@dirvine I assure you if you did a MAID series-B you would have a revolution on your hands lol. If everyone was logical we would just say ok I have less of the total MAID but now its worth more then it would have been (perhaps completely nothing if the company does not have the resources to get to final)… but people aren’t gonna think like that. I mean consider even the little bit extra that was produced in the first batch. When you guys said we are gonna sell this traders dumped like crazy. Sure I will be there to take advantage and try to catch the bottom but people that just buy and HODL might feel betrayed. Like why did I buy so long ago and endure all the opportunity cost only to see a better price now?
On the other hand selling non-voting equity in the company would not irk people holding MAID right now, and be something valuable investors would want to buy. I would not say that it dilutes any non-selling stake holder. Someone already owns 100% of the company. Its not more company being created. Just trading what there already is.
@nicklambert I don’t know if it is so wise to sit in crypto when your costs are fait. I mean that would be cool if people would accept a certain amount of BTC or MAID for working on this project regardless of what direction the fait price was. Maybe as we start to see the light at the end of the tunnel people will be like hells ya you can pay me in MAID. Also I must ask when prices reached your 24 month prediction why did you keep HODLing? You should have stopped the loss here.
If we cashed in our btc and MAID at the start we would have been bust 2.5 years ago Folk will always want the other guy to dilute, but we don’t have non voting shares. I have made every share equal as I don’t believe its fair really to have such differences. Moving forward who knows ? but … fairness in everything is always a goal. I don’t think e could have a MAID sale again as there is no new MAID so that is not really an option for anyone AFAIK.
We will see what occurs, but I will always strive for folk to be treated equally, as long as I can anyway.
Thanks Nick - I think this has always been your stance. To be frank I don’t see anything particularly sensitive in disclosing your funding strategy in advance if it is a sensible one.
To illustrate here are two strategies…
Scenario 1) Raise capital in bitcoin, telling everyone that the plan is to sell at opportunistic and strategic times to get the most out of the capital and fund the project. Also disclose that if the strategy doesn’t get you where you need to be then further fund raises and dilution will occur. It doesn’t harm your negotiating position to disclose this unless you want investors to assume there is no prospect of dilution and therefore invest more. The other reason you might not want to disclose this is because you want people to think they are funding you in fiat as that will solicit more confidence and therefore more capital, but actually plan to dump it all into crypto hoping to double your money - again not a smart long term plan.
Scenario 2) You plan to have a series of fund raises, milestone based, and with traditional VC like rounds and dilutions. Detail that in advance and set about achieving those milestones. If you plan this but don’t tell the earlier investors that dilutions are part of the plan then you cut off your opportunities for further funding so again secrecy isn’t a great strategy.
These are just cartoons to illustrate the kind of approach I’m talking about. If the community starts to feel like their interests aren’t being taken care of then they can become more of a liability than an asset to the firm. That’s why I think it’s prudent to proactively open up the plans in advance and that far outweighs any negotiating position risks you might fear from being open. We’re no longer ‘in advance’ unfortunately and indeed the money is close to its end with the only chances of success for the entire project either being an aggressive bull market, grants and donations or dilution which I don’t believe has ever been made a transparent plan. Feels like the right time now to be open and seek out angels who want to back a world changing tech. There are now many crypto wealthy who are idealistically behind what you are doing and would be willing to support you rather than screw/stifle you - no need to be closed doors with them/us. Grants are great too - I sincerely hope that works and can get you to sustainability.
well to sell more MAID you would have to say we are pre-farming more and there is that much less available to the farming pool. I think it’s important the lions share goes to farmers so that they don’t feel like they are subject to traders whims and are getting paid a fair share for the work they are doing.
ok 2.5 years ago was also not the best time to sell. What you need to do is hire me to trade for you lol. Or at least someone who is really practiced at the game. It doesn’t guarantee success but it has much better chances of gains then picking a target price 24 months from now and assuming that will all work out as planned. Ideally you should have orders on both sides SOMEWHERE. Like yes always have some MAID for sale but also there should be some price you are willing to buy it back to flip again. My personal volume is without a doubt in the millions of MAID. That’s cause I have bought and sold then rebought countless times. My actual bag is only a small fraction of what has flowed though my trading account. To really make profits trading you want to play the variance. Every time there is a candle that is bigger then 0.16% you could have made some money on polo. IMO there is wayyyy more to be gained here then you get counting on a never ending uptrend to just wait a while for then sell randomly somewhere.
