Basically if people don't want DeVCoins and so determinedly don't want them that they will just throw them at buyers instead of stating a price they want for them and waiting for a buyer who is willing to pay that price, then why give them DeVCoins at all? We would drive down exchange rates less by just giving them dollars instead without the exchanges being involved, and since the profitability and market cap sites and so on do nto take over the counter sales of coins into account their deperate throwing away cheap of coins need not have an effect on the "official" exchange rate such sites show.
If we know ahead of time how many DeVCoins people want to throw away cheap we can be ready for them, with a private little exchange in effect, oh well mister author, we know you prefer fiat so we picked some up for you already, no need to throw away devcoins cheap, we sold them at a good price so you are getting more fiat this way than if you just threw it at the buyers...
Did someone say price fix?
I think for it to work best, it should be left to individual investors (eg credit unions) to do this kind of thing, rather than an institutionalized devcoin project particpant.
Basically figure out how many dollars or bitcoins or whatever you need your writing to be worth, also known as how many dollars you need each share to be worth.
Then place your sell order at the price that, based on how many devcoins this round's shares turned out to be, makes that many devcoins work out to that same amount of bitoins or dollars or whatever that you demand for your shares.
Basically it sounds like we need a writers futures market - not for usd per devcoin, but USD per devcoin per share. Or even an options market considering we can know exactly how many shares the writer has for sale at any one time.
Eg options market: middle of the month a writer has 20 shares, and opens up 20 contracts to sell the share at say 150,000 devcoins, when the round finalizes (this can be checked, for the most part). Anyone who thinks the shares will be worth more than that (ie the final tally will be less than 1200 total shares), can buy it and basically buy the final value of shares for the set price. If the tally ends up being 1000 shares, the person who bought the option walks away with 30,000 devcoins profit. If the tally ends up being a lot more than 1200 shares, the speculator only gets 120,000 devcoins for the 150,000 he paid. There would have to be some way to get the share payment from the writer to the speculator automatically, like maybe putting up the full amount as collateral. I don't know how easy it would be to game this system. This doesn't really help with the devcoin per $ problem, but that could be handled in a similar way, really.
Why am I even complaining that people drive the exchange rate down? Its not as if I do so much writing that I have more than enough devcoins already to sell up near or above 200 Satoshis, for me the way I manage to have lots of devcoins to place as highball sell offers is by having people throw their coins at my lowball buy offers.
Thinking like that it is easy to start thinking huh what is wrong with low exchange rates, aren't low exchange rates awesome, aren't they the very thing that makes high exchange rates so goshdarn lucrative?
How would anyone even recognise high rates as high if there were not low rates to compare and contrast them to?
You're actually profiting from volatility, not low prices. You'd have the same result if the price was measured in bitcoins and not satoshis.
If enough people used the shotgun bot (or any other volatility trading strategy), the price would mostly only move towards the long term trend. The downside is that volatility trading sucks with a long term trend, but while there is volatility, nothing beats it. The fact that volatility trading works pretty well with devcoins is part of why I said devcoins are actually quite stable in price. Albeit a low price.
When we're using the new forum, we'll try it again.