Topics include : Steem, Graphene, Peerplays and OPENPOS.

Today Bytemaster, Cryptoprometheus, Datasecuritynode, Kencode and others speak about various projects.

Bytemaster and the community talk about the merits of the new Graphene blockchain Steem, as well as the launch party and beginning of the crowdfunder for their graphene based chain called Peerplays. Kencode gives us a deeper understanding of how OPENPOS will only gain value as new BitShares wallets hit the scene.

Listen to Episode 153 - Create a BitShares Account

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Note : This transcript took over 9 hours to complete at 13,469 words. This is by far the longest post on Steemit and probably took much longer than any other post on Steemit to complete. Considering some post on Steemit are nothing more than external links and are making thousands of dollars, I would greatly appreciate all the upvotes I can get for the vast amount of finger aching work I put into this for the Community. :)

I have personally completed or paid for out of my own pocket more than 8 months worth of transcripts, most of which I received nothing for doing and did it simply because I think it is important to have a written record of the Hangouts. Not only is it great search engine food that brings people to our ecosystem, but some people would rather read the transcript and it provides a place to easily reference quotes from various participating projects.

Thank you for your support!

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Introductions until [00:04:36]

Bytemaster (Dan Larimer) Discusses STEEM

bytemaster: I'd like to just take a quick moment to talk about some of the cool things that the synergy between Steem and BitShares. If you haven't checked out Steemit.com, please check it out. You can now create an account and get about $3-$4 of STEEM for free. All you need is a Facebook account to login.

One of the things that we've observed is that a lot of projects that we talk about here on Mumble are posting their announcements. When Blocktrades adds a new trading pair it post and when Kencode does his mobile wallets and other things, they're making some great post and it's getting upvoted to the tune of thousands of dollars worth of STEEM at this point. So it appears that participating on Steemit it's possible to raise money for funding things that benefit BitShares.

So if you look at the total amount that Steemit has awarded to BitShares related post I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than BitShares has paid out in all Worker Proposals combined and Steemit is still a baby. So there is lots of incentives to come and get involved and help support Steemit. There is a lot of synergy.

I would really like to see the BitShares community move the forum and the discussion over to the BitShares topic where's there's a whole category just for BitShares on Steemit. Over time as the platform matures I think it would be a great way to bootstrap a community. There's a lot of synergy between the two projects. Bugs get fixed for Steem they benefit BitShares. There's a network bug that we're looking into for the seed nodes and that's going to benefit both projects. So I'm just really excited about how well the two are playing together.

That said, when you come over to Steemit to talk about BitShares it's important to help the platform grow to talk about more than just one project and to be kind and respectful toward everyone else on the platform. The broader we can make the platform appeal the more people we can reach, the greater impact we can have on the world.

fuzzy: So just from the Beyond Bitcoin perspective, I know I've been looking at Steem and I've been thinking to myself how many different Communities out there might have similar struggles in terms of funding a lot of the projects that they would like to fund. But this seems to me like it offers an opening for people from other crypto Communities to join up and produce their own content and release their own press releases on Steem.

And I would be able as a Beyond Bitcoin lover, a person who likes to think beyond just the basic blockchain technology use cases, that I would have a very real incentive to upvote those. And others might as well if they are part of this entire Community. So there might be a way to fund projects or help atleast get some funding for them by posting just to Steem, correct?

bytemaster: The best way to make money on Steem is to post original content or original ideas. It can either describe things you are doing to benefit mankind, the world, that BitShares is something that is helping to decentralized exchanges and solve those problems, point of sale systems. Obviously things that directly benefit the Steem network have higher benefits, so if there's any way at all your project can integrate with whats going on with Steem that's a bonus. But, original content posted to Steem first and share the links to Steem, those types of things help boost the profile of the site and the higher the profile of the site the more value that Steem has, the higher the rewards get.

Everyone benefits when we all work together to build this common platform for sharing information. Right now when we dilute our efforts between 20 different forums, the BitShares forum, Bitcointalk, the Ethereum forum, Reddit, it's dividing that. But if we came together and all built on one platform the value would grow and we'd all have greater resources with which to change the world.

CryptoPrometheus: I'm really excited to sort of watch how this whole subjective value proposition unfolds. I've noticed just in the past few weeks of watching sort of which post tend to accumulate very quickly and which ones don't and I haven't come up with any real theories about it yet because there's this phenomenon that's happening where sometimes ... I saw a post that was a rock stacking competition, which was really cool. These people were taking all of these stones and stacking them on top of each other vertically and taking pictures of them. These were guys that do this and like this meditative exercise or whatever, but I looked at it and I was like, "yeah that's really cool, I'd like that and everything", well this particular post had earned significantly more, I mean it was in the top 2 or 3 percentile of earnings right now at this particular stage. And I thought, "huh that's interesting, like what a random thing for everyone to get excited about".