‘Soon’ is the kind of word that in this particular context rings alarms also I’m not clear on your earlier explanation of how you view MaidSafeCion holders, as either dilutable or not. May I ask two blunt question based on hypothetical scenario…?
If funding becomes critical, would you be willing to fire 95% of your front end team to conserve finances to pay core MVP development?
David if the company was forced to close, would you be willing to continue work for free on this project? Like for instance Luke-Jr does with Bitcoin.
** I’m sorry front end team - no offence meant - you do a great job, I’ve just picked on you as a non-essential component in the context of a bare MVP to get the project out to an open source community and safely away from the risks of startup capital.*
Asking these types of hypothetical questions is not very useful, and here is why:
If you trust maidsafe management, you will trust that they will do the right thing when times get tough when the funding gets tight or during any other kind of crisis. You will want them to have maximum flexibility in times of need.
If you don’t trust maidsafe management, no answer they give now will satisfy you.
The thing is they never communicate on planning or roadmap with timelines… I cannot trust that they don’t have any objectives with dates in mind. I have never ever seen any company with no such planning, whatever the product they are building, whatever it was done before or it is totally new. I have personally followed this project for 3 years now, but I’m now so bored no having any roadmap that I am about to leave this forum… I will come back in a few months hoping something new appeared… Sorry to say that but on my point of view weekly updates are more and more boring…
ok then leave and go invest in like ETH or apple until the risk is gone. When you get back I will gladly sell you some MAID at the much higher price that follows from the risk diminishing.
maybe but at these prices I am willing to risk HODLing. Not to mention flipping on the short term swings. Is there any price you would buy MAID for or is it always too risky?
Anyways I don’t really want you to go. Back to the original point of discussion here: If all traders leave there is not enough money to finish the project. Not to mention it sucks for traders that stay if the volume diminishes. Maybe you are at the point you think this project is spiritually bankrupt and that will physically manifest itself eventually. I don’t think I can really persuade you then. I am also HODLing cause I am confident the team can complete this even if they kinda botched the trading element of funding here. Its not irrecoverable at this point.
@dirvine@nicklambert Do you think you might be able to reduce costs and hedge your risk on MAID by having an optional program to forgo a certain amount of your fait pay and instead receive a certain amount of MAID (weather it goes to 1 cent or 1 dollar) This would also act to kinda crowdsource the trading element out and not be dependent on any one person/group making the sniper shots on the market.
Also its just my opinion but I would GTFO of bitcoin right now (I mean other then what you need for MAID buy orders, not go all in right here and now) and just hold MAID and fiat. But really if people will take either BTC or MAID you could just earmark that much and say there that is paying for this many hours of work no matter what the market does.
Actually this used to be the project I trust the most for months, but updates are more and more boring and we cannot see any light at the end of the tunnel… And the team don’t want to share any roadmap they have in mind. Even if of course everyone know that such roadmap is likely to change.
oh we already got married and went on the honey moon I do understand what you mean and kinda feel bad for the people that are just like I will buy this and cold store it for how ever many years this takes. For me its like a medium term flipping coin. I do hope I have a nice bag when the parabolic upward movement starts near beta but we got a lot of in and out time before that I agree. So really MAID is more like who am I gonna meet at the club tonight?
This feels key to me. Delivering the core MVP is what everyone is waiting for. It de-risks the technology, providing a viable alternative to blockchain and so much more.
Sure, browsers are nice, solid integration is great, semantic web is awesome, but it feels like these things are a distraction and divert funds away from delivering a core working network. Even having multiple library bindings and the such is not necessary at the beginning, even if highly desirable afterwards.
