Bitmark's Value
A currency with no initial price tag, and which earns value over time? No exchange? What is it's value?
Perhaps I'm putting my miners hat on, but is the title of the post actually addressed by the rest of the post? As you know I'm fully supportive of all your endeavours here but until there is an actual value placed on BTM, then it is hard to evaluate the whether the other projects like getmarked will be viable. People, social media, websites, etc, will only adopt getmarked if it carries a tangible benefit. It's all well and good to build all these systems but at the end of the day, if giving or earning Marks has no intrinsic value, people won't bother.
The coin needs to dip it's toe in the exchange market sooner or later to establish a foothold. After all, if you can't buy or sell BTM then it really does have no value. My best suggestion is to continue to expand the nethash mining the coin. The IPM project is a good way of doing that. Exchanges keep a track of these sort of things but a low profile coin like BTM can get lost in the blizzard of "Look at ME" new releases. A smart exchange like Bittrex will pick up a promising coin (although sometimes they need a nudge).
We have three things at play, value, production cost, and price-tag.
- Price-tag and production cost are correlated strongly, we already know the production costs at any given time.
- Network difficulty determines the production cost and price tag.
- Difficulty is a measure of demand.
- Value (usefulness, adoption, value proposition) create the demand.
By focusing on value the rest handles itself, we are creating limited value already measurable to real people, this project is impacting their lives. This is raising demand, difficulty is rising, production costs are rising, and the price-tag will reflect that whenever it is shown.
The problem with exchanges for altcoins is that they create an artificial demand, where market movements based on speculative self interest or manipulation appear to be the measurement of demand, and therefore the value.
I understand your points and can empathise, that miners have costs, I am sure we can find ways to address this, with or without exchanges.
You say "if you can't buy or sell BTM then it really does have no value", this is where we disagree. We can see many valueless coins which people buy and sell.
Consider just buying or selling goods and receiving or giving BTM as the unit of payment... that is the goal is it not?
Exchanges are a bi-product required to swap from one currency of value to another, in order to spend that currency. Exchanges in this scene are games where the ones with the best marketing campaigns or the most pre-arranged win out.
We do face
an issue which I think surfaces between the posts of this thread.
On the 13th July 2015 when we are one year old, there will be 10,000,000 BTM in existence, which must be distributed reasonably fairly. Maybe it is better to describe it as 10,000,000,000 Marks and then we can frame things more clearly.
This can only be achieved by balancing supply and demand, within the context of getmarked this correlates to producing a reasonable figure which new adopting software would be armed with or require. The users of each software or community will distribute the marks within themselves. Collectively the communities will increase demand and value.
There is an optimal figure to find based on some average adoption projections.
Let us say that:
1. the users of each adoption will require 5x more marks in the first year than they first acquire upon adoption.
2. each adoption leads to 2 more within 4 months.
3. we will start with 4 adoptions in the first 2 months.
4. the network reach of each user will be 2 deep, with 40% shared contact and 45% distribution to those contacts within a year.
5. The average number of users for each adoption at adoption time is 800.
6. 40% of the bitmarks will be retained by investors or traders, with much lower distribution than average users, and amounts measured in BTM rather than Marks.
These are example figures, but already we can extrapolate some example findings.
6,000,000,000 Marks available for Marking.
4+8+16, 28 adoptions.
800+(1600*0.6*0.45=432)+(2464*0.6*0.45), 1465 users per adoption.
28*1465, 41020 getmarked users after one year.
6,000,000,000/41020, 146252 Marks per user after one year.
146252/6, 24375 Initial Marks required by each user per adoption to use all 60,000,000,000 Marks available for Marking.
By these example figures we would need to launch 4 getmarked adoptions armed with 19,500 BTM each in the next two months, to distribute most of the marks mined over the first year to 41k users.
Now consider instead that we target four communities with different software, and add getmarked support to the software they use, open source.
This could increase the number of adoptions by 4 or 5 times easily, reducing the number of BTM required per adoption by the same measure, to say 4000 BTM per adoption.
It would also suggest that the number of users would be higher, Mark distribution further, and Marks per user much lower.
My instinct is to suggest that 150,000 users over multiple services with an average of 6,000 Marks, or 6 BTM each, is achievable within a year.
Make up your own projections and see what you come to, the average of all we suggest will be closest to the truth, and give us some idea of how many BTM to provide the first four adoptions with.
The good news is that only 5 million Bitmarks are mined in the first year, so you can half all of these figures.
If the average user only has 6,000 Marks, cannot get any more, often uses and receives them. The do you think the average 'Marking' will be 1 Mark or more like 0.05 Marks?
