Thank you for your questions. Going to try to answer them as best as we can.
1) There are no shares in a company. There is no exchange company. This is a decentralized exchange supported by a group of developers (us). There's nothing to own other than being entitled to 50% fee payouts from the DEX as a smart contract, there is no exchange company where you could own shares or stocks.
2) Bridgecoin was fairly mined as a scrypt-compatible coin from Day 1. The dev-team mined in competition with everyone else, there was no pre-mine. The early miners can second that. Our mined BCO will finance the development of the decentralized exchange, assuming it reaches a higher price. Right now the funding is secured until the end of the year, as we were able to sell at the good prices last week. This is very much in contrast to the usual ICO launch where some budget is reserved.
Doing an ICO in our juristiction is very illegal and we want to stay out of jail, this is why we created BridgeCoin to finance the development of the DEX.
3) Future (business) development will be paid out of the 50% fee that stays with the CryptoBridge devs, or alternatively with BCO, if we haven't sold them yet, to finance the application. As there is no exchange company, there are no voting rights in what direction the DEX will take. Our experience with BitShares tells us that it is almost impossible to reach consensus in which direction the project should move, that is part of the reason why it is not very successful so far.
4) You're not investing into us, nor are we selling coins directly to you. You're buying them on the free market. You, as an investor, have to decide on the value proposition. You're welcome to compare this project to other (exchange) ICOs out there. Compared to them, we already have a working product and completed several milestones already. We're dependant on the BCO price to go up to continue to finance the development, so we're very commited to this project. There's nothing in for us to abandon the project since we're heavily invested in it. Knowing or not knowing who the devs are does not change this situation.
So couple questions from an investing standpoint.
1. How did you guys come up with the 50% profitsharing number? The way you structured this feels almost like buying stock in a regular business, however a stock in a regular business gets you the same share as what you pay for. In this case, if I buy all the bridgecoins available I only have 50% of the company.
2. I understand there must be an incentive for you to run/maintain the exchange, so rewarding yourself with 50% of the profits is one way to do this instead of doing an ICO and taking x% of coins for yourself. Once you don't have ANY coins, you are purely incentivized to make this exchange grow and reap the rewards. Instead of, like with most ICO's, pumping up some sort of business and running away with a couple million. BUT, I think you also started mining bridgecoins for yourself, so while not explicitly giving yourself x% of bridgecoins, by being the first miner, this is what happened anyway? How many bridgecoins do you have?
3. Building the product is just the first step in running a succesfull business, redistributing all the profits seems nice, but what happens when you want to grow this exchange and need money to do this (advertising/employees/lawyers/etc). Who will pay for growth, who will decide how to grow?
4. Previous point leads to this point: Who are you? People are saying this isn't relevant, but it is relevant once I buy bridgecoins, become a shareholder and have my profits in your hands.