I see two options, a sort of fork in the road for the community. Do we want to be a community guided by investors who buy shares but who have nothing more to do with the community or do we want a community guided by the labor and services of the community? Perhaps we can compromise and have a combination of both, but removing mining and going entirely toward an investor model removes everyone else and I don't see that option as sustainable. Just look at Ripple and tell me you want that.
If we want to be guided by the labor of the community then you'll have to build a community economy which is sustainable. People will have to start working for DACs and get paid in shares. People in the real world work for shares and people online should be able to work for shares in my opinion. That is my stance and now to address the criticisms.
The way you get cheat-free marketing is to make people stakeholders and put their own money on the line. When their money is on the line they have financial incentive to do GOOD marketing.
Not money but time. If they have to mine their Keyhotee ID then that Keyhotee ID's reputation is on the line and they could have spent those computing time mining a pump and dump coin if they just wanted to make money.
There is no money in the system. Input and output, you're assuming that money will magically appear in the system prior to people working and getting paid. People must profit in order to have any money to input into the system and that is the problem I have with the plan to make people pay with $ as the only way of getting Bitshares. That basically backs Bitshares by the $ which people would be working for or perhaps they are rich already, rather than the community itself. I want the community to actually be working for the currencies/shares of the DACs.
If you go decentralized you cannot micromanage it so easily. You can have reputation, you can have ratings, you can have moderation, you can have spam control functions, but you cannot have a boss who dictates what you should or shouldn't do. You have the free market which is the ultimate boss of us all, and the algorithm which controls the rate of distribution of credits according to difficulty. So if we are all doing the same thing it wont be profitable any more and this would make us have to do different things.
If you pay someone to post on forums etc that is called astro-turfing. People will do it without any care in the world.
But we aren't talking about paying people to post on forums. A better analogy is we are talking about paying people to wear a tshirt which has the url (or QRcode) to or mention of Bitshares (or other DACs). I am talking about undercover or buzz marketing, not astroturfing. Astroturfing is what politicians use to push their agenda and this isn't an election. The goal here is to increase mind share to compete with Mastercoin and the only way to do that would be to have a similar signature campaign.
Of course you could say the Mastercoin giveaway thread was astroturfing but either it was a success or it wasn't. If Mastercoin is popular for it then it's a success in my opinion as determined by the market. You and I don't determine if a marketing campaign is successful or not, but it seems that signature marketing works well if you look at all the alt coins which have used it for pump and dump schemes. Bitshares is actually innovative so all you really need to do is get people to click a link or just see a brief description and Google it.
If you try to manage all of these credits, reputation points, etc then the whole process becomes political and people fight about what is good or bad marketing.
Let them fight. People fight over mining already. You have mining pools which act like political parties already. You will never remove all the political crap. But who cares?
The numbers will show us whether or not it is working. In my experience it has worked. It's not an accident that Mastercoin seems so much more popular than Bitshares right now. When you go on Bitcointalk you will see a bunch of people with Mastercoin in their signature but you don't see anything about DACs. If each DAC has to be marketed then the only way to spread the word is to pay people to spread the word otherwise some DACs like memorycoin for example wont get very far because no one even will know it exists or what it does.
And if you don't compensate people for spreading the word people will spend their time spreading the word for something else. Their signature space (or spam space if you want to call it that) will go to Mastercoin, Colored Coin, Quark or whatever the latest alt coin is.
Equal opportunity investment, easy investment, anonymous investment, no minimum investment, is the best way to allow people to profit and promote solid advertising.
So basically you want only investors and no workers? That isn't a community and it wont be sustainable. A community has to be backed by labor at some point whether it be human or autonomous agent. If you're saying basically only people with lots of fiat should be investors and the only way to get fiat is from the banks, I can see this playing out similar to Ripple and I do not support that at all.
The last thing this movement needs is to attract more people with the mindset that they can get a free lunch by performing questionably valuable services.
"Free" would mean they aren't performing any service at all. So we must disagree. If it is questionable then why isn't investing from the fiat world just as questionable. How do we know any of those fiat investors care about DACs at all? It could be a big pump and dump for all we know. It also opens the community up to being bought out completely, or to market manipulation. Basically if you want the politics of it the idea of going entirely into an investment model looks like selling out to anyone who isn't capable of being an investor.
At some point you have to give people some sort of way get a share if they don't have money already. If you think the signature method of marketing is questionable, or ineffective, there are many other methods we could discuss which are equally accessible (provide free lunch), and are effective. If you're against it because it's too easy or seems too simple then that is a political rather than economic stance because it doesn't make a difference to the DAC which marketing method brings people to the DAC and the DAC does not care what kind of work people do to commit to it.
Humans subjectively judge the work of other humans sometimes not based on the actual result but on the perception. Sites which run on pop up ads for example look like scams so people judge it, but do those sites make money? If they did not make money then Google ad sense would not exist. If we did not have websites which could get paid by advertising then how exactly would you fund the creation of the web? Tell every website to ask for donations/investment? You think everyone going to websites has money to donate/invest?
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