Airdrop Ideas

[coolspeed]

I suggest requiring a minimal action for holders in other chains to be eligible for the airdrop - maybe sending 1 satoshi to a registration address.

This would give you an audience of interested, capable and engaged users, rather than passive holders, or exchanges, or lost coins.

Simply distributing to all holders will create large downward price pressure . . . most won't bother to look into it at the outset, but every time the price goes up, it becomes worthwhile to sell, creating a new wave of sellers.

Also I suggest skipping BTC and LTC too - you'll find the more adventurous and open investors with larger positions in other coins.

Another suggestion is to cut off the top and bottom of the distribution, so not distributing for very small holdings, and maybe putting a cap on for very large holdings.

Also distributing to specific active individuals - coin devs, marketing, service owners etc could be a good idea - but with a long vesting period . . maybe two years . . . sure they could sell their private keys, but that's a risky purchase.

Strongly agree with you. 

[coolspeed]

Just to add a little conceptual DNA, stir the pot and stand back 50 kilometers...

Why not simply give each leading mined coin developer a matching DPOS coin that pays interest and honors them one for one?  (PTS and AGS holders get their 10% out of the as-yet-unmined-and-never-to-be-mined-since-mining-is-dead reserve in each coin for providing the free upgrade.)

Now every coin owner has a copy that shares profits and a copy that doesn't.  Upgrade the whole alt-coin community in one swell foop.  Then let market forces handle the inevitable switchover to the upgrade at whatever pace individual investors choose.

BitShares gift to crypto-owners everywhere.  (As long as we're doing promotional stunts.)

I like that idea! So that at the end a holder of 10BTC also has 10bitBTC .. and so on!

Stan says it's not for Bitshares X, so I don't think BitBTC is a good example.

[liondani]

For every bitshare airdrop a percentage of 50% (as an example or 1:1) will go to charity that the community will chooce after a Bitshares-DAC voting system take place for this particular reason! So the community will practical self experience how a DAC works and how fair and transparrent is the whole procces.
So only after somebody votes a charity via the DAC then he can release his coins... (or after voting they can release more so they have a reason to vote and see how the concept work...)

or make a charity-lotto-bingo style DAC available only for airdrop purchasers... that will draw every Monday a winner so every purchaser that keep bitshares and don't sell them have an interest every week to come back...

[blahblah7up]

I would suggest an inverse-proportional air-drop on BTC holders.  Then you would get all the people on board who have decided to risk their hard earned money on this whole crypto movement by buying in - the enthusiastic poor people!  That would be huge.

[xeroc]

Just to add a little conceptual DNA, stir the pot and stand back 50 kilometers...

Why not simply give each leading mined coin developer a matching DPOS coin that pays interest and honors them one for one?  (PTS and AGS holders get their 10% out of the as-yet-unmined-and-never-to-be-mined-since-mining-is-dead reserve in each coin for providing the free upgrade.)

Now every coin owner has a copy that shares profits and a copy that doesn't.  Upgrade the whole alt-coin community in one swell foop.  Then let market forces handle the inevitable switchover to the upgrade at whatever pace individual investors choose.

BitShares gift to crypto-owners everywhere.  (As long as we're doing promotional stunts.)

I like that idea! So that at the end a holder of 10BTC also has 10bitBTC .. and so on!

[fuzzy]

A lot of discussion on airdrops has been going on recently and I would like to add a new twist. 

1) I like the half life concept... 50% drop every month until balance is below 1 BIP.
2) Unclaimed air-drop funds should be sent to developers.
3) Altcoin owners are likely more valuable than BTC owners because BTC-only owners are usually altcoin snobs.
4) I recommend honoring all of the top 10 bitcoin-based alt-coins proportional to market cap.  This will get the widest possible airdrop.
5) Don't honor coins with large pre-mines...

If you set this up right, the developers can avoid any accusations of 'pre-mine' because everyone had an opportunity to claim it, unclaimed funds go to devs... this also solves the problem of dead coins being honored.

I like this. 

I ESPECIALLY like it if the 2nd BTS chain is of those same top 10 altcoins.  This would give all of the top 10 altcoins' owners an incentive to actually trade their BTS for shares. 

