As for who can participate in acquiring FreeMarks, it depends on your jurisdiction. Some people have more economic liberty than others, and less wealthy people are often not allowed to invest because it involves risk. It should be noted that any investment that has a potential reward will have the possibility of a complete loss of investment, unless insured, and that must be paid for in advance at a rate that allows the insurer to be compensated for the risk, rather than the investor. Even banks that are considered “too large to fail”, well, generally are not.

So when governments try to regulate less-wealthy people from taking risks, they are really regulating them from earning rewards, undermining social mobility. They are interfering with their right to fail and to learn from it, stunting their growth in competence as investors. Lastly, everyone has the information available now that sophisticated investors have. So what is the point in assuming that the normal person cannot decide to become an investor, read up on it, and take their chances? It’s their money, and there is now no rational justification for limiting their economic liberty.

To be frank, private company equity raises are subject to such a convoluted set of contradictory and ambiguous laws in the various jurisdictions that regulations already interfere with capital raising—the reason for the invention of the ICO in the first place. Governments are in this way also impeding job growth and economic activity. Today, a young firm can find investors globally that are willing to tolerate various levels of risk and easily. It is an absurd presumption of justice to limit freedom of speech out of anti-commercial bias.

The challenge of course is to navigate these rough legal seas without violating any of the laws, when practically the whole world can view a company’s equity offer when placed on the internet. As is often said, ask ten different attorneys and you will get ten different answers. 

Governments should not have a legal right to limit the human right of freedom of speech for business people, as they try to find qualified investors. In essence, they are pre-regulating prospecting because of commercial regulatory for lack of competence or maliciousness. Prospects should be legally qualified after they are identified and communicated with, not before. Worldfree, for instance, works with 3rd parties using advanced technologies to process KYC/AML issues.

Nor is right that the economic liberty of smaller investors be violated as it is being done today. That is why we offer an alternative method of owning FreeMarks that is less costly, that anyone can participate in. When an entrepreneur decides to start an food franchise, for instance, say selling burgers or chicken, they are taking a chance on franchiser’s continued success in business. They invest their money in physical premises, inventory and initial operating expenditures to make their franchise a success. They are not regulated from opening a franchise by regulators, nor should they be, nor should the franchiser be regulated from setting up a distribution network for their products. 

If a child sets up a lemonade stand, he or she is taking a chance by buying raw materials and expending energy that they will discover a market—that their lemonade will satisfy future clients enough to be paid. There is no guarantee of success, as every child learns (or should learn). Regulators should not treat adults as children.

In the same way, people buying a Worldfree Miner’s License will be paid for searching for websites and parsing them (identifying sentences grammatically and semantically) with computers, for hire. Our offer is to pay them in FreeMarks—they can accept them are not, with knowledge of the Worldfree plan and the nature of cryptocurrency. As an asset-backed currency, they will have a better chance of those FreeMarks retaining their value in the long-term than fiat currencies. Attaining and maintaining asset-backing is, however, a best efforts performance, as the funds must be raised and invested in a Reserve Endowment Fund to earn returns. Investing for reward again necessarily involves risk, otherwise there would be no reason anyone would pay the reward. 

Worldfree is committed to manage the Reserve Endowment Fund under law in the jurisdictions it functions in, and audit the management of the fund, under explicit terms as set out in the Information Memorandum. This is more than most government currencies, which abandoned asset-backing generally with the demise of the Bretton Woods Agreement by 1973, prior to which the various currencies were generally backed by gold, and after which they had no backing at all. These issues are discussed more thoroughly in the White Paper, which all prospective investors should read. 

The Reserve Endowment Fund is not a collective investment scheme, however, as it does not pay investors money, only serving as asset backing of the FreeMark currency generally, which is more responsible than most governments. Yet because of limitations imposed by legal standards for collective investment schemes, the Reserve Fund can only serve to back the currency, provide liquidity for exchange and invest and promote the growth of the network at this time. Its returns therefore cannot be distributed to holders of FreeMarks, as we would have preferred. But FreeMark holders are rewarded in other ways, as discussed below.

