I don’t think you actually solved the trilemma; it seems like you unwittingly chose the “inefficiency” side, except it didn’t hit that hard because the markets were smaller back then. Specifically:
> and a promise to burn the unsold tokens
This means that you *were* selling a specific percentage of tokens at a specific price, and so the supply-and-demand argument holds.
> we let the market decide what price is right
The problem is that at the point where the price is 2x higher, you’d sell 2x fewer tokens since you have a fixed cap, and because you burn the unsold ones, the remaining tokens are 2x rarer, and so 2x more valuable. Hence, it’s *really* economically equivalent to a simple fixed-price, fixed-cap sale — but, as I said, the cap happened to be not too widely off the mark.
Author: Vitalik Buterin
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