A core network, which can operate in the wild is what needs to be proven. Once that is done, word will spread and devs will come and fill the gaps. Until there is a working network, most will simply not expend the time or money.
I really hope the roadmap to Fleming will align with this. I also hope that if a funding crunch does start to look likely, it will at least focus minds on delivering this core MVP.
I’m too emotionally and financially entangled with this project to entertain the idea of failure. I also have great trust and admiration for the team. I just hope that I am right.
In you previous post you were mentioning regularly disclosing positions, Oscar, in addition to funding strategy. Of course when clearly defined I agree that confirming funding strategy makes sense, but I’m not convinced the ongoing reporting of financials and fielding the questions that follow would serve us well, our team is small and I’ve already mentioned the advantage this may provide to others.
I don’t think dilution is ever a plan, but it so often happens as firms raise E and F rounds. One thing I would say is that we never offer preference shares, so although diluted, our existing shareholders have only ever diluted at an even rate. So we do look after people that have supported us as much as we can.
From my perspective we are progressing many options at the moment and once we confirm which best suit our objectives we’ll be in a position to provide more details, the same way that we did with the crowd sale and with Bank ToThe Future.
Edit: I also meant to add that we typically held between 6-9months of our assets in GBP, so no entirely dependent on crypto, but of course the declining markets still had a big impact.
ya I would rather hear real news and trade on that. One option is you put out fake news and pump the price then dump on unsuspecting traders lol
In any case I am not sure of the legality but seems to me there are no rules against insider trading crypto. When you know you are gonna nail down a Flemming release date and tell everyone in the near future… buy that shit up haha. You guys seem pretty ethical and I doubt you would really do that. Although maybe that is why its good NO ONE ….not even people on the inside knows there’s some target date for whatever. I would say the weekly updates keep things pretty transparent. I might not know what’s been achieved since last Thursday but I got a pretty clear medium zoom view of things. I don’t feel I am at any disadvantage trading against people actually working on the project.
One thing I haven’t seen discussed is the test-safecoin we will need somewhere BETWEEN here and final. If that should happen to (or be somewhat engineered) to occur before funds are depleted I would not have a problem with a crowdsale of this as long as it and the data bought with it were wiped at final. That should not really impact the value of MAID other then increasing it when we get an idea what 1 safecoin might buy. Maybe even do a swap of MAID for the test-safecoin and then just liquidate the MAID on the market as needed. That would give some immediate value to MAID and the price would prolly go up quite a lot as you are selling the swapped MAID into that surge of demand. In fact if you did it that way I would not even have a problem with the data staying at final (of course the test-safecoin would be no more and replaced by true final version safecoin)
ya that’s a bit of a grey area. It would no doubt dilute the value of final safe coin for PUTs as there is already this “freeloading” pile of network resources to accommodate. I think that would be a drop in the bucket over time as the network grows though. Also since we have no idea what 1 safecoin will buy at this point I don’t think its betraying anyone that expected a certain value. If anything its helping discover the real value early and I would gladly pay some later value for that at this point. It would not create any more coins then there were planed to be at final anyways.
@andyypants
What on earth makes you assume they dont have financial advice on what to hold?
It has been stated previously that they do get advice and held a variety of fiats.
Dont fancy your chances of getting a trading job from them either.
Folk will always want the other guy to dilute, but we don’t have non voting shares. I have made every share equal as I don’t believe its fair really to have such differences. Moving forward who knows ? but … fairness in everything is always a goal. I don’t think e could have a MAID sale again as there is no new MAID so that is not really an option for anyone AFAIK.
I do understand what you mean and kinda feel bad for the people that are just like I will buy this and cold store it for how ever many years this takes. For me its like a medium term flipping coin. I do hope I have a nice bag when the parabolic upward movement starts near beta but we got a lot of in and out time before that I agree. So really MAID is more like who am I gonna meet at the club tonight?