Although I am in the camp that wants to be careful with treating NBT proceeds as revenue, there is the perspective that we might be taking it too seriously.
As @tomjoad partly implies, currency is a numbers game. Say there’s 10000 USD in town and then Jordan comes along with 10k NBT. People buy 10k NBT for 10k USD. Then suddenly both Jordan and the people who now hold NBT think they have 10k USD - which means there’s somehow 20k USD.
It doesn’t really matter what is in place of NBT - BTC or food (barter) or securities or other fiat. Just bringing about an alternative currency already implies a fractional reserve system, unless there’s devaluation of one side. BitUSD requires “300% reserves” but even so one has to acknowledge that 25% in their books was created from thin air, and relies on market principles to support that 25%.
Some of us want to think of Nu as a company that has to balance its books, and must be able to buy back every NBT it’s sold. On the other extreme, Nu can be considered purely a service that enforces a mechanism that keeps the peg of NBT as stable as possible while keeping itself afloat, relying on participants to “balance the books” themselves.
Real world currency management lies in between these two. On the “far left” - “book balancing”, it can be a company that issues private currency, or any small political entity that doesn’t have a comprehensive economy. On the opposite side, it can be a large country like the US that borrows money to buy tanks, fighter jets and build nukes, which are sometimes even lent to other countries, to get people to lend them more money, trying to be perpetually in the state of “just because we can”.
Both of them can break down; the left side basically uses accounting principles that are designed for relatively small entities to keep track of their finances, which can be rendered meaningless by external factors, and I don’t have to explain for the right side. Currency value is an illusion that kinds of lets you measure how much people want the things that can be bought with the currency, until it doesn’t.
Note that BTC and Ripple are basically on the right. By trying to balance to books somehow, even to a limited extent, and taking responsibility for the peg, we are already much more conservatively on the left compared to other cryptos. We can give ourselves a pat on the back for being more “honest” than our competitiors, and at this point I wish we can show for a strong ability to balance the books.
But one day we will become large, and NBT will be far out of our control for this style of maintenance. Ultimately we want to build a social force that supports a stable currency for a robust internet economy, and hopefully be rewarded for our efforts - so we need to look towards to right side sometimes, as that’s what’s needed when NBT gets big.
TL;DR: I do not support dumping NBT for dividends now, because we want to be as solvent as possible to keep track of developmental hazards (and partly for my selfish hope to be able to afford more NSRs before this gets big ;)), but I support, at least in part, Jordan’s long term vision of selling NBT for revenue.