With that said, exactly how difficult would it be to make one's own chain?  I have read somewhere before that if we made a competition for coin donations from altcoins (kind of like how crypsty does for voting) to ensure they are on the next chain developed, that someone would just come in and easily make a chain with their own coin on it. 

[FreeTrade]

I suggest requiring a minimal action for holders in other chains to be eligible for the airdrop - maybe sending 1 satoshi to a registration address.

This would give you an audience of interested, capable and engaged users, rather than passive holders, or exchanges, or lost coins.

Simply distributing to all holders will create large downward price pressure . . . most won't bother to look into it at the outset, but every time the price goes up, it becomes worthwhile to sell, creating a new wave of sellers.

Also I suggest skipping BTC and LTC too - you'll find the more adventurous and open investors with larger positions in other coins.

Another suggestion is to cut off the top and bottom of the distribution, so not distributing for very small holdings, and maybe putting a cap on for very large holdings.

Also distributing to specific active individuals - coin devs, marketing, service owners etc could be a good idea - but with a long vesting period . . maybe two years . . . sure they could sell their private keys, but that's a risky purchase.

[pgbit]

Bitcointalk banned giveaway threads, and now these have sort of been rekindled with airdrops which are in essence semi-structured giveaways.
? get in quick before they ban airdrops. I guess we need to look at the airdrops and see which one has been most successful in achieving a fair, widespread distribution yet without post-giveaway dumping. To structure airdrops better, would it be possible to take into account coinage and reward those who are longer term holders?

[sumantso]

This is an interesting list of altcoins by developer activity, community, and liquidity. It might provide an argument for looking beyond pure market cap when deciding who to include. Vertcoin and Auroracoin, for example, are higher than their pure market cap would indicate. Some of these have unique communities with probably less overlap than others.

http://www.coingecko.com/

My list of 10 would be Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Vertcoin, Peercoin, Primecoin, Counterparty, Feathercoin, Worldcoin, LTBcoin. We can have them in 'blocks' though and distribute it amongst those blocks so that coin communities which overlap a lot will get less. For instance, XPM and PPC can be one block; LTC, FTC, WDC another, XCP, LTBcoin also in one group etc.

[sumantso]

2) Unclaimed air-drop funds should be sent to developers.

By that do you mean back to AGS fund? A simple destruction of the unclaimed funds would also do for me.

3) Altcoin owners are likely more valuable than BTC owners because BTC-only owners are usually altcoin snobs.

Not necessarily, as there are a lot of big altcoin holders right now who are just buying to sell after a pump.
Besides, the main motivation was to garner press. Bitcoin gets big publicity.

Somebody was suggesting donation and also mentioned churches. Since this is not the place for discussion (and I don't want to spoil my mood thinking about it), I am strictly against this.

[donkeypong]

This is an interesting list of altcoins by developer activity, community, and liquidity. It might provide an argument for looking beyond pure market cap when deciding who to include. Vertcoin and Auroracoin, for example, are higher than their pure market cap would indicate. Some of these have unique communities with probably less overlap than others.

http://www.coingecko.com/

[donkeypong]

I love the airdrop idea. The more I've thought about it, this is such a simple, low-risk way to build a buzz and bring others into the Bitshares ecosystem. DACs will never get full community consensus on this idea or how to air-drop, but not everyone will be on board with every decision made...that's life. In an open source world, the out-of-the-gate marketing buzz is so, so important. And I think this gives Bitshares a chance to build quickly. The clock is ticking, though, since this concept is the logical extension of everything we've seen in cryptos so far. If this is not done soon, then someone else will do it and it won't have that edge anymore.

[amatoB]

I need to find the thread and reread the claiming process works.  Do you get to claim an amount proportional to your balance ?

10 altcoins sounds quite ambitious.  I suppose if you remove premines then we avoid non-bitcoin forks.  I would suggest that if I3 (?) is willing to pay for this work, then you even out the amounts given to each coin a bit.  btc just dwarfs the other communities. 

 One thing I can say about a lot of the altcoin holders is that they're loyal true believers.  Those coins have been on a steady downward trend.  If people have held on to them, then that is the type of loyalty you want.

