So, this baby seems pretty popular. It's been a few days and we have 4 of them already in the works and several more that are likely coming soon. It can take a lot to figure out so I'm not surprised it takes a few days to make decisions. You'll see a couple of names you might already know hopping along soon. It's getting kinda hot in here!!!
Why would you go through this?
I can't tell you what's right for you, your family, and your finances, but for me the exciting part is the future potential. First off if you're successful I think you can get a market cap that's worth real money. 10k active users is 1/5 of what steem has as a blockchain. Steem has a market cap of $112M right now. You're not guaranteed 1/5 of that, but if you get anywhere close you're gonna be a happy camper.
Second off, now's the time. There's a 20% discount available by purchasing the tokens on the market. I already sold 25% of those so it won't last long. They are being consumed by people making a Scot, distributing it with Scotbot, and viewing it in their custom website powered by Nitrous.
What's the process?
Scot is a 100eng transfer on the web with a short list of settings.
Scotbot is 1000eng and you have to share the active key for the account. You also gotta read up on the settings, which are fairly technical, to decide how your community should work. This payment is automated too.
Nitrous is different. It's so new that we can't even accept automated payment for it yet! For now, people that are starting it are doing the scot and scotbot steps through steem-engine.com, messaging me in discord, and transferring 650 eng to steem-eng to get started. Once that's done I get them in touch with Eon (the dev) and try to get you up as quickly as we can.
The costs...
Seems like a shit ton of people want this, and then see the cost and get frustrated. A few things about this. We have to run a business. I know crypto people want things for free, but free doesn't automatically scale well. Growing a business takes leadership and incentive. If there's no money coming in it's hard to incentivize people to do things. With money coming in we're able to hire devs, get servers up and running, upgrade the look and feel, and get things moving!
There's little concern about Scot. 100eng to make a token seems to have been accepted pretty well.
$200 to setup Nitrous and $50/month to run it hasn't run into many problems. Especially when I share that Nitrous requires it's own server to run for just your website then hopefully that's a little more clear. We're doing some custom work on each install. If there's a lot of custom work we'll be charging $100/hr (paid in ENG). So far it's mostly simple stuff and we're trying to get it into the sites as we create them without further charges. Anyway, there hasn't been a lot of issues here so far.
Scotbot is where the challenges lie. It costs 1000 ENG to get started. That's around $300. People seem fairly understanding of that. The one that folks really are either scared of or don't like is the 1ENG/active user per month.
I get that it can be daunting. If you get a lot of users how will you pay for this? Where will the money come from? How will you keep the project alive?
Token sales and ad revenue
Well, all of that goes back to token sales and advertising. If you airdrop all of your token on day 1 and don't have any left to sell that's probably bad for you or you're going to need an alternative source of cash to support the network. Reserving and selling the token may have to be the way to pay for this service initially. Keep in mind though that having some costs is part of what will give the token value.
I know it doesn't exist yet, but this is day 2 or something. We'll get banner ads on the site that you can easily monetize and work to improve the revenue stream over time. So, who you collect today will be worth ad dollars in the future.
Is the price of scotbot high or low? What's the alternative?
Well, let's start with Steem. Right now the proof of brain requires essentially 21 witnesses to operate. Each one requires 110k steem/yr right now. So, that's ~2.3M steem for ~50k active users.
Scotbot piggy backs on the steem blockchain. If you get 50k users you'll owe 600,000 eng/yr, but thats way less than you'd be paying to run dpos on your own. It's about a 75% reduction compared to running your own full fork of steem. It's also technically vastly easier and doesn't make you start your community from scratch or lose any of the tooling (like keychain) that's already built for steem.
It's possible we'll scale pricing in the future especially if we add staking to ENG. That is under consideration, but for now and likely through at least 10k users we'll be sticking with 1eng/active user per month. An active user is someone who at a bare minimum has staked your token.
Nitrous is booming right now as we speak!
If you have a community that you want to power with Nitrous now's the time to capture first mover advantage. Now's the time to collect community members. Now's the time to to pull this together. Popular communities are already forming and there's a good chance that if you wait then the thing you're passionate about will already be in someone else's hands. Don't be that guy!
Get your scot created, setup scotbot, and then for now just dm me in Discord- https://discord.gg/whqnzqT
Be blessed and don't miss your chance at your dream community with Nitrous by waiting!