuss our roadmap after escrow and reputation systems. Once we get past that feature set it seems like there isn't a strong call for one thing or another just yet so we we're going to focus on smart-contracts within Syscoin but things like prediction markets, futures and options are on the roadmap at the moment; doesn't mean they can't be added. Keep in mind the target demographic here is large financial markets, services and systems so we will be prioritizing features in that vein of development.
--what do you consider the three biggest uncertainties regarding development implementation (either with core or future-beyond-core features)?
How can we implement a fully automated escrow (we're working on an agent-based escrow currently)? How can we implement smart contracts as is commonly understood in crypto on top of the Syscoin Certificates foundational structure? Which features will be the most heavily leveraged after launch and how will that possibly change the roadmap? ie: what if data storage is a the huge feature everyone uses instead of market or certificates? How would that change our strategy/would it?
Hope these answers satisfy your questions