So I guess I'm saying this sort of as a compliment or a response to what you mentioned bytemaster about what are the best things to post on Steem. I think anything can be posted on Steem ultimately in terms of value, you know. I posted an article that I wrote a few weeks ago and I got a good response from it and it was a little more of a technical article. It had to do specifically with Graphene so I thought this will be great. Steem's built on Graphene so I'll post an original article on Graphene and everyone will look at that and go, "great good value added". So I did that and again I was happy with the response, but then I scrolled through the pages and I saw some other random things that were just like, "whoa", you know, that's a very simple little post, it doesn't really have much on it. I was thinking, "where did this come from? why is everybody so excited about this?".

So anyway I guess I just wanted to comment on that aspect of it which is that it's unlimited in a lot of ways. You can go on and we're sort of developing this as we speak in terms of you know, I think promoting and getting people to come to this site. One of the things that we did for the project I'm working on yesterday is we published a white paper and we published it on Steem. And then we linked to that white paper on Steem and all of the rest of the sort of promotional material we're doing and so little things like that to get people to come and look at the platform and see what it is and have it sort of click in their mind that this is directly integrated with a cryptocurrency and on a blockchain. I think things like that are going to go a long way towards getting this to click in people's minds.

bytemaster: Keep in mind that at this point in time there's only a couple hundred users on Steemit. So this sample size isn't necessarily big enough to even out some of the apparent discrepancies. So if you see something that you think is valued way out of proportion, a lot of those things will change. Right now all payouts are tentative, which means as more people submit things it's going to dilute the existing payouts between now and July 4th.

After July 4th, depending on the market cap there could be several thousands dollars per day awarded, but right now it's sort of in this bootstrapping phase where there's about 2 million dollars to be divided among all of the post. So it's a great opportunity to come and provide original content, but more importantly a place to build Community and we're really working to enhance the platform.

What you see now is not where it ends, it's very very early in our grand vision. But together we can do what we're already doing on the other forums, like BitSharesTalk and we can just do it better and in turn help fund the things we're interested in. I don't want to monopolize this whole Mumble talking about Steem but I did think it was worthwhile to point out how the project is having synergistic benefits to the BitShares ecosystem.

CryptoPrometheus and DataSecurityNode Discuss PeerPlays

fuzzy: You can see that. I will definitely say that I appreciate that we are going to leave some room in here for anybody else to speak up. CryptoPrometheus, speaking regarding this you mentioned the project and that's Peerplays currently, right?

CryptoPrometheus: Yeah that's correct. I'll go ahead and introduce myself then I'll pass it off to Jonathan Bahai who is one of the leads on the project. My name is Michael Maloney, aka CryptoPrometheus. I am the communications advisor and lead on the PeerPlays project. Peerplays is a decentralized provably fair gaming platform that is currently being built on the Graphene toolkit and this morning we have just recently as of 40 minutes go, launched a preliminary crowdsale for tokens on that network. So I'm going to go ahead and hand it off to Jonathan.

DataSecurityNode: Good day everybody. My name is Jonathan Bahai, I'm the President of Bunkerchain Labs Inc., which is leading up the Peerplays project. The crowdsale has just started and we have launched the website, PeerPlays.com. Basic information is available up there. We've released the white paper which details what PeerPlays is all about and the innovations that it brings. And we've also launched a new explainer video that goes over the details of PeerPlays and what it will be able to do for the industry.

We have links at BitcoinTalk thread, social media links there as well. People are already contributing to the crowdfund as we speak actually. The crowdsale is going on, what we're doing is we're doing a preliminary with just 20% of the Peerplays tokens right now and it's a 2 Tier sale. So the first 100,000 tokens will be for $2 and then the next 100,000 will be for $3. So those that buy in early are getting them at a really good price.

There's a really simple process on the website on how to be able to donate. We're accepting only Bitcoin and bitUSD. Those are the only things that we are accepting right now. When you go onto the site there will be instructions on depositing your Bitcoin automatically. The process for bitUSD is a little bit more manual but we're accepting that as well.

Also there is live chat on the website, so if you need some help there's always somebody there who's going to help you along if you need help. We have an awesome development team. This development team basically is like a dream team to be able to make PeerPlays happen.

