30K is a freaking lot of BTC. I know it costs money for notary nodes and the development.
But lets be honest KMD will be using already developed technological pieces from other coins. All the dev is doing is patching things up and it does not cost tens of millions USD in funding.
I think Dev is being greedy (want to use the coming ZCASH hype hence the opportune timing of ico) and bit jealous (of Waves developer) hence the 30K BTC cap + 6 million USD worth of BTCD.
This one is gonna be a saturated ICO if more than 5000 BTC are raised.
What is the minimum quantity of BTC that needs to be raised to make the project viable?
It depends on what level of the project you mean. There are the mission critical parts, like paying for bitcoin fees and notary nodes.
1000 would be enough for a reduced bitcoin notarization frequency and smaller number of notary nodes, but not a lot of development.
5000 would allow to have the fastest bitcoin notarization frequency, all 64 notary nodes and staff up a group of C coders and GUI devs fulltime for some years
10000 would allow having many LP nodes all fully funded for the lowest trading spreads and many liquid trading pairs
Above this would allow a warchest that can make opportunistic trades, arbitrages and other means to generate working capital and set up a very long term organization of the above. Along with some large scale marketing. Of course, even at the lower funds raised we will be doing marketing, but with a limited budget.
1000 btc which is over $ 600 000 would only result in "... not a lot of development". The majority of the funds could go to the project managers as pure profit with no benefits for the ico investors. But with another 4000 btc, adding up to 5000 btc which is over $ 3 000 000 the ico investors would "... staff up a group of C coders and GUI devs fulltime for some years".
"Ideally we can recruit half a dozen high caliber C devs for continued enhancement of the tech, along with a similar number of GUI devs. We will of course manage with less, and we probably have to. Meeting the funding goals would allow us to do rapid development beyond the features we have announced."
https://komodoplatform.com/faq/I question the need to pay notary nodes about $ 500 each month. The continuous expenses should be minimized since they add up.
"Notary nodes receive a monthly wage of ~$500 (to pay for expenses and as a reward) for the effort and resources contributed. Voters can also use the testnet KMD as one metric in evaluating a notary node.
The Komodo platform will require 64 notary nodes to which the vast majority of the 3 KMD block reward is expected to be allocated to. If the market price of the monthly 1/64th share amounts to less than $500, the Komodo team will use the ICO funds to cover the difference."
https://steemit.com/komodo/@komodoplatform/notary-node-elections"The primary use of funds is for the dPoW consensus system implementation. In order to secure Komodo blockchain, the Bitcoin transaction fees must be paid. Capital is also needed to ensure there are enough high capacity nodes around the world. Eventually, the system will become self-sustaining, as other coins will use Komodo to get the benefits of dPoW."
https://komodoplatform.com/faq/From a altcoin blog, translated from german to english with google translate:
https://altcoinspekulant.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/komodo-ico-macht-bitcoindark-btcd-hochinteressant/"For me, James aka jl777 belongs to the clever minds of the cryptoscene, but still does not have a great degree of recognition. This is because James has been concentrating on the Nxt environment for a very long time, which has been successful since 2013, but has remained in a niche and has not been noticed by large parts of the cryptocommunity. The crypto-conglomerate which he created during this time is the same and is difficult for the outsider to see through. Here is only a part of it:"
