A BTC option would have to exist, as US bug hunters have no real easy way to cash out MAID if that is what they desire to do. It would impede people trying to find bugs if they have no way to get their money.
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Thatās likely because @maidsafe offered to double your balance on launch. I was bummed that I missed it and that some still participated after it closing which I I suppose wrongfully respected. If that was offered again I would gladly hand over all of my holdings. Otherwise, unfortunately I have to be conservative.
But I think weāre talking about raising money outside of Maidsafeās involvement.
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Iām thinking about posting a poll to see whether people would be willing to provide funds for this with or without MaidSafeās involvement, as well as to gauge about how much people would be willing to contribute.
My gut is that many people would feel this way as well. After all, marketing is a standard business operating expense. It would make sense to raise funds to support it.
Iām currently pulling together a more detailed marketing proposal to share here in the next day or two. The proposal will include suggested initiatives, associated budget, a roadmap, and volunteer/skill set requests.
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Really exciting to see you organizing this, looking forward to it!
Iāll have to go back to the loan thread because I donāt remember how the matching of donated balance was to be honored or where these Safecoins are to come from but I and others that missed out would be able to provide a good amount of funding if the loan agreement was reopened.
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Please check out a 2020 SAFE Network marketing proposal here: SAFE Network Marketing Proposal.pdf - Google Drive
This is a first draft, so please share any feedback that you have. The marketing proposal is ambitious, but so is the SAFE Network. Many of us in the SAFE Community are committed to supporting MaidSafe in the quest to deliver the SAFE Network in anyway that we can. While the MaidSafe team works hard to deliver a working product, marketing support will be crucial to build awareness and engagement.
As mentioned before, the average ICO allocates at least $500K to marketing alone. This marketing proposal calls for 3M MAID (~$300K) to support marketing endeavors. To put that in perspective, the funding campaign a few months ago was oversubscribed and raised 20M MAID overnight with many members of this community still seeking the opportunity to participate. Please note that at this time the loan opportunity from Oct 2019 cannot be extended.
Before any funds would be collected by/distributed to a community-led foundation, a board of directors would be nominated by the community with publicly declared roles and responsibilities. To get a sense of interest in supporting marketing initiatives for MaidSafe and the SAFE Network, Iāve created some polls below (your vote will remain private):
Indicate to whom you are willing to send donated/lent funds (multiple choices ok):
- I am willing to donate funds directly to a community-lead foundation
- I am willing to donate funds directly to MaidSafe
- I am willing to lend funds to MaidSafe under an agreement similar to the funding round from Oct 2019
- I am willing to participate in an original token sale to raise funds for marketing
0 voters
I would be willing to lend more funds if MaidSafe makes the same/a similar offer as was extended in October 2019
- Yes, I am willing to lend more if the same offer is extended
- No, whether or not the same offer is extended will not impact how much I am willing to lend/donate
0 voters
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This is brilliant and organized 
@Sotros25! I especially like the marketing competition and the hackathon. The reward amounts def seem to be the right size to get people to jump out of their seats to make a best effort. All around it definitely gives the sense of good organization, healthy competition, and excitement of breaking new ground. Nice presentation as well. Iāll read through this another couple of times so I can really marinate on it to see if I have any constructive feedback besides just praise 
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Thanks @nigel! Really appreciate it! All feedback welcome. I really hope we can rally up lots of community support for this 
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something just doesnāt sit right that we are allocating 200k for and exchange to friggin put us in their database and only 100k for all the hard work of EVERYONE on the ground. I do agree getting exchange listings is very important and maybe worth that price if we can raise the funds. That said, I would hate to see us give up on all the other productive activities just cause we canāt pay the exchange tithe. Maybe split the funding round into two sections. One for marketing and one for paying off the exchanges. Let people decide what section to send their money to. I say if we ended up with like 200k devoted to actual marketing and only like 50k to bribe exchanges we could/should just work with it.
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Agreed. The hope would be to stretch the $200K to secure at least 2-3 exchanges and invest in marketing activities (e.g. bounties, airdrops, etc.) to support those listings.
As much as I wish that we could get the exchange listings for free, history seems to indicate that is very unlikely. That being said, some exchanges like KuCoin and Kraken claim to offer free listing if they think the project is worthy. Letās keep our fingers crossed that would be the case. If not, better to be prepared/funded.
