Hi Lako, I’m going to try to answer some of these.
In the whitepaper, the author comments on the shareholders of NuShares doing certain things like voting and such. But how do we know that the shareholders will increase the interest rate in a time of need? How do we know the shareholders will grant more NuBits when necessary? What is the incentive for the shareholders to help the network?
To protect and increase the value of their shares, as well as keep the stream of dividends coming. The same reasons people would vote in any company that has shares, voting, and dividend payments.
Also, how are shareholders making money (what is the benefit for them?)? When they mint, they only make 40 nushares more, and the nushares have no value. When do they get paid the dividends?
Shareholders get dividends when custodians pay them out. Shareholders vote a custodian and create NBT for them, the custodian puts the NBT into circulation ( by selling them ) and the money earned goes to shareholders. See KTm’s proposal, which I think is the first and only live custodian that will be paying out dividends currently.
As you can see, when $720k worth of NBT has been sold by this custodian, he/she will pay out $72k to shareholders. The more shares you own, the bigger dividend you would get. Nushares will have value. They already do in fact.
Also, how do we know that the custodians will help the network? What if they run off with the money?
As the whitepaper notes, a custodian would probably show their interests align with shareholders by proving they are a large shareholder them-self. But imagine NuBits was as big as Bitcoin. There would be hundreds, thousands of custodians asking for money for this or that, eventually someone is going to run off with some NBT or otherwise fail shareholders. In most cases it wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it’s going to be up to shareholders to pick custodians wisely, especially if it’s for a large amount of NBT.
Is there a transaction fee when people send their Nubits to someone? Is there a network fee?
I think the fee is currently 0.01 NBT per kb, same as Peercoins. This fee is destroyed as there are no miners.
Lastly, what is the benefit of me buying Nubits? I pay more money and spend more time to actually buy NuBits than actually paying for an item with regular USD. Meaning, when I buy NuBits from an exchange, I still have to pay a 0.2% fee; when I use USD I don’t need to pay a fee. Can you explain to me a scenario when NuBits would be useful?
The same benefit as using any cryptocurrency, except you can rest knowing your value will stay the same. I’ve already used NuBits to my advantage. I needed money for something, however a lot of my money was in Peercoins. The value of PPC kept changing, mostly downward, I had to constantly recalcuate how much my coins were worth and how many I’d have to spend to do what I needed to do. So I just bought some NBT with it. Boom, done. No more worrying. No having to turn it into USD on some exchange and risk it being stolen. No sending it to my bank account. Just a lighting fast NBT withdrawal to my wallet and I was all set.
