Not sure what you're talking about with the $2 an hour thing Vlad. I got 17.2 shares last round = ~6179641dvc = ~7.6btc = ~$823 at current exchange rates. Now, I posted some stuff I had written in the past, and I also got some shares for programming work (which actually took more time than writing), but assuming I had got those shares for writing 17k words, that'd mean I had spent over 400hrs, at ~40 words an hour. I definitely write faster than that!
I think if you're writing about something you know a lot about, 400 words an hour is a reasonable pace, which would give an estimate of about $20 an hour. Not bad for freelance writing. Granted, some people might write slower than that, and the exchange rate is crashing a bit, but it seems to me writing is still worth your while. I haven't had as much time this round to write (finals week in my university right now), and it is a bit discouraging seeing how many words the top writers have contributed, while I've only written about 4000. But even if there are twice as many shares that is still about $100! And I don't know about your situation, but as a college student, an extra $100 a month is very helpful.
You're talking about yesterday. Round 24 and soon 25 has gone down by at least a factor of 4 if not more. First, the value of devcoins has been cut by roughly 60% and then the amount of coins per share is down by at least 60%. That's closer to a factor of 5 or 6 than a factor of 4 so take your $20 per hour and we're closer to my $2 per hour neighborhood than your $20.
Being a student is one thing. If you were a skilled computer programmer would you work for $5 per hour, $3, $2 per hour? That's the neighborhood we're in.
I'm not complaining, nobody is forcing anyone to contribute. I was simply pointing out a statistic, a fact and I mentioned that it may not make any difference as there may be lots of people, like students or trained professionals in 3rd world countries who think $20 per day is a good deal.
Like I said earlier, I'm excited and curious to see what happens in round 5 because unlike round 22, I see much wider and deeper awareness for round 25. Should be interesting.
Good luck!
Edit: here's an easy way to figure out the change: last round we got 359,000 per share and I actually paid .00041 cash for devcoin on vircurex.
So for last round we got 359,000 X $.00041 = $147
This round I'm guessing a share will be roughly 140,000 coins times $.00020 (the actual bid is lower than this right now) so then your total per share this round is $28. And it keeps heading lower for some reason.
So from $147 to $28 it's pretty much what I guessed, a change by a factor of 5, which means this round and maybe even the next is worth 20% (1/5) compared to last round so last round is not a good gauge to use for time value or opportunity cost.
I think devcoin will bottom soon and eventually go up on increased global demand and and/or positive catalysts, but I doubt we'll ever see large shares like last round (359K) or especially the round prior to that (1.41 million).