Well this is exciting!
I am honored to be taking up the mantel with MineBitShares.. I am happy to see the delegate got voted in.. but at this super early stage where we are just starting to take over operations and put together our marketing engine, I don't think I can offer much in the way of assessing what or how many additional delegates could/would be used today.
My approach is like that of any business I have started. Get it going.. make a proof of concept.. and grow it out as best you can from there.
Once we have gotten into our MineBitShares mojo and can better assess where we are and what it will take to get us further after we have started our plans.. THEN I can give more definitive numbers for people to better judge and assess for themselves the value of what each delegate in this project might mean to BitShares.
I do think it's got really huge potential.. however, I cant imagine ever getting to 8 delegates... my #1 mandate is to find ways to make this profitable on its own. With some creativity it can be done. Some who have talked to me about MineBitShares already know I have been polling for ways I can pull profits into the operation so that we won't need the delegate eventually. I could be wrong however. After we crunch the numbers and figure out everything perhaps it does take that. Without that data though, it's a really tough call.
That said, the delegate we have, and the others that are being contributed at this stage ARE ESSENTIAL to making this work. That is what is so awesome about BitShares. We can overcome the catch 22 of making this pool profitable and significantly increase the liquidity of BitShares through this project.. not to mention all the new users.
Thanks to the legendary efforts of Nethyb and the support of Bytemaster, this has proven it's concept. Now we got to grow it out thanks to the delegate (and maybe more), and make it profitable so we can take the delegate out of the business. and have a solid operation contributing users, liquidity,and market cap to BitShares.
At this early stage though.. I simply don't have enough data to even cast my own vote on how many. Give it a little time.. and then maybe I can put forth some clear information that will allow people to decide if it's worth the extra delegates.
My two btc anyways... If others would like to vote in this poll just to show how much you would like to support this you are welcome.. but I understand if you don't have enough data to make an educated selection.