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Thatās an interesting approach. I generally prefer control and granularity but in this case I worry that it would divide the overall support for this initiative. I may be way off. Splitting into smaller bits may make the goals seem more approachable but being split up, then either or multiple milestones may not reach full funding. I also like the timeline/roadmap approach that Sotros has weaved into this which gives us definitive goals that compliment or piggyback off of Maidsafe progress. Itās ambitious like mentioned before and of course the exchange listing fees seem like ransom but they are unfortunately somewhat of a necessary evil in our current environment.
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ya ideally we could just invest 100% in marketing activities and those activities convince exchanges we are a major coin it would be silly not to list and miss out on the hype all that marketing is creating. Buying a listing then doing the marketing seems like the exchange gets everything and we do all the work 
Thatās at least what the ethical idealist part of my mind saysā¦ the pragmatic part does say just pay binance 100k and hype up our coin and that will still be profitable even if the exchange is kinda taking more then their share.
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Yes, this is why the first exchange listing is positioned after the first two major marketing initiatives (SAFErace and SAFE the Internet). Any exchange listing needs to come on a swell of mounting engagement.
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I think there are 2 strategies here. One is just do our thing and be cool and hopefully we get invited to some parties. The second is pay the cover and go to the clubā¦
If we really look like a growing presence then at least some exchanges are bound to list us because for them just capturing that volume and making trading fees is good enough. Now we have a place to trade and direct new people to go if they are interested in us. Thatās pretty good, but some people might not want to come to our house party if they donāt know us that well.The other option is just pay binance. Last I heard their fee was 100k. We donāt even really need another exchange if we have them. The advantage is thatās just everyones go-to place so we could get some extra action from people outside our inner-circle.
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My concern is that, if we just pay off an exchange without building up engagement and anticipation before hand, we might end up in a similar boat to the tons of coins that pumped hard at time of listing then dumped even harder (and stayed dumped) not long after. I think weāre in this for the long run, so might be best to take a measured approach.
Best case scenario is that we kick off the first couple initiatives, testnets/Fleming land sooner rather than later, and the resulting interest gets exchanges to come knocking. If they donāt, hopefully weāll have the funds to get a seat at the table while also having already created demand.
Once all the exchanges are diligenced and we know what fees they want to charge (if any), I think we should let the community choose where we list via vote. My two cents.
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Oh ya I do agree that either way we should build our message at least a bit before getting listed. The question is do we just wait for the listing to happen cause our message gets so strong exchanges hear it on their own. Or at some point do we push the button and say ok message is out there lets pay to be listed somewhere well known.
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hereās another reason to maybe split the funding rounds. First round is for pure marketing. Then when we have a million people saying āwhen binance?ā we tweet out a donation address to make it happen.
There is free for everyone to act their own contribution. But I am some worried about this kinds of marketing.
Do you hear anyone marketing TCP/IP protocol based global network ? This network is the Internet.
The people use Internet because internet give them a chance to make a money and easy communication not because of marketing.
I have saw many of blockchain project to do that kinds of marketing. But truth, if their protocol is good, people will use it, if not people never use it.
P.S I think that the best marketing is making an application on the SAFEnet. That is what I focus now.
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On the most base level we attract investors to our coin and the dev team has more runway to actually get this puppy finished.
But aside from that itās really just to show people something they hopefully will indeed find useful. At some point we can depend on a snowball effect, but right now I donāt think we have the critical mass. We need to get it to the point crypto twitter is all talking about it maybe saying āwow this is the stupidest next bitconnect thingā or hopefully ādamn this is the future!ā We need to get it to the point we are really tested. I think everyone here believes the project has great merits. so put us though the ringer!
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@Sotros25 Just a clarification here. The loans were all made against my shares in maidsafe. so when safecoin launches all shareholders can claim their safecoin, however I cannot as mine back the existing loans. I eventually do get my safecoin over a period of 5 years all going well.
Bottom line is that my allocation is pretty much used up, so we cannot really extend the loan scheme. I should probably have said earlier, but probaby OK as itās not a focus here.
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If you think ādamm SAFE is the futureā, how about make an application on it?
The PPT and talking are not impactful.
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