Well I was making a response to the whitepaper question. Most people just glance over them an assume the content is correct. Few people read them. Happy to answer your 9,800 BTC question, just wanted to put you on the spot for a second and ask about Sybil attacks in the Maidsafe whitepaper first.
Actually, anyone who's more interested in "putting me on the spot" than answering an important, direct question about the development budget, is unlikely to be someone I want to take a risk with and invest in, but altcoin world is full of surprises, so I still look forward to your answer.
Really just wanted to see if you actually read the whitepapers. I have this theory that a few people only read them in depth, and than most people just skim and assume all the content is correct.
Try to see it from my perspective (the perspective, I suspect, of most coin buyers on bticointalk). I'm not crypto-techie. There are many coins, many message threads, many posts and many scams across bitcointalk. With a day job, it's not practical or cost-effective for many of us to read everything out there until we come across digestible tidbits/summaries/previews that command our attention and merit a deeper read and research. For instance, I've read a ton about Ethereum. I never read anything about DarkCash (and thank heavens). I have to prioritise and count on correspondence in bitcointalk with people who have explored these things in depth to get a preview and early education to decide whether to explore a coin further. It's just being practical and, to be a successful coin developer, you need to do a better job of suffering us fools galdly. See Vitalik Buterin - guy's a genius, but he treats every inquiry he gets (that I'm aware of, no matter how inane, as long as it's a genuine inquiry) respectfully and with patience, his time permitting. Now, I came here, because what I saw of the website and glimpses of the interface and concept looked professional and impressive, but I dont have time to read it all.
As for the 9,800 BTC that is the value we intend to raise over the long term of the project, not just the initial crowdsale. I say value because some will be distributed through early mining, and the rest can be distributed via future crowdsales for new Storj platforms.
For example one of our users made a decentralized video player in a few hours off our existing APIs (
see Demo). Imagine how powerful that would be if that was cleaned up into a nice web app. So we can do a crowdsale to support that specific app.
Also by setting a hard number you avoid the wishy washy of price discovery in an early market. The market will ultimately choose, but it makes things a little bit more stable.
That clarifies things a bit - thank you. Hope to get a chance to check out the whitepaper.
