I'm going to use this post to cover a bunch of things. I strongly dislike the 6 minute flood timer, it's causing a lot of grief. Nonetheless...
Just so everyones on the same page:
You are valuing your project at 1666 BTC or $733,333.00
Yes. As it stands, our project is a whitepaper and ~8,000 lines of code that sets up a single quorum and doesn't store files. This alone is not worth $700k. However, with this round of funding, you have our existing project and the idea, plus 2 developers who can afford to live for a full year working full time on Sia. Up until this point, we've had to balance Sia against our other responsibilities. This round of funding gives us a lot of time. The idea, whitepaper, plus 6-12 months of implementation is what is worth $700k. We're also lucky because the 2 developers are cofounders. If we were trying to raise what Google would pay us for 1 year, we'd need a lot more money. As it happens, we're content enough to just be able to afford California living expenses.
The other thing is that there is a clear demand for Siastock/Sianotes. One of my fears is that someone is willing to pay a lot more than the cost, but misses out on the opportunity because we have lowballed our offer and sold out before they realized we were doing the IPO. We've been at it for less than 1 day and still haven't contacted everyone who expressed interest.
Expecting others to foot 100% of the risk is a shady way of doing business I think.
There is a significant amount of opportunity cost associated with doing this. Our investors are not handling all of the risk. We are giving up very comfy salaries to do this. Our opportunity cost is actually more than the money we are raising.
If you really need the money for expenses you could have a seperated escrow system that pays you out a fraction per month for a certain amount of time.
For example you could receive 20% a month, every month, for 5 months.
Assuming you sell out of the IPO, this would equate to $22,000 a month. Don't try to tell us that your expenses would cost your more than 22K a month. You would have to rent quite a few Lamborghini's to make that happen. If you need more time you could split the escrow into 10 parts equaling $11,000 a month. Anyone and their entire family could live quite comfortable with that kind of cash so I can't think of a reason why this wouldn't work (2 team members? easy! $5,500 a month each! 3 team members? easy! $3,666 a month each!).
In this scenario, your expenses are covered, and if you don't produce anything after a month at least 80% of the funds are saved (or 60%, or 40%, etc etc, atleast you are protecting investors in some way).
Please provide a valid reason as to why this system would not work.
We're looking at raising the money to last a full year. Doing a staggered escrow would work just fine, if anybody wanted to arrange that. The problem is that we'd need strict rules for figuring out whether or not the money should be released an when. As we stand, we've got enough people who seem willing to fund us even without escrow. Ultimately, I'm expecting that Luke and I combined will be spending around $5k per month, especially early on. As Sia progresses, we'll start to have legitimate business expenses. The ~$100k that we are trying to raise gives us enough to live comfortably for a full year (including insurance), plus a comfortable amount of emergency money in case anything goes awry. (cars break down, people get sick, etc. Just need to be prepared). And even after that we'll have extra money for servers, initial hard drives, and be able to set up a reasonably reliable base network without any additional miners.
Just make sure to enter the correct Bter Deposit Address when sending NXT and you have nothing to worry about... pending deposits disappear after they get the required confirmations but that is just because Bter transfers the NXT to another account before they credit your account.
Expanding on this a little bit more, I sent a test volume of 50 nxt to my bter deposit address. This was confirmed in about 30 minutes. Then I sent 25,000 nxt to the same address and bter never updated our balance. If you look at the blockchain though you see that the coins were forwarded to bter's primary account. I'm not sure if large transactions have a 1 day hold or something, but it's been 68 confirmations and I'd expect to see something. If someone can help us out, I'm trying to trade nxt to bitcoins for 0.00007 btc per nxt.
It's disconcerting but I'm not too worried because not a large percentage of the funds are at stake. I will of course honor all sianotes that have thus far been sold regardless of how things turn out with bter.
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If we contacted you about buying with btc before your announcement of the rate change, can you sell it to us at the old rate? Seems unfair that we have done that then you change the price?
Yes, I've been able to contact some people but haven't been able to get to everybody yet (that 6 minute flood timer...). Anyone who sent me a message requesting a sale before the price raise can buy up to 10BTC worth of sianotes at the old price. You should know who you are.
Other people have expressed concern with the price raise, saying it seems a bit dishonest. It was a tough decision to make, because I was afraid that this might seem the case. I don't want to follow MaidSAFE and sell out in 5 hours, where many interested parties end up missing out. The price raise is to slow down the offers a bit and give everyone who's contacted me or expressed interest over the past few weeks a chance to invest. I really have no idea the best or most honest way to do this, however I'm keeping a list of everyone who buys at the inflated price. If at a later point we decide the honest thing to do is have everyone pay the same price, all people who invested will be given more sianotes according to their investment.
At the low price, we are selling out very fast, and this concerns me. As far as I know, there's no smooth way to handle a pre-IPO with cryptocurrency. We're doing our best. Ultimately, we care about getting our 250 btc, and we care that everyone feels like they had a proper chance to get involved and invested. We don't need more than 250btc at this point, and we're happy giving up 15% siastock to get the money. Thanks for understanding, and I'm open to suggestions.
