These kind of issues are why we are waiting for forum feedback like yours before committing one way or another.
Our first newsletter covered this is some detail (see the News tab at invictus-innovations.com). There we speculated:
Can you imagine if you had owned ProtoShares for the idea of a web browser? By the time Netscape,
Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Chrome had been implemented, you would own shares in every
one of them! Who would try to introduce a new browser without honoring the market share of current
browser ProtoShares holders? ProtoShares are like ownership in a patent that never expires – entitling
you to “royalties” in all future implementations of the idea!
The
assumption is that subsequent arriving competitors would see several advantages to honoring the protoshares of an existing DAC:
- It would give the most informed and committed stakeholders an incentive to view their new implementation favorably.
- It would leverage an already existing community with populated forums, trading mechanisms, and reputations already established.
- Some DACs may require a critical mass of shares to pre-exist in order to function efficiently or at all. This is a way to initialize a DACs market with informed owners and an operative money supply.
- By investing in those ProtoShares before announcing that social contract, they might expect to grow the value of ProtoShares for everybody and hence raise some capital to fund their own development.
Of course, that last bullet factors into their consideration of where to hook on in the family tree. The higher you hook on the more stakeholders you inherit. The lower you hook on the more your announcement will influence the value of your acquired stake. There's also the theoretical possibility of specifying your DAC's social contract to include multiple inheritance. Think about that one.
Lots to be learned here. Hoping for new ideas and a robust discussion of their pros and cons.