There is myself, Jonathan Bahai and I'm the business development and lead on the project. Neal Haran, who is onboard as a member for the esports and gaming partnerships and he's got a lot of insider industry connections. So he's going to be very strategic in terms of bringing Peerplays forward.

We also have Dan Notestein and his team at Blocktrades who's the technical lead Graphene developer on the project. We have Dr. Fabian Shuh, who is known as xeroc, who is also our technical consultant and is assisting in Peerplays. Michael as mentioned is our communication specialist. There is Chris Coney, he is the marketing and video making guy. If you look at the explainer video, he's the person that put that video together. Awesome work. And we have Ed Hall who is the web designer who's created the website that you see right now at Peerplays.com

So we're going to be moving forward the development of Peerplays. The actual code is going to be live in approximately 3-4 months. That's going to be a live testnet so you will actually be able to see Peerplays operational on that testnet and that is when it will be public.

Now moving forward we're going to be giving updates on what happens weekly. We're going to be hosting shows, myself and Michael, that give updates on Peerplays and talk about the various elements of what it's going to be able to do and what it means to the gaming industry.

We also have Chris Coney who is going to be putting together a series of answer and question videos, frequently asked questions basically and promotional videos that are going to help give more information on Peerplays. And for the time being we have the official Peerplays thread at BitShares Talk, but it's very likely that we're going to be moving that all over to Steem quite soon.

So right now over the next few weeks we're sitting down with the Devs and finalizing milestones so that we can make those public as well. If you have any questions or you want to get in touch with us go to Peerplays.com. Like I said the live chat is available there and you can reach us through that.

At Bitcoin Talk you can reach me at Bunkerchains.labs.Inc and you'll see me in our thread there as well replying to questions. At BitShares Talk you know me as Bunkerchain Labs. And of course if you want to do the old fashioned email, you can reach us at PowerUp [@] Peerplays.com. So that's all the updates I have right now on Peerplays.

I highly encourage you to check out everything we've published. We've got an awesome white paper as was mentioned. It's worth nearly $13,000 on Steem right now, so certainly upvote that if you like it. Also I highly encourage everyone to join us in our social media outlets, Facebook, Google, Twitter, we'll be doing more updates there as well and we'll be holding the hangouts like I said.

This is very exciting. In the time that I've been sitting here giving this update I'm just watching all these donations pouring in and I'm just taken aback and I'm very thankful to everybody who's helping to contribute on this project.

fuzzy: Real quick just so everybody knows it is going to be available for them to donate but they can also if they're not familiar with Steem yet they can make an account on Steem and they can upvote the updates and the white paper that you guys posted and help fund the project that way right?

CryptoPrometheus: Yes absolutely. Steem is brand new and the fringe benefits are sort of unfolding as we speak so absolutely that would be a wonderful way to support us as well. We may end up taking any money we make on Steem we've kind of been talking about hosting some sponsored tournaments right away and giving that back to the Community in the form of tournament jackpots and things like that.

But there's going to be more information on that as we develop and as the plan unfolds. I guess I'll take the talking stick from Jonathan because I know he's probably frantically answering help questions. I wanted to get into a little bit, one of the main questions we've had over this last week just to recap. We had a little pre-launch announcement on Beyond Bitcoin last Friday and we went over a basic overview of the platform and got into a little detail, this was of course before we released the white paper and before anyone had a chance to look over any information. So I would encourage everyone to go check that out.

But I'm going to talk a little bit today about how you can make money on Peerplays. That's what everyone wants to know and that's a very good question. There are a number of different exciting opportunities that I want to share with you guys. At the top of the list, this is what's going to set Peerplays apart from everyone else or any platform that exist right now. And that is that the core token holders of Peerplays will receive regular profit sharing payouts from all of the network fees that are charged on the Peerplays network.

So there's a number of different fees and I'm not going to go into all of where those fee points are, but like BitShares the Committee itself is going to have the ability to toggle a lot of those fees and set them for most of the operations.

However the main draw is the ability and the feature which will allow the Peerplays network to charge a rake fee, which is a percentage of a jackpot, percentage of jackpots that are being paid out for tournaments. And that rake fee will be split through a smart contract and distributed at regular intervals to the accounts of holders of core Peerplays tokens.

So we have Peerplays for those of you who are familiar with BitShares Fee Backed Assets, which is a feature on BitShares right now, we are taking that model and extending it essentially to the entire network. So that's really exciting, that's kind of a core feature that everything else revolves around. I'm going to move forward and tell you about the other ways that you'll be able to make money on Peerplays.

