Hey, I asked our founder Yanislav to provide you with a reply, but he is quite busy with the campaign, so I will do it.
First of all, thank you for the reply. We really appreciate your comments and find them quite relevant.
Let me address your points.
We decided to have no volume cap so that anyone willing can participate. We believe that if more people have AE the value of the underlying system will increase. No cap was also Ethereum's approach and that was quite successful.
The name "Friends, Family and Real Innovators" might not be the best choice of words, but this is how we imagine the first people supporting us. I believe Yanislav, being quite sentimental at times, tried to express "closeness" with the first contribution campaign participants.
We definitely see your "over-bought" point. However, organizing a campaign such as this one will always be a balancing act. We are building a public blockchain and we want as many people as possible to use it. This point is further stressed by Yanislav's idea to distribute 1% of AE tokens, created during the backing campaign, to most (technical limits apply) BTC and ETH users by "attaching" ownership to public addresses.
Again, thank you for the comments and thank you for the good words in the end. We appreciate both.
Vlad
Vlad, thanks for your reply. We both desire greater community benefit, including accessibility, and I think there are a few more points to consider:
We believe that if more people have AE the value of the underlying system will increase.
I think the focus is too much on "our family now", at the expense of the larger segment "our eventual family (e.g. two years out)". The vast majority of people, including weekend crypto enthusiasts and the later stage adopters, will find out about AE well after the crowdsale. If the crowdsale cap is low, them the opening market cap for the coin will be congruent with a very early stage startup. That congruence will be more likely to attract attention (and investment) as it will be seen as an investment that makes sense. The project and price are then more likely to grow as a function of the merits of the project, and demonstrations of what's being produced - items that will justify a higher market cap. The sustainable returns will create positive community attention and media attention, which will fulfill your goal of getting more people involved.
Conversely, if an unbounded sale raises $50M for example, for an immature product, I think you're likely to see a panic sell as soon as AE tokens are on the market, as people realize they've paid too much, and don't want to wait two to three years for a $50M market cap to make sense. An immediate large drop in your market cap makes for bad news, and will likely further deter investment and raise questions about the team's decision making. Additionally, the people that are losing money in that situation include your earlier adopters. An event like that would taint the project from the start, and impede your growth.
No cap was also Ethereum's approach and that was quite successful.
I don't believe this is an appropriate comparison. The Ethereum crowdsale was 2.5 years ago, when the cumulative market cap for Crypto was around $ 7B. It's now worth 3.5x more, at ~ $25 B. This has attracted many more investors, and as I mentioned earlier, even mainstreem VCs are now on the field. Moreover, the market is extremely bullish now. I think an uncapped crowdsale now is likely to raise more than Ethereum did.
The second point on the Ethereum crowdsale is that a good outcome doesn't necessarily equal a good decision.
The name "Friends, Family and Real Innovators" might not be the best choice of words, but this is how we imagine the first people supporting us.
I think it's excellent to be close to your users, and I think this point deserves more consideration: If the team indeed has the best interests of their "friends, family and innovators" in mind, I believe an important action would be to minimize the risk of them paying too much for tokens, and potentially losing money if they need to sell tokens in the first year or two, by not capping the sale at a level appropriate to the business needs of the project. To have an uncapped sale is to allow your friends and family to contribute their hard-earned savings, blindly -- they will have no idea of the worst-case price of their tokens at the time of contribution. In other words, an unbounded sale allows the risk of extreme dilution if a new entrant VC decides to flood you with Eth, at the expense of all the backers.
For both the benefit of your project, and the protection of your backers, I encourage you to reconsider putting a cap on the project that is aligned with your business needs, and will protect your backers from an over-bought token.