If you haven't already, please vote on the Team Requirement proposal. I'd hope the following would sway a no vote, but if you still feel yes (killing the team requirement) is justified, then please vote!
TLDR: I fell it's unlikely we'd gain more than 1.5M Team RAC at the most wildly generous numbers. This would, if fully staked, add only 30M BBP demand for the coin, which is roughly 1 month of average volume/15 days of newly minted coins.
So, here is my logic on why removing the Team Requirement is not going to help.
First off, as a holder and big PoDC miner of BBP, there are two conflicting thoughts that present before considering the actual primary issue. The first is if the BBP Team Requirement (which I'll save some typing and call BBP-TR) is removed, but we also ban other coin teams (basically Gridcoin and Byteball) then one of two things could happen. One, nothing. Two, we could spike our RAC. A spike in Team RAC would make mining unprofitable for most if not all current users unless you had some unique advantage such as dirt cheap power. So the current miners, like myself would drop out. So we'd need a HUGE spike to offset this. If we did see a huge spike in RAC and that corresponded to a similar long-term increase in price, then as a big holder, I should welcome this. Sure I wouldn't be mining anymore but, in silly terms, if price went up 100x because the RAC went up 200x, then I'm coming out great!
The issue is this. Look at Byteball. There is no team requirement, in fact wasn't even a Byteball Team for the longest time, and the benefit for being on the team is still small. I can account for most of the top 10, which is about 50% of the distribution. I'm pretty close to the top 10, in fact most of the top 10 is Team BPP, but I'd wager the rest of the other BBP users don't know much about it either and are either 1) cashing out when they mine or 2) hoping for a price increase since this is basically "free" coins.
So the question becomes, where are all the team members from Hard[OCP], US Navy, Oracle, Overclock Forums, etc? Why are they not participating in Byteball? I don't see them in any large numbers (at least in coins rewarded, since again, I've got most the top 10 covered and the top 10 is about half the reward), Byteball is incredibly easy to set up. It's trivial enough I think my beginner computer friends could get linked to Byteball following the instructions. However, none of them would be able to figure out our coin without help, and then the issue of buying crytpo to stake, would end that discussion. So I don't think (if we block Team Gridcoin and Team Byteball) we'll see many new users from this, since the most crypto savvy ones are going to be blocked. And the rest of the teams, as evidenced by their non-participation in Byteball, which has far less complexity, are not interested. Or maybe because in part, most of the big teams, don't do much CPU BOINC.
But that thought aside, let's look at some very hard numbers. If we could get a 1% conversion rate, that is, by removing the BBP-TR, we would get 1% of the overall user base to become BBP users and fully stake their mining, what would that really mean? (and for the record I think 1% is way too high). At R@h, we're anywhere between 15-20% of the daily work done, Gridcoin is usually about 10%. Yesterday the two teams combined accounted for roughly 29% of the work at R@h. So if we got 1% of the remaining 71% that would be 225K RAC. At World Community Grid, we're about 3%, Gridcoin is about 4.6% and Byteball is about .5%. So between all three projects we're basically 8% of the total. Again, if we could get 1% of the remaining 92% that's about 1.2M RAC. Even rounding up we're looking at, again in my opinion of the best case, roughly 1.5M RAC added to our team. That would create demand for 30M BBP to stake, which is roughly 1 month of our average volume, or about 15 days worth of newly minted coins. How would that affect us? Who knows, but probably not by more than a few satoshi of value in the medium term.
In the end, the market is poor all around. We've overextended our support of orphans given the fall in price. Removing the BBP-TR is removing one of the potential major marketing points of the coin, the hard and fast numbers of how many people we've added to the cause of scientific research. How many we can lay exclusive claim to for being on BOINC. We're the number 3 team ALL TIME at Rosetta@home, set to be number two by mid-October. And number one in RAC there. We're number 89 all time at World Community Grid and should break into the top 50 by the end of the year, all while being the fifth highest there in RAC. Giving up that potential marketing angle for what I suspect will be a pittance of users seems not worth the effort. And using that programming time (however small) seems to be a poor use of resources in an increasingly lean time.
Although I generally feel this is a good post in most respects, I want to offer the assertion that the "1% gain in boinc participation" should not necessarily be considered way too high in our estimations. I would say that in most PR campaigns that would be a true statement. However, in this case for all intents and purposes we are basically inviting users who are already paid up on the hardware and paid on the electricity to come to BIBLEPAY for only the cost of the UTXO (which is considered their asset - they get to keep it - so its not a capital expense to them). So on the grounds that they can tinker with a new novelty item (Those that were resistant to crypto) this might be the kicker that gets them started, I would argue over a year, it is possible to gain 20% of the boinc users (IE 10,000).
This campaign is sort of an experiment, to see if we can become a seed in order to become a household name later. Im looking at this as the difference between biblepays
stagnation (requiring us to really think out of the box to grow), or possibly gaining a massive amount of PR and growing through this experience. This appears to me to be the Holy Grail opportunity for growth at this time for the PODC side- especially since we already do that so well. We are great cancer miners, and great at WCG.
I do not believe the long term effect of additional boinc users is a price dump! They can only dump the coins once while value buyers buy them once, at that point once the emission is emitted, our total supply is stable. Another words, I view 10,000 miners with 10,000 exchange accounts as much less volatile and more stable for our price than 1,000 miners (over the long term - 1 year out+).
Anyway, I will roll with this either way, as I said I am for no double dipping and nice team stats, but I lean towards Growth at this time and feel with our blacklist feature we can prevent double dipping and make our own stats report.