Playing games, sponsoring on-chain games, which are games that are actual smart contracts built into the blockchain. The basic model will be buy in's, everyone throwing into a buy in jackpot. So if you have 12 players and everyone wants to play in a tournament for a game, everyone throws in a buy in and those buy ins are all combined and that gets locked away in a smart contract and the game happens and then the smart contract sends those funds to the winner, minus the rake fee. And then that rake fee gets distributed through the network. So I hope that makes sense.

So winning jackpots and you will also receive something called PowerUp Points. PowerUp Points are going to be the coin of the realm I think we'll call it. They're basically the reward tokens for Peerplays which will be tradeable on the exchange which will be internal to Peerplays, similar to BitShares. And the PowerUp Points will be rewarded based on a number of different algorithms that we're developing that have to do with such things as win/loss records and amounts wagered and things like that.

But PowerUp Points will be the points or the only buy in token that will be accepted for something called Mega Jackpot Tournaments. So this is another sort of really exciting aspect of Peerplays that sets it apart from a lot of different projects right now.

Mega Jackpot Tournaments are tournaments that are sponsored by the network itself. We talked about rake fees already, those rake fees are split up in a number of different directions. A portion of them goes to the holders of the Peerplays core tokens, a portion goes to network maintenance, the Committee can have a network maintenance account which is similar to BitShares that can be used for bug fixes and things like that.

And the third place that the fees are distributed to are a Mega Jackpot. We're calling it the Mega Jackpot Virtual Account. And that virtual account, no one will have the private keys to those funds, but there will be a smart contract that distributes those funds in periodic Mega Jackpot Tournaments. So that virtual account collects all of the fees and once it gets to a certain threshold then tournaments can be launched with on-chain games and players can buy in with their PowerUp Points and play for large jackpots that are sponsored by the network itself. So that's a third way to play games.

The fourth way to play games is 3rd party sponsored games, jackpots specifically. So third parties, gaming partners and even large companies that want to sponsor e-sports gaming tournaments and things like that. A lot of the e-sports gaming tournaments are sponsored by corporations and things. They can actually create custom tournaments and supply the jackpot and they get registration codes where everyone can register and then that jackpot is distributed automatically through that smart contract. So those are all the ways players can earn playing games.

Now sponsors or third party tournament host have a number of different ways that they can make money and there's a number of different business models on Peerplays for sponsors. The first one, the basic framework for this is sponsors will be able to run hosted wallet portals or plugin to the Peerplays blockchain through the Peerplays API similar to the way for example OpenLedger plugs into BitShares through the BitShares API.

Even CryptoFresh.com is another example of a website that displays the information on the blockchain database in a unique way. So that will be possible through hosted wallet portals and so third parties can build tournament hosting sites and offer server side tournament hosting. So a lot of these more complex games are not going to be programmed directly into the blockchain. A lot of them are proprietary, we wouldn't be able to program them in even if we wanted to. But more importantly there's a lot of moving parts in these MMG's and RPG's and these big graphics intensive games.

So server side hosting is an accepted model, trusted model in the e-sports tournament space and so we are able to offer that to third party tournament hosting sites while they can still use Peerplays as their payment processing network. So they can allow players to wager tokens on the blockchain and handle all of the wagering through the blockchain so they don't have to essentially operate a site that's offering payment processing for wagering or gambling. They will just host the sites and the players will plugin and use the Peerplays blockchain.

fuzzy: So out of curiosity, the one question in my mind that I think others might have, this service is going to not all be connected to the blockchain, correct? You can have your own server which is running a web service that essentially allows people to build their own tournaments and say it's going to have 16 people on each side and then I'm going to promote it on social media from this site using this link that's given. And these are essentially tools that are used by people who want to monetize these events, right?

So is that portion going to be on the blockchain or is that something they would be running their own third party servers that would hit against the blockchain just for the payments?

CryptoPrometheus: Sure, so there's two aspects of the tournament management platform. A tournament management platform on Peerplays, the custom management platform will allow third parties to become a registrar for a tournament. These sites would have their own Peerplays account and that account would become a registrar for a tournament on the blockchain. You would set a number of different parameters including the start time of the tournament, I'm sorry I don't have the document in front of me of what all of those parameters are.

If you look up tournament management server side hosting software and look at a lot of the tools that are available, specifically the tournament brackets for example, putting players into brackets. The two main aspects we will have is the ability to build brackets, register players and have players send their tokens and the only thing that the server is doing is, as the registrar is pinging the blockchain and saying "this is the winner of the round or of the tournament". Which is a trusted model on server side tournament hosting.

