So, is it worth a speculation to see if the currency can recover? What scenario is likely to encourage demand for the unit?
Cool and useful ways to invest them. Think about all the amazing things you can buy with Bitcoins. You can have them sitting in a CoinLenders account earning 22 percent interest, you can buy some stocks which pay out weekly or daily dividends on Bitfunder. You can even buy shares in mcxNOW which pay out dividends in BTC and nine other cryptocurrencies every six hours. If you have Bitcoins, you can easily grow them into more Bitcoins. If you have Devcoins, well... for the most part, you first have to sell them for Bitcoins if you want to invest them, or you play the game of buying low and selling high, which definitely isn't for everyone. There are a few "investments" you can do with Devcoin but it's easy to spend as much as you want to spend on them using the earnings from one round, and then what? Actually, just having Devcoins sitting on the mxcNOW exchange collecting dust would allow them to earn a few more DVCs for you, so at least there you can hoard your DVCs and still have them doing
something for you.
You want to increase demand for Devcoins? Come up with cool things to do with them which will help people better their lives. If it's a great opportunity that's only available for Devcoins, even better.
My opinion is that the people who buy Devcoins are either Devcoin supporters who want to improve the value of the coin, or they are speculators who figure that they can buy at 30 sat and sell later for 35 or 40. But no one is buying them because there's something they want to do that they can only do with Devcoins. And those of us who write are flooded with these things every month, millions and millions of them, but there just aren't too many places to spend so many, so you tend to want to unload them for something that you
can spend or invest in very cool and interesting and hopefully profitable ways. Some people hold onto them for a long time in the hopes that things will turn around and they can sell them for upwards of 200 sat. And I'm holding on to some for that reason, but there's only so many million that you want to stockpile, the rest of which you want to turn into something that can go somewhere in the present.
People on this thread who have offered things for sale in exchange for Devcoins are the ones who are going to turn this around, and the more people who have something for sale for Devcoins, the more likely it is that eventually, Devcoins will be a crypto that people want to have and the exchange rate will reflect that. That won't happen overnight, and anyone who wants to start a viable operation will need to fund that operation, and that will undoubtedly involve the sale of Devcoins if they have lots of them to sell.
I don't know much about computer gaming, but some have talked about the possibility of Devcoins being used as gaming tokens. I think if they become the gaming token of choice for some major online interactive game, then that will fuel the demand, and the exchange rate will reflect that. It strikes me as an easier way to create demand than other ways, but again I do not know computer gaming so I could be way off. I also think there are people on this thread who are working on things like that, and I would love to get regular updates from them in plain English
Along the same lines I think Devcoins could be handy for keeping score on various barter networks, for example, they could be used on a babysitter exchange as babysitting tokens. Maybe people who run those kinds of networks could be approached? I think there would be some advantages to using a blockchain currency over just some internal point system. In this situation, it would be very advantageous that you can buy a lot of them for next to nothing.
Personally, I wouldn't care too much how low the exchange rate was if it were stable. If Devcoins are always going to be worth 30 sat apiece, then I could live with that. Some people would decide writing for Devcoins wasn't worth it and those who do write would pick up more DVC/share and it would all even out. But the part that makes me want to sell today rather than tomorrow is the concern that if they are 30 sat today, they'll be 28 sat tomorrow and 26 sat the next day, and so forth. But of course that way of thinking can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy which drops the price through the floor. For this reason I try to hang onto my Devcoins until I have something specific I want to do with them (or the Bitcoins I trade them for), and then I sell enough to do that thing and then wait. And I try to have the patience to place a sell order for higher than the highest buy price. But every time I turn around there is something new I could do with Bitcoins that I can't do with Devcoins, and that creates demand for Bitcoins against Devcoins. But give me something amazing I can do with my Devcoins as Devcoins and then it becomes a different game.