If an airdrop is to be undertaken (and I'm not saying it necessarily should be), it should be timed and structured to build suspense, with a countdown like "airdrop commencing in XX days, YY hours, ZZ minutes." That way, it can maximize attention and eyeballs on bitshares as recipients re-visit websites repeatedly over time to monitor the price, learn about the DAC, claim their shares, etc.

[luckybit]

There is a large disconnect between bitshares and churches etc.  For the most part, it would be in their interest to find a member and sell the shares back on the market.  Where the shares are scooped up by the same group of guys who'd buy them from miners.  It would make news, but thats about the only upside.  Well, and charities realize the donation.

Marketing is about bridging the disconnect. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sent computers to schools and libraries allowing people to access the Internet and learn about the personal computer.

Churches and charities live off donations. Endowments are often in the form of stock. Look at how the Gates Foundation does things. I think it's a brilliant idea to give shares to churches and charities. It also gives you the opportunity to reach thousands to millions of people strategically. People go to churches to get free food and clothing, and it would make news.

Strategic means bringing on valued partners.  People who are already in the ecosystem and are past the initial cryptocurrency entry block.  People who will USE the dacs.   Share owners that become DAC users.

I think that is exactly the problem. Always bringing in the same people from the same network is exactly why the network has plateaued. You have to invite new people in who don't know much about Bitcoin or Bitshares but who would be able to benefit greatly from it. The Internet used to be mostly university students until an effort was made to spread it. Microsoft packed a copy of Windows on every personal computer.

Originally I said go with a large portion to BTC and I am still not all that against the idea.  The reason in this.  Out of all the people I led into cryptocurrencies, they all have a BTC wallet and only a BTC wallet.  So I could naturally show them their interest in the world's first DAC. 

People who have BTC will just buy it with their BTC like they do any other altcoin.

I think also a very very small amount of people have BTC out of the people who know about it. Many of those people just got burned because their BTC got stolen.

And now you have the core developers trying to kill altcoins entirely. If anything the alt chains should stick together.

I can't do this with other cryptocurrencies.  You're going to get people who have just dipped their toes in the water.  Don't think that everyone with a btc wallet has any opinion on altcoins.

Bitshares is bigger than cryptocurrency. That is why I said approach churches and charity. It's not enough to just think it's about Bitcointalk. Bitcointalk knows about it already.

One option instead of the claiming system, might be normalizing account amounts and make the shares untradeable.  If they aren't readily tradeable then no market will develop.  THen everyone is locked in.  At some point in the future perhaps make them tradeable, but for now force everyone to hold.

I like the idea of just giving out some AGS. Do it in a smart way though, give it to the right charities, some churches, some unique altcoins, but not Bitcoin. I don't think Bitcoin needs to take value from Bitshares. It should give value to Bitshares.

Give it to Mastercoin, Nxt, and others.

Actually I would support something like the claim system but without the shares being trade-able.  Claimers are then locked in as share holders.   They can't just claim and dump.  Nothing can go wrong with the market price making I3/Bitshares look bad.  People will still be able to buy and sell Bitshares.

I agree with this. Angelshares aren't tradeable and these shares shouldn't be. This way you can give it to charities, churches, anybody who will accept it and they can't trade it until you make it liquid over the years. It gives them a stake in the idea itself just like we have.

Please do not give people the amount proportional to their accounts.  You will end up centralizing ownership, because those with the higher account balances will have far more incentive to redeem their shares than those with lower balances.

I think different blockchains have different purposes. I think start with charity and work your way down. Charity not only is good marketing, it actually has the people who actually need the endowment. I don't want my shares diluted to go to some rich miners who have tens of thousands of stolen Bitcoins.

[jwiz168]

Just to add a little conceptual DNA, stir the pot and stand back 50 kilometers...

Why not simply give each leading mined coin developer a matching DPOS coin that pays interest and honors them one for one?  (PTS and AGS holders get their 10% out of the as-yet-unmined-and-never-to-be-mined-since-mining-is-dead reserve in each coin for providing the free upgrade.)

Now every coin owner has a copy that shares profits and a copy that doesn't.  Upgrade the whole alt-coin community in one swell foop.  Then let market forces handle the inevitable switchover to the upgrade at whatever pace individual investors choose.

BitShares gift to crypto-owners everywhere.  (As long as we're doing promotional stunts.)

wow nice comparison... exploding one's head.