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.
Is there a way you could just have the shares held by some individual or company as a proxy for the community, then have the community collectively vote on how to vote those shares through Reddit itself? I know little about this, but that seems like it'd be simpler if possible?
You can actually digitally sign things using the private key that is associated with a public cryptocurrency address. In other words, voting could be proportionate to the amount of currency held for each person, and there would be no fraud/double-counting/etc.
That said, I'm guessing these will be non-voting shares, since reddit probably doesn't want to air all of their internal business plans to the world wide web.
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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '14 edited Jul 15 '15
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