what do you think will happen to the 100k coins when 10.5mil coins suddenly become added into circulation
I don't know.
Hint: I mentioned it in my first post. I really don't understand why you keep shrugging off this very critical point. The Fed prints money at an rate of 1-2% per year, and people are already complaining about that. (And I'm sure Icelanders understand inflation) Imagine if they printed 100x the total money supply of USD in one year. Yes, that is the kind of devaluation we're looking at.
Okay, that is an advantage. But why can't Bitcoin do the same thing for Icelanders? (Besides being illegal to exchange fiat for it? What if Iceland bans Auroracoin?)
I would have thought that would be obvious - because they'd have to buy Bitcoin but they're going to get Aurora for free. Adoption is worth big money in the cryptocurrency world and no-one has so far come up with such a strategic and well targeted adoption method for any coin. Icelanders are going to benefit financially from facilitating such a widespread adoption IF there's a good takeup. However, that becomes less of an IF everyday that the valuation increases and a virtuous cycle ensues between adoption propensity and coin value.
A noble goal, it's hard to beat free. But if it's given out for free, Icelanders will have no investment in it. To Icelanders, it'll basically be a one time gift. If it crashes to 0, they will have lost nothing, thus they won't have an incentive to try to build it's value.
This is great for Icelanders, but why in the world would anyone else want to put money in
Why does anyone put money into any foreign currency ? Forex markets are huge because you're basically buying into a country's economy without having to live there. Apart from anything else it's going to garner some major publicity if things continue on this path - the kind of publicity that not even Bitcoin has been able to get it's hands on apart from to cite one coin-loss disaster after another.
A major difference is that when you put money into forex, your investment isn't instantly being given away for free and diluted by 99% (you don't invest in markets you think are going to go down, obviously). Right now, the supply is artificially low because of the 50% premine (technically, 99% premine, if you want to use the current supply).
Icelanders will have no choice but to either A) use the coin (which would require rapid merchant adoption) or B) they dump it for Krona
No. Those are not the only choices. Remember that most money is neither spent nor converted but simply sits in bank accounts or stocks as a store of value. Auroracoin has a fixed supply and is equally distributed to the entire population. That gives it a massive advantage over ISK which has an unlimited supply and is de-valued on a regular basis. So Auroracoin gives people a new option to store their ISK.
When all is said and done, it may well get "dumped" but the significant thing here - and this is something that applies to all crypto's - it will never disappear. Cryptocurrencies are unlevered base money, unlike bank credit money. So this experiment is going to be interesting whatever the outcome of the exchange rate.
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While I've been writing this, Auroracoin has increased in value to over $40 per coin. That makes the airdrop worth over $1000 per Icelander. What do you think the Government and central bank are going to do about this ? The value of the airdrop is now valued at 15%-20% of Icelandic government annual tax revenue.
This is MAJOR stuff which they can't ignore. On the other hand if they ban it (using a totally un-enforceable ban) they risk making themselves as unpopular as the worst of the bank-crash cartel and another popular uprising. The emperor's clothes are coming under 1000 spotlights just round the corner.
I agree it's an interesting experiment, but IMO, the lead dev should have released the coin shortly before the airdrop because it's experimenting with people's real money. Right now, there are tons of people poised to lose a ton of money.
Btw, your last few points don't apply to Auroracoin uniquely, they can always store their money in some altcoin-that-isn't-Bitcoin.
I don't have beef with new alts, but I do see this as the antithesis of cryptocurrency: It's completely centralized (99% in the hands of 1 person), 99% of the current supply is going to be distributed in a centralized manner (by the same person), huge first year inflation (10000%), and if it crashes, it will give a very bad name to cryptocurrencies as a whole (you thought bitcoin losing 70% of it's value at it lowest recently was bad, try losing up to 99%). I seriously hope that this guy does what he says and distributes it openly and transparently, but the reason why the cryptocurrency movement is here today is because we want to move away from 1 (or a few) person controlling the entire money supply, which the dev is doing currently.