I didn't listen to the hangout, so I'm missing the background on this. But what is the main purpose of BMs proposal? If people are willing to give up some BTS to help prioritise certain projects, why not use all of those BTS for funding the project, rather than locking them up or burning them? That way there might be a much larger funding pool?
No, because then they sell them on the open market and drag the price down defeating the sole purpose of raising the market cap by reducing supply, man.
Using the coin for funding facilitates more value-adding projects, which increases the value of BTS, and demand for it. If the projects are productive, this demand would absorb any selling pressure when the coins re-enter circulation. The value of bitShares rises with the increased capital and utility we build to support it.
The logic of withholding that capital to constrain its use in the hope of increasing scarcity value is highly dubious. In the wider world outside crypto, investors provide capital to ventures that create value. The world ends up with a more valuable economy, and better goods and services, as a result. Capitalists don't then worry that when the employees of those companies spend that money (i.e. "sell" it or convert it for other things they need) the pressure of "selling money" will reduce the value of it. They don't then conclude as a result that everybody would instead be better off hoarding money (presumably to increase its value) rather than investing it so we can all be paper-rich.
Collectively we can burn as much BTS as we like, and it will never increase the value of bitShares in totality. If we burn everything until we have 1 BTS left to split between all of us, that 1 BTS will be worth no more than what all today's BTS are worth, without any increase to the wider market's valuation of the utility of BTS. To me these just seem like convoluted games to distribute BTS within our little collective. What we need to be talking about and promoting and getting excited about are not such games, but real value-add.