Chinese cryptocurrency portal 8btc hosted a question and answer session on Wednesday on the subject of Ethereum Classic’s monetary strategy for the first quarter of 2017.

Participants included Roy Zou (Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Ethereum Classic Consortium), Igor Artamonov (core developer contributing under the Github handle Splix), Matthew Mazur (monetary strategist and author of ECIP-1017, contributing to Github as Snaproll) and Avtar Sehra (developer and event organizer of the London monetary policy event).

For the author of ECIP-1017, the goal of his proposed improvement protocol is to restrain inflation of the monetary supply in an effort to avoid attributes deemed unfair by the community. If, for instance, token issuance were to restrain supply too soon or too far out into the future, those results would limit incentives to invest in the platform, either in the near or far term.

In addition to finding a fair balance for rate of emission, instituting an overall cap would provide important data for investors to predict future value. “Having an upper bound, or a ‘cap,’ on a token, or any tradeable object, assists with price discovery,” he stated, “or finding the true value of something since its level of scarcity is known and/or can be measured.”

Considering the role of core developers, Splix outlined the steps that would be necessary to implement ECIP-1017. That timeline begins with asking the community for feedback on the improvement protocol, followed by development in February.

Artamonov went on to say that several months of testing to identify potential attack vectors would be needed to avoid compromising the security of the network. The goal would be to have a working implementation of the improvement protocol available by the summer for testing on private servers, so that the ECIP could be activated by the end of 2017.

The core developers are currently seeking Go and Rust coders to help facilitate the process of testing ECIP-1017.

Developer Avtar Sehra mentioned several details related to his decentralized crowdfunding initiative, Fundonomy. Roy Zou will be tasked with business development for the project, and looks to provide backing for Fundonomy by holding an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Fundonomy intends to eschew the “move fast and break things” mantra for a “move efficently and remain effective” approach.

Splix contends that while these are still the early days of the platform, in a few years “there will be thousands of applications built on top of our technologies.” Regarding the network’s key difference from the Ethereum Foundation’s, he stated, “We believe that principles of immutable blockchain will give ETC more adoption than to centralized mutable blockchains.”

8btc — ETC monetary policy AMA