Certain governments have no legal right to be “abridging the freedom of speech”, as some laws have been doing for business people, thus denying the presumed legally-protected human rights of this minority, contrary to various constitutions and international human rights standards. Worldfree has as a mandate to build a better and more free economy within its global private network, while maintaining a higher standard of financial and monetary prudence, using Digital Prerogative as the basis for the rule of law. Worldfree is endeavouring to have a more safe environment for doing business, with higher character of participants over time encouraged through more accurate and rational recognition standards, while discouraging activities violating international legal standards of human rights. Worldfree is a globally-operated enterprise, not a local one, but operates under locally applicable laws where it is allowed to.There is no guarantee that when an individual is paid a US$ or Euro today that it will have the same purchasing power in the future—in fact, there is a practical guarantee that it will not, because it has no actual asset behind it to justify its value—now called “fiat money”, as discussed in Worldfree’s White Paper.

Precisely because of this poor monetary performance by governments, cryptocurrencies have been invented. Governments should not be seeking to regulate people from creating a fiscally responsible world, just because they are unable to. Then governments become enemies of societies, and act contrary to the general public’s best interests. 

Worldfree receives a mandate of selection by its network members that is unanimous, to act in accordance to its plan. This is thus a more democratic method of selection than current governments operate under, as the Worldfree White Paper discusses, because 100% of the participants accept the terms of participating in the Worldfree network, or they simply withdraw their capital and move it elsewhere. Thus this form of rule of law is more just than modern consensus-based governments, as it operates completely with the consent of its members.

Worldfree contacts potential investors one at a time. We make explicit the terms of our offer, and the risks involved investing in a young venture, as all enterprises share the same risks—as most rational adults are aware. We do not make any general public offers to sell securities. We discuss our plans and goals in public as is our right. When investors show an interest, then we qualify them at that point, in accordance with law, prior to making offers. If any jurisdictions do not find this reasonable and responsible behaviour, then our offer is not valid for their citizens.

Worldfree Software Corporation, Ltd is a UK private firm, acting under the laws of the UK. As such, we are allowed limited sales of equity shares to private investors, and more generally to accredited investors. Worldfree is offering equity in the Company as well as the currency because it provides greater value and lower risk for the investor—not more risk. 

The FreeMark, our new currency, seeks to become a tradable digital medium of exchange that is 100% backed by assets over time, and pegged to the price of a quantity of a basket of 20 commodities chosen at midnight of the ICO closing date equal in total to $1, £1, or €1 for ḞṀ$1, ḞṀ£1, or ḞṀ€1 respectively. But at first it cannot be 100% backed as capital is required for its establishment, so we would like to offer equity in Worldfree to make up the difference. This is a financially responsible idea, and should not be regulated against, as it limits the downside of an investment while allowing a substantial upside. Yet it is also an innovative idea, and such a hybrid currency-equity instrument does not fall under existing legal standards, in general.

In order to understand the value of the Common Stock equity instrument, an allowed investor should look at the Information Memorandum, where there is an investor qualification. Elsewhere on the www.worldfree.com site information is presented to facilitate an understanding of our business plans, which  necessarily occur on a best-efforts basis.

Ninety (90%) of revenue from FreeMark sales will be placed into a regulated and audited Reserve Fund that will be established after the ICO. Representatives of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) have agreed to audit the funds-raising process. There is a “last mile” between the virtual world and the physical one that cryptocurrencies must still manage in a careful, secure way, and existing 3rd parties are best placed to facilitate a secure transition to a distributed authority system, where Digital Prerogative provides a regulatory means. We are not yet in the promised land of digital currencies, and cannot be pedantic about being “purely distributed” when firstly it is not possible, and secondly unwise, until such time as safe patterns of behaviour are developed and matured.

Importantly, as we proceed with our plan, the FreeMark will become a better currency than existing ones—more stable by design, more easily transacted and recorded, and more value-holding in virtue of our efforts to design it with asset-backing. It is to be built upon a re-engineered crypto-technology, called the Nodechain, also discussed in the White Paper.