Its about cultivating a particular entrepreneurial mindset. Not a dependency mindset.
BitShares is all about stimulating an entire decentralized ecosystem and one of its tactics is to encourage start-ups and spin-offs. Throughout this year we have experimented with various ways to encourage the emergence of a decentralized community of entrepreneurs. Grants and bounties and stipends and rewards and prizes have been used and now paid delegates are part of the mix.
Some delegate jobs make sense to be permanently funded exclusively by the blockchain. Others may just need a temporary start-up boost - and that should be part of their proposal.
Then people can vote for whether they like sponsoring a delegate who plans to be dependent on the blockchain forever vs. one that just wants help bootstrapping a profitable business that grows our ecosystem. I expect the market will produce lots of variations on this for voters to consider.
We need to make it socially acceptable, even praiseworthy, for a delegate to combine multiple income streams one of which comes from the block chain. (Until 100% pay reaches the value of a full time salary, this is almost essential for some delegates.)
While BM may be the classic example of someone who can easily justify being 100% paid by the blockchain forever, sometimes he has to lead by example.
Any trickle of funds he might raise from his example are incidental to the point he is trying to make.
I can see the merit of this approach. It generates lots of questions though in terms of ownership of the content.
Is his blog owned by the stakeholders because it's delegate funded, or is his delegate pay not enough to fund the blog on top of dev work, and he is claiming independent ownership of the blog? These websites (bitsharesblocks, metaexchange, bm blog) are all BitShares assets and I have been assuming, due to them being delegate funded, that they are owned by BitShares, not the creators.
If I used delegate pay to pay for Spanish + Chinese translations of BM's blog, it would all be owned by the stakeholders, like state-owned media. I could be free to assume BM would be fine with me doing that as it would all be done for the good of BitShares. If his blog is not not owned by the stakeholders, he might want me to pay him for the right to use the content on another site, which would cost BitShares more money.
Important BitShares sites could become worth a lot of money in the future. It's necessary that its sorted out early on who owns them. The bitUSD Argentina portal being created by me + team will be owned by BitShares, because I will pay myself + team back for the expenses so there can be no ownership claim. If the site became really popular and I realised I could sell it for $xxk, I will be bound not to, as it is not my property.
These websites, owned by BitShares, could be used to help back the market pegged assets. In the very unlikely event of a blackswan creating uncollateralized bitassets, BitShares websites could be sold to create a bail out fund.
I thought about the idea (just theorising) of launching a crypto-media company that had a startup fund from BitShares for say, 6 months funding. BitShares would own perhaps, half of the company in exchange, and would receive half the advertising revenue and if the site was sold, half of the income. BitShares could become invested in many businesses in this way. I've about the legality though as BitShares is not legally defined (or is it?) so I don't know how well it can interact with companies.