Hello. Just came across this project, it sound every interesting, but the minimum goal of BTC is not met yet, with only 20 hours left to the end of the ICO. What will happen if the minimum goal is not met, will everyone be refunded, or what will happen? Sorry if this was answered before, I couldn't find where...
If the token sale does not reach its minimum of 200 BTC, the Escrow which holds the BTC and is administered by Coinfirm, after it verifies all transactions, will refund all BTC collected during the length of the sale.
All funds will be returned to the wallets indicated during the purchase process. The only loss in value when contributing are the transaction fees associated to the purchases and the return transactions. So please do not wait, as we have strong evidence that we will cover the minimum no matter what.
Also it should be noted that we fully intend upon creating the environment, including the Ember tokens, regardless of the results of the token sale. When and how that will take place is something we will worry about only if necessary, but we have already laid the groundwork for those contingencies before we began all of this.
Dev, sorry for the question I'm going to ask, but if you guys can cover the minimum, why are you going to ICO? Was it necessary to make an ICO if you are able to follow through with the project? I know that you deserve to be paid for the nice work and future product offered, but was an ICO necessary? Or why didn't do it with a minimum minor? There are many ICO's, it's a difficult competition.
We, ourselves, cannot cover the minimum, I just believe that we have enough people out there we have spoken to that leads us to believe that we will cover. Plus there is the rush factor, we have been told to expect the rush at the end. So that is what we are expecting. We are simply saying that IF there is not and we do not cover, we have made real efforts to give us options in case something like that were to occur.
The funding from the ICO was going to help us instantly qualify for the matching technology research and development grants that would allow us to hire and acquire all of the proper people and tools for the job, without having to go through the time and expense of funding round trips and convention/event appearances to meet with everyone. The token sale seemed to be the preferred method of not only funding, but also marketing. Most people learn about new blockchain projects from watching information about ICOs, especially platform or consumer-facing applications that have a group of blockchain industry outsiders like us.
Finally, the biggest reason for the ICO is because it was the easiest, most decentralized way to ensure a wide geographical distribution of coins, even at low numbers. A platform such as Embermine needs a significant, geographically distributed User population in order to operate efficiently, and this is BY FAR the easiest way to do that, funding or no.