Yeah, one approach could be that everyone earns mana by default, and needs to opt-in to get dollar payouts. This would allow us to direct the stream of dollar payouts more directly to the people for whom it may make the most difference, who can then opt-in. Just taking the preliminary week 1 payouts for example: I know @wchargin and I both intend to opt out from dollar payments, and given that, the $250 would go a lot further for the other contributors.
That said, I think there’s definitely something to be said for opt-out. First, it just makes the system simpler; everyone who contributes gets potential payments. Less admin, more potential happy surprise for contributors who learn about it later, and no appearance of an “insiders club” where the people in the know got paid earlier/more/better. We can then have an explicit step where contributors can redeem their payouts to mana instead of $, and can let contributors set an auto-redemption policy, which e.g. I can opt in to.
Given that some proportion of contributors are redeeming, we can then increase the weekly payout to account for it, so the contributors that want cash payouts will still get the increased payouts, but with the (added benefit?) that we’re distributing a higher nominal $ value total.