Unfortunately your stance on the above issue makes more believable the following scenario: Setting artificially early day for the snapshot because such date provided 3 benefits for 3I:
1. Serious inflow of funds to the AGS account.
This isn't a bad thing. The point of ags is funding. It would be one thing if they created a snapshot, got ags funding and ran. However they didn't do that they are still coding away and developing the bitshares brand. Clearly they are focused on the big picture. If anything the early snapshot lost funding opportunity for I3, since people are less optimistic about the other DACs and simply want to profit from early investment in bitshares x. So now the price of ags is significantly lower/there are less donations because people understand that they have less to gain from donating at this point. I dont think funding is an issue at this point. It is my perception that they can accomplish the development their dacs without additional funds. Its more of an investment opportunity for the community.
2. At the same time – the total position of 3I, in PTS and AGS (as a percentage), allowed for maximizing the company’s share of the BTS.
Once again this is not a bad thing. Firstly they should receive a large stake in what they are developing, because they are the ones that are putting everything on the line to develop and market it. Secondly, their ability to accumulate stake in pts and ags is due to their understanding of how valuable the concept of a dac is, while most people do not understand the implications of this technology
3. At the same time, i.e. while achieving 2. above, giving AGS and PTS holders 50% each i.e. all of the shares- far above the promised minimum of 10%. And looking good for doing so.
This is the point where I can't even entertain your logic. So they have accumulated a large stake in ags and pts by doing exactly what any investor in the community can do on their own - buy pts, mine pts, donate pts to ags fund, donate btc to ags fund. You have to see that there are no barriers to access in the investment vehicle they have provided. The only barrier is ignorance. Second instead of only donating 20% to ags/pts and keeping the rest for themselves they have allocated all bts to ags and pts holders thereby leveling the playing field once more. It is not mathematically possible that they can have a larger stake in bts by doing this. All i know is that whereas my stake in bts would have been 0.0026% under the initial agreement, my stake is now 0.013% under the current agreement
Lets make some things clear:
1) We could have raised more money by not announcing the snapshot and missing an artificial deadline
2) Knowing a longer time horizon would have given us the wisdom to spread out our own investments and thus maximize the AGS per PTS / BTC
3) Early estimates (made in January) were based upon the following assumptions
a) release with a single trustee and eventually turn into Consensus + TaPOS
b) that there were no unexpected market manipulation attacks.
c) that the MVP would not be extensible for many alternative DACs.
4) Since then we have found problems with Consensus and also market manipulation attacks
a) we have opted to avoid the single trustee and go straight to DPOS.
b) we have opted for a phased approach to minimize risk
c) we have refactored into an extensible toolkit and thus accelerated the timeline of many other DACs.
So rather than looking at this as merely missing a release date or some kind of conspiracy we need to view this from the perspective that we have increased the features to be tested in the MVP and accelerated follow on DACs. This decision was made to maximize the value of testing in the MVP from the perspective of all DACs. So taken as a whole the schedule hasn't slipped as we will be delivering more in the MVP than we had originally planned.