So 60 Minutes is investigating FreeTrade and the pre-mine scandal - I've got a transcript of the interview with Katie Couric -



Katie: How much MemoryCoin did you pre-mine?

FreeTrade: *laughs* So that's a tough question to start with. I'll answer it, but why don't we come back to it after there's some background?



Katie: Okay. Did you crash MemoryCoin 1?

FreeTrade: That's better. *more laughs* No. I mean it was in a pretty bad state technically. I wanted to make repairs and the whole idea is that coin can pay for that out of grants or salaries, but the shareholders voted to give those funds to themselves. I guess you could say I lost confidence in the shareholders. They were angry that I didn't continue developing for free and called me a lot of names. All of them not nice names.



Katie: But you told Bter to de-list MemoryCoin?

FreeTrade: No. There's something called a trading halt - that's when something big is about to happen to a stock and trading is stopped to allow people to absorb the news. I told them they should probably suspend trading for a while because there was big news. But I don't get to tell exchanges what to list and de-list. Believe me, I've tried!



Katie: Did you sell any MemoryCoin before that happened?

FreeTrade: Actually I was a buyer of MemoryCoin.



Katie: Why resurrect it now?

I was tired and I took a long holiday and when I got back I saw ProtoShares had very similar parameters to what I was doing with MemoryCoin so I got involved with getting that started. But MemoryCoin was still tugging at me though and a lot of the shareholders I really liked and felt a real responsibility towards, because, you know, some were still voting for me right till the end and asking me to come back and fix the coin.



Katie: So you put them the pre-mine?

Well I had a lot of coins too, but the problem I was trying to solve was how do we keep voting but stop the short-sighted shareholders from taking the salaries and firing the devs?

And the solution I came up with was to fork all the balances from the old coin, but dilute anyone who wasn't voting, or just voting to share the grants out amongst the winning voters. So the fork rewarded people who were really engaged and trying to make the project work, but still kept balances for everyone.



Katie: What was your stake in the original coin that was forked into the new coin?

I had a 1.6% stake, so I got about 160,000 coins. At the current price, that's under $50,000. Some people will say that is excessive but I've worked very hard at it and that's not really very much for the skills I have and there's a lot of risk of ending up with nothing at all.

I also control something called the Memory Coin Foundation which gives out tips and grants and that got 47,000 coins. From the earliest days I've explained those are not mine and I'm continuing to give those away to people helping the project.



Katie: With that voting control, didn't you stack the deck?

You hear about these countries where they hold elections and everybody votes for some guy who wants to chop off the heads of all their opponents - they're not ready for it yet. I think the MemoryCoin is a bit like that. There's a process of democratization going on where the pre-mine has less and less of an influence because there are more and more coins out there. I think we've fended off the big challenge of a minority of voters trying to steal the salaries again, so I'm trying to step further back. If there's another attempt to use the voting system to destroy the coin, I'll step back in if I can, but I won't be using massive voting power to select between two good CTO candidates, or two good CEO candidates for that matter.



Katie: About democratization - can it ever be democratic if big shareholders can easily outvote small shareholders?

That's a pretty standard way to do things for all corporations. If you were going to have a crypto-government you'd probably want to do things differently, but MemoryCoin is more like a corporation and I think that is the best model for weighting votes.



Katie: You said they were trying to destroy the coin. I'm guessing you mean Newmine's plan to distribute funds directly to those who voted for him. Why do you think that would be so bad?

Well my theory is that it is possible to create a positive feedback cycle. I mean improving the coin, you know, through development and promotion should lead to a higher price. That higher price should lead to more funds for development and promotion, which should lead to a higher price. I think its possible to create really huge value if we can create that cycle. But the Newmine plan interrupts the cycle because it stops creating value. That's why it is so detrimental.



Katie: Are you going to try to destroy the coin if they vote you out again?

Of course not, I don't know why people are putting that about. I'd have no incentive to do that, quite the opposite, I'd probably stay and develop even if I wasn't getting one of the salaries. Also, the whole idea of a crypto-currency is that it can't be destroyed like that. Every coin starts out centralized around the original developer, and becomes de-centralized over time. I think we're getting there a lot faster than other coins - even if I was hit by a bus tomorrow, I think the coin would survive because there are other great devs working on it now and being paid to do so.



Katie: FreeTrade, thank you very much.

FreeTrade: My pleasure.

