jti, you guys have no credibility whatsoever in my eyes. Last minute completely changing the idea of freicoin to give yourselves all kinds of power. Why should anyone care? Does anyone? What was the point of releasing when you did if you weren't ready to implement whatever system you have planned? Worried about missing the boat? Was Indiegogo giving you deadlines? The actions of your team do not make logical sense to me.
You have to take into account that we have different views. Personally I'm not convinced about the proof of stake voting idea (republicon), but many others think it would be the best and I'm open to explore new ideas.
The foundation is not a "last minute change" at all. Although I've been resisting to any alternative to mining distribution since I proposed freicoin until possibly the last months before release, the opposition to mining issuance has been persistent from great part of the community since the beginning, just days after the forum was created, you can check it out. Countless possibilities have been discussed, we have an specialized forum for that and there's more proposals dispersed in other subforums. I would even say that some people left the project because of my resistance against non-p2p solutions.
After many discussions I was convinced myself that although "mining is needed for security" and "miner's profits should tend to zero by competition", everyone else was right: initial issuance through mining is wasteful.
Not destroying energy to create the initial base being a want from the community is not surprising since actually some people are precisely attracted by sustainable investments argument that people like Bernard Lieater or Charles Eisenstein use in favor of demurrage currencies.
And I ended up agreeing, guilty on that. I know there's other people who would like to use a system like republicoin for part of the 5% demurrage too, but I think centralization is only acceptable if it's a one-time-only thing.
Actually I thought that "giving money away to good causes" would be simpler than it seems it will be, but we needed to launch before, because we need a price to calculate the amounts for the grants, and ideally some merchants on board too.
Unfortunately there's no place to look at to know the fiat price of FRC yet, and it's not easily convertible, so almost no merchants.
But one day the foundation will dispense some coins, and it will be good to have many vigilant people to guarantee that the funds are not abused.
Better issuing the coins by resource wasting than by corruption. But mining is only better than that, and there's actually people out there managing resources transparently using participative processes. So why not give it a try ourselves? The anti-corruption button is always there.