Let me restate in full to clarify. Hopefully this will make sense to you.
Currently ODBcoin can be purchased during the sale by anyone with an account on AltMarket. Deposits are currently limited to ETH, BTC, and USD, with TAO coming shortly. This is just for the purpose of purchasing ODBcoin for the duration of the sale which ends in February. I believe Tao gives you a 5% discount, the same as what you get if you signed up to the pre-sale notification email opt-in that was up on the site before Dec 1st when the sale began.
After the sale is over, there will be the audit which will be concluded sometime between mid February and March 1st to my understanding. I'm not sure if trading will become available to the public before or after the end of the audit, but at the latest it sounds like it should be very soon after the end of the audit.
Once full trading is open to everyone, Tao will be the base for trading pairs for either most or for all alts on the market, and definitely will be the exclusive base for ODBcoin and all future icon token trading pairs.
I believe BTC will be a base for some alts, but it will not be for any of the icon tokens, and would also not be a base for Tao in the proposed scenario. I'm not sure if BTC would be traded with TAO as the base, but I'm assuming most likely not in this scenario. ETH will be the base for some alts but none of the icon tokens. I'm not sure if Bryce is considering decoupling from ETH, so possibly you might have it as the base for TAO.
So if you want to buy Tao on the market once it's open you'll be able to hook up your bank account, deposit USD and buy Tao directly, or you'll be able to deposit BTC and trade to an alt and buy with the alt, possibly including ETH. If you want to buy ODBcoin you will have to buy Tao first, no other option once the sale ends. Same with future initial artist token offerings.
Should be interesting to see it. In the mean time, I'm hearing electrum servers are up and running and one of the community members is working on an android wallet to be released soon.
Uh huh. So you can't currently even use TAO for it's ostensible main purpose, is that right?
But "in the future", altmarket won't be offering icon token sales with anything but TAO, but obviously there's no way to stop other platforms from doing so, or from OTC sales to happen? Or, if this isn't possible, what's the difference from said tokens just being stored in a centralised database at altmarket? Just the blockchain buzzword?
It just seems weird to me that if the point of TAO is to be the single point of entry for icon tokens, that it, well, isn't. Instead TAO/OBD is, at launch,
not even an option.
It also seems weird to me how often and how many times the ostensible plan, deadlines, goals etc. have changed since the original launch of TAO. And I mean they haven't been
small changes, but pretty radical differences.
I don't recall ever saying that the icon token sales would only be purchased with Tao during the crowdsale, or that it's the single point of entry during the crowdsales. It's always been USD and other fiat as other jurisdictions become available, plus BTC, ETH, and TAO during the sale. There is no way for anyone else to offer ODBcoin or other icon tokens during a crowdsale because AltMarket has exclusive rights to generate the tokens for the artists. They could make up their own token or create a new blockchain and call it ODBcoin but that obviously wouldn't be the same any more than if I picked a popular Ethereum token and made my own smart contract to generate tokens with the same name. And there would be legal trouble for someone who did so for the same reason the developer of Coinye got in trouble.
After the sale is over, no exchange can list any of the artist tokens without permission or risk being sued for using the artist image and name without permission. Again, legal precedent is established already. I've explained this multiple times. Of course, OTC could happen.
There have been course corrections and adjustments over the last year or so and there have been
speculative timelines like the July 4th date which were never confirmed in the first place. More recently things have been pushed back a little due to last minute hurdles, but I haven't seen any dates that are contractual like the ODBcoin sale being changed, and those are the only ones I've ever considered hard dates.
There was a big pivot over a year ago from the original plan, which is the only radical change I can think of, but that was just an intelligent response to what they learned about the needs and interests of the music industry. Startups pivot at some point pretty often. Inflexibility isn't a winning strategy for a business. It seems very silly to render judgement about what AM is doing anytime prior to March at the earliest when we can actually observe the results and see if the real timelines have been met.