I'm honestly kind of confused.
The original plan was to distribute all the coins that didn't get sold in the fundraiser back to investors, right? that's the plan I signed up for but people apparently said in the vote that you could start now and hold some back to do a second round later (sigh).
That's right. We originally said that we would do a typical one shot takes all fundraiser, but then people voted to lock some coins and make them available for future fundraisers. I think it was assumed by some of the Swarm founding team members that we would distribute all of the 24mm coins to whomever participated in round one on the basis of their SWARMPRE holders, but this wasn't discussed as a team and so our communication on this point was not consistent.
Although it seems nice to have more coins, it's not clear that this positively affects the value of the coins either in the immediate term or in the long term. There are various arguments to be made about having a higher coin market cap, and the potential negative price movements that can happen when you have an asset split (which is effectively what we we are doing). So some founding team members thought we should work out some other solution.
Since Counterparty now has an asset burn feature, this was proposed as an option. Obviously it's not fair to burn unsold coins but leave the founders with a larger share, so we also discussed and agreed to burn our own share.
That said, it's still not overwhelmingly obvious to me at least that this is the best option. Among other things, there's a clear communication gap since some people were expecting us to distribute more coins at the end of the fundraiser. I'm not sure what percentage of the overall coin holders thought this was going to happen though. I assume it is higher here on bitcointalk since these issues were discussed more throughly and since I was primarily handling the communication and assumed (perhaps naively) that this was the best solution.
As for my part, I was never completely convinced of the burning proposal, but I don't think it is unreasonable if the founders burn their coins in the same proportion to the folks who participated in round one.
That said, I think any shift in direction this complex requires a lot of discussion and a vote.
The best option I see at present is to actually shelve this discussion for a bit and focus on building the platform and our next couple coin launches. The team is gathered, our office is nearly setup, budgeting is set, accounting is nearly up to date, and we have our first few launches lined up.
Btw, this also brings up the larger goal I wrote up on
one of my longer pieces on cryptoequity, of having an elected representative of swarm coin holders who participates in the decision process of swarm and periodically audits our books to make sure we aren't doing stupid things with the money we've raised or violating the interests of swarm coin holders.
I'm not sure if there is anyone here who is interested in volunteering for this role at present, but I think it would be good if there was someone who served as an interface for the interests of people who have swarm coin. This person would also be responsible for shaping any proposal that goes up for a more general vote, so that we don't inappropriately structure a proposal to serve only our own interests.