Hi Gekko463!
Disclaimer: this is a long one.
A couple answers to your questions, some of them indeed very relevant. Please note that you will find answers to some of them on our website:
http://www.neucoin.org/en/wiki/ - you may want to have a look at it. But I’ll give you details below.
Looks like two people on the Advisory board have had their advisory roles in this project grossly exaggerated: Palmer and Witrant.
Jackson Palmer today discussed his "Advisory Role" at Neucoin in the following terms: "To set the record straight, I'm not at all a paid shill for NeuCoin... I had provided marketing assistance in an advisory role previously...when the NeuCoin folks came to me and asked if I'd mind posting a simple request for feedback I thought "hey, Dogecoin hasn't got a lot going on right now, maybe this (free stuff!) will interest them".
Then he quit the crypto community, including, presumably his (limited) role at Neucoin?
I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to show here: “I had provided marketing assistance in an advisory role previously” - he uses the expression “Advisory role” himself. You may have a different conception of what “Advisory board” and “advisory roles” are, but basically from our perspective, these are positions in which the people filling them provide us with their counsel, but is in no way an operational role. Here is an example of Jackson’s previous help, when we released our white paper (that you may be interested in checking out as well:
http://www.neucoin.org/en/whitepaper/):
https://twitter.com/victoriavaneyk/status/582614164251762689 As for the fact he left the crypto community, Jackson envisioned a world where cryptocurrencies would be designed to reach broader audiences than what we can see today. NeuCoin's goal is exactly about this and we'll keep executing on this mission statement!
I can't find a business plan. Who owns the company producing this coin? It seems what they want us to buy is the product (the coin). But it seems somebody else, whomever is to be on the receiving end of these bitcoins they want us to pony up for the coins, is obscured.
Where is this corporate entity? What is it that the "Founding team" owns? What corporate entity receives the BTC, establishes these Foundations and pays the Salaries? Who is the CEO?
If the Founders are being paid in neucoins, rather than corporate equity or salaries, they have to sell those coins to pay their (Parisian for at least Sandrine) rent. N'est pas?
2% per month cash out limits means 24% per year!
Here are details on the corporate entities at play in the NeuCoin Project: three non-profit Isle of Man foundations were created, they will be donated the 2.4B premine when the cryptocurrency is created - which is scheduled to happen in July 2015.
Details about the establishment of these three foundations can be found on the links below:
The current Isle of Man foundations register can be found here (updated daily):
http://www.gov.im/lib/docs/ded/companies/companiesReg/Foundations/foundationsactregister.pdf.
You can see the 3 NeuCoin foundations near the end of the list (numbers 000060M, 000061M and 000062M).
Another useful link:
http://www.gov.im/ded/companies/Foundations/register.xmlAfter the NeuCoin cryptocurrency is created, the founding team will donate the source code and the premined coins to Neucoin’s non-profit foundations in the Isle of Man: the NeuCoin Code Foundation, the NeuCoin Growth Foundation and the NeuCoin Utility Foundation.
Since NeuCoin is not yet created, nor yet donated to the NeuCoin Foundations, the Presale will be handled by NEU Development Ltd, a Seychelles based IBC with the single purpose of handling the Presale transactions. Once the NeuCoin currency is created, and the pre-mine donated to the NeuCoin Foundations, the foundations will transfer 100 million coins to NEU Development Ltd in exchange for the funds raised in the Presale, and NEU Development Ltd will transfer your coins to people who have taken part in the presale.
The founding team owns 0.2 billion of the 3B premine. The detailed allocation of the premine is available at this link:
http://www.neucoin.org/en/wiki/#advantages, point 10
Some of the team members work for free, some work for heavily discounted rates, and some are paid full salaries. The resources for salaries came from the NeuCoin Project’searly seed funding and then a later angel round:
http://www.coindesk.com/uber-hotwire-2-25-million-neucoin/.
Here are some details about the business plan, there will be two parts in my answers:
1. How the Foundations are able to fund marketing and the development of useful applications targeted at mainstream consumers.
2. What is the “founding team” business model, what is in it for them - as it is indeed a fair question.
On the first point: NeuCoins will be distributed to reward and incentivize all participants who help increase its utility and value:
- Some for free to consumers to try using NeuCoin and for recruiting other users
- Some to companies that make NeuCoin useful: content providers that accept micropayments in NeuCoin, exchanges, payment processors, wallets, etc.
- Some sold to investors, with proceeds used to fund code development, user acquisition, and projects to further develop utility, with a focus on micropayments
The NeuCoin foundations use proceeds from coin sales to directly fund projects that increase the utility and consumer reach of NeuCoin, which in turn, increases the value of NeuCoin. More details are available at this link:
http://www.neucoin.org/en/wiki/#utility-development On the second point: the founding team’s long term “business model” indeed revolves around their holdings of NeuCoins. Here are the detailed resale restrictions: holders may only sell 2% of their holdings per month in the first year, 3% per month in year two, 4% per month in the year three, 5% per month in year four and 6% per month in year 5. Maybe you are familiar with common equity vesting mechanisms in startups, these re-sale restrictions totally match them. The NeuCoin team invested work in a challenging project and built it - as such they get “equity” (in our case, a portion of the premine). Typical equity vesting has a 4-year cliff, but the founders are allowed to sell 25% after the 1st year, a little bit more on the 2nd, and so on. We used pretty standards figures here. But of course, maybe you are free to not like these standards.
The more I try to understand this, the less I am interested.
Lots of free coins to be had? So why pay for any?
There is a misunderstanding around NeuCoin distribution plan here. NeuCoin will never be “airdropped” for users doing a Facebook connect. They will be distributed by the Foundations over several years, always against an action from a consumer: for reading about NeuCoin, learning about it, recruiting new users, using NeuCoin, and so on. They will also be distributed to application builders who make the coin more useful to mainstream / non-tech users.
More information on this here:
http://www.neucoin.org/en/wiki/#funding Each year, the foundations’ goal is to sell sufficient NeuCoins through private sales or exchanges to fund the following year’s cash needs. However, when NeuCoin prices rise, the foundations may sell additional coins, with the excess cash obtained kept as a “rainy day” reserve. When prices fall, fewer (or zero) coins will be sold.
Over time, the NeuCoin foundations must continuously determine what the optimal use of their NeuCoin assets are - optimal from the perspective of maximizing the value of NeuCoin. The Growth foundation must always assess whether NeuCoin’s long-term value would be maximized by giving more coins away to consumers, or selling more coins and using the funds for consumer marketing. The Utility foundation must always assess whether NeuCoin’s long-term value would be maximized by awarding more coins (ideally with sales restrictions) to service providers that make NeuCoin more useful, or by selling more coins and using the proceeds to directly fund projects. The prevailing price and demand for NeuCoin will always have a large bearing on this decision calculus.