Only a single minded community has any real chance here.
Look up wolffire the game overgrowth. The devs are very active and its an indie project. Regular content rich updates, the fans love it. I can get on cryptsy chat and talk to netcoin devs. i even had one offer to make me a custom wallet for a feature i suggested for block splits. I dont need free stuff but i was impressed by their comms and attentiveness.
Need this here. Who's going to build services for DGB if they dont see dev comms and interaction? If this doesnt happen dgb is just another altcoin with low block time for trans and a 21 billion supply.
Without a doubt communication is critical and the past few weeks we have not been as communicative as we could of been. However, this does not mean by any measure we have been sitting ideally by. There is a lot underway for DigiByte right now.
The investment DGB has received has been used to maintain several aspects of the network as well as to develop privately held services built on the DGB network such as DigiByteTip (I can say there are other services under development as well right now). We are not going to disclose some of these projects, partnerships or advancements until they are ready. This is for multiple reasons.
First, we don't want to tip off the competition until the services are ready to take to market. Second, we don't want to fuel rampent speculation and pump and dumps. Finally, when you take on a private investment, it does come with a few a catches. But when such investment comes with the experience of individuals who are much more business savvy and have a proven track record of business success over the past few decades it is hard not to listen to the advice given. There also are legal ramifications for me publicly discussing some of these projects or discussing some of the meetings I have been in. I have personally signed multiple NDA's with multiple companies and obviously do not want to be held legally responsible for breaching these agreements.
To summarize, DigiByte is open source and will always be decentralized and open as a network. Anyone can build a privately held service upon top of DigiByte. This has already been done numerous times. Cryptsy, GiftOff, ShapeShift and many more have integrated DigiByte. Have any of them open sourced their code bases? No, why you ask? There would be a dozen copy cats that popped up over night. This is the reason we have not, nor will we open source DigiByteTip any time soon. This does not mean it wont happen at some point in the future. Mind you there have also been significant legal costs no one is aware of just to get DigiByteTip to where it is now. (Part of the reason for not actively marketing it yet.)
Without a doubt for me personally this is all a tough balancing act. On one side there is the open source network and all the other public services to go with it (all the wallets, DigiHash, website, explorer and more) and the the community at large who make all of it possible.
On the other side there is a private investment and a business to move forward. Obviously everyone here I consider to be an investor as well and I personally owe it to both sides to reach the best possible outcome so everyone comes out a head in the end and wins. And I believe this will happen and we are well on the way to making that a reality.
So far we have done a lot with the limited budget we have had compared to other companies in this space. Look at the investment ChangeTip has received as well as the $500,000 DogeTipBot has. Thats just one service. We are building multiple platforms and maintaining multiple services (6 node servers each month, digiexplorer, digihash, digibyte.co, digibytegaming, easyminer, ios wallet, android wallet, digibyte gaming wallet, all core wallets, a fully functional exchange we haven't launched to do crazy laws in the US, as well as a few other services we haven't released yet. I don't know anyone else in the crypto space to have provided all these aspects of a coins ecosystem from one source.
All in all things are moving forward and I am very excited for the future of DigiByte. This technology is here to stay and we are doing our best to position DigiByte the best we can to seize the opportunity when the time comes.
Thanks to everyone for your support, feedback and continued passion. There are some great conversations on here and now i'm going to go get to work on that video update.
Cheers,
Jared