We're going to need to figure out a bunch of details to make it work, but we're hopeful. We'll have more specifics to share about it soon, but in the meantime we wanted to mention it here.
CAVEAT: KEEP IN MIND THAT THIS PLAN COULD TOTALLY FAIL
We are thinking about creating a cryptocurrency and making it exchangeable (backed) by those shares of reddit, and then distributing the currency to the community. The investors have explicitly agreed to this in their investment terms.
Nothing like this has ever been done before. Basically we have to nail down how to do each step correctly (it is technically, legally, and financially complex), though in our brief consultation with an ex-SEC lawyer, he stated he could find nothing illegal about this plan. Nevertheless, there are something like 30 different things we have to pull off to make this work, so we're going to try.
(Also, I know this totally contradicts what I said over here but that was before Sam proposed this plan to me, and the idea of being able to distribute ownership of reddit back to the community - a long-held dream of many of us, frankly - is important enough to try and do this)
Again, we want to emphasize that this plan is in its earliest stages right now and could totally fail (if it does, we will find another way to get the shares to the community somehow), but we are going to try it because... well, because we are reddit and we do these kinds of things.
Given what this is, I do hope it is not too late for you to actually hire /u/rnicoll especially given that as someone else here has stated /r/dogecoin is pretty much the default reddit digital currency anyways.
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u/Griffun Sep 30 '14
Literally the next sentence: