Good questions!

1. Where does the money come from to fund the conversion into USD? i.e. is this self-funding somehow or is it a government program?

It's not a government program. The primary way in which we build our USD reserves is through the sale of "Future Gresham Dollars," which are tokens that automatically convert into GD at a pre-determined future date, after which Gresham Dollar no longer automatically converts into USD. An early investor might pay, say, $5 million USD in exchange for $50 million FGD. Anyone can buy FGD, so you can think of it as a form of crowd funding or crowd investment.

2. Why 30 days to mature (why not 0, 3, 15, 45, 3650)?

30 is an arbitrary number. I picked 30 days because it sounded reasonable and then I did some calculations based on that number.

For example, let's say we choose Boston as our starting city. We would sign several merchants, probably mostly grocery stores, to 90 day merchant contracts with a 100% reserve ratio requirement. There are roughly 10,000 homeless people in Boston. We'd need about $5 million in FGD investment to run a 3-month experiment during which we distribute basic accounts with a $10 daily basic income and a 30-day GD lifetime. This assumes that we're handing out the same number of accounts every day; on the last day, the 10,000th account will be activated.

In a worst-case scenario assuming we don't get any further USD reserves and everybody sits on their GD without spending it, we run out of money and shut the whole thing down after 90 days. But that's a worst-case scenario.

We can do similar calculations with other GD lifetimes. And, in fact, the plan is to gradually lengthen the lifetime of Gresham Dollar until the day when it no longer converts to USD at all anymore.

3. "Far fewer USD reserves than a central bank would normally need..." OK. So I'm missing a bigger point of the mechanics.

Hmm. Well, we don't offer on-demand par exchange for GD. The only way for GD to convert back into USD is for its lifetime to expire and its lifetime gets reset every time it changes hands. The less people trust it, the more they will get rid of it, and the less we have to dip into our USD reserves. That being said, we will initially have 100% reserves, but not forever.

4. Is there a Ponzi-Scheme danger as more people are trading their Viral Currency?

There's always the risk that we run out of USD reserves. But we will continually maintain worst-case estimates of when that will happen that are visible users when they log into their accounts, so it won't hit anyone out of nowhere. Furthemore, you'll always be able to see how much of your GD is guaranteed to convert even in the scenario where everybody just suddenly decides to sit on their GD one day. Even so, if you're an ordinary user not holding large balances of GD, you'll be okay even if we run out of reserves.

Unless you're a merchant partner, there's a cap on the amount of GD that will convert to USD in a given period of time. So if, for whatever reason, you're holding $2 billion in your Gresham Account and we run out of USD reserves, you're not going to get most of your USD back. I wrote more about the activation cap in one of the other comments here.

Merchant partners take on risk as defined in their contract. If you're a merchant partner whose contract says you get 90% of your USD back in the event that we fail, you'll get 90% of your USD back.

It's actually more involved than (and not quite as bad as) that. We have a whole plan for what happens if we run out of USD reserves. It's called the Disruption event, and it's something we can technically come back from. But during Disruption, GD will obviously not be converted to USD as normal and we will allow merchants to set separate prices in GD and USD. But if Gresham Dollar is already somewhat established by then, it doesn't necessarily mean the end of the currency and we can always recover from Disruption by bringing our USD reserve levels back up.

PS- 1. The premise of the hack is interesting--bad money gets spent first, good gets saved; though ironically the bad is less valuable if you spend it today (discount)

Thanks!

If you spend at a merchant partner, who's required to accept GD at par with USD, then you don't actually get less value from your GD for spending it early. And if you're selling your GD on the market, you'll still get more value for your "younger" GD because all GD is the same to the person receiving it, so you'll get the same price no matter what.

2. I like the goals of basic income. Thanks for experimenting with it and starting a conversation.

=)