So we have sort of a dual aspect here with Peerplays. We have the ability to do fully on-chain games in simpler games, casino card games and a lot of different two player games. There's some difficulty doing certain games of skill, for example like chess, just regular chess, because of the reality that bots would absolutely rule the roost. There wouldn't be really any fair game play, I think even Bobby Fischer was beaten by a computer bot. So there's a balance that needs to be struck and there's a number of different parameters on theories and ways but nevertheless there are thousands upon thousands of existing games that will very easily be able to be programmed into the blockchain with just a handful of specific operations.

A little bit of this is outlined in the white paper. But essentially we have that and we also have the ability for third parties to host the more complex games, things like Starcraft or any of the large e-sports tournaments popular games and anything else. Ultimately it doesn't need to be that, third parties can host simple games on their servers as well, any game in the world can be hosted on a third party server. So building a tournament hosting platform, as the registrar of a custom tournament on Peerplays you can charge an extra arbitrary admin fee. Similar to if you go on eBay when you sell something you'll notice that they allow you to add a shipping and handling fee but that fee then becomes built into the cost of the actual item you are selling.

So that becomes your price point in other words, what you're advertising to people. It doesn't say we're charging you all of this extra money for this or that, it just becomes built into the price. Peerplays will allow third parties to do that as another revenue generating source. And of course like I mentioned before third parties can also have their own sponsored jackpots where they can just transfer the entire jackpost to the smart contract and then pull people into the platform and do promotions and things like that.

Moving on from this I want to get through these points. We've got the referral program which is very similar to the BitShares referral program, which takes a percentage of the fees. And these are all amounts that will be discussed and set by the Committee as well. A percentage of the fees paid by every account will flow back up stream so to speak to the referrer of that account and then the rest of the fees will go to the network to be split out into the three main areas where they are split.

So that referral program of course will also be a major incentive for thirst parties to be able to migrate their user bases to Peerplays or even offer Peerplays as an option and get kick backs for the whole life of the user account. So if someone comes on and they're spending lots of money in there, like everyone does when they play tournaments, anyone who goes online in gaming their going to spend assets, they're going to spend money or tokens and you're going to continue to get a portion of those tokens. And like BitShares unless they choose to upgrade their own account into a referrer, in which case you're still going to get a nice hefty one time referral fee that's paid as a portion of that upgrade fee.

Anyone who's listening to this after this hangout, a lot of what we're talking about now is very BitShares specific and it does require a good deal of background information. I would suggest the best place to go right off the bat to familirize yourself with Graphene and all of the features that currently exist in BitShares is to go to BitShares.org. There's a lot of great information on that there. I think most of which was written by the BitShares lead developer Dan Larimer. So check all that out if any of this is confusing you and I apologize if I'm not presenting this in the most easy to understand manner.

fuzzy: You're doing fine. Out of curiousity, xeroc is another person who is working with you right?

CryptoPrometheus: Yes he is.

fuzzy: And he is the one who wrote the documentation at http://docs.bitshares.eu.

CryptoPrometheus: Yes I believe so. Thank you for bringing that up. xeroc has written a good deal of the documentation on the Graphene platform itself. So if you're looking for more technical documentation you can go to this site.

CryptoPrometheus: Moving forward we're talking still about ways to make money on the Peerplays network and the next major area for opportunities for both individual players and tournament hosting partners is as gateway token providers.

Peerplays will have the same User Issued Asset functions as BitShares, which basically the main function that you need to understand gateways is the issuer of the asset can set all of the fees for trading that asset and for transferring that asset. So asset providers can operate a business as a trusted provider of a off-chain token and issuing a representative asset of that token on the exchange and then allowing people to trade and utilize that asset on the blockchain and then when they want to go off blockchain and cash in their chips then they go back to that gateway provider and they transfer them the actual asset, whatever it may be.

Gateways are currently used for just about every type of crypto-token on both the BitShares exchange and other exchanges, like NXT and on-chain exchanges. Also for fiat assets is another common way that gateway tokens are used to get in and out of exchanges and in this case for Peerplays there's also a huge opportunity for in-game merchandise.

So many of these multiplayer online RPG style games are filled with in-game assets that are valuable that take a long time to acquire or take certain skills or abilities to acquire and there's actually quite a robust market in different areas for these particular assets. And of course they're all scattered in many different areas for many different values.

But in this case players or someone who wants to run a business can develop a storefront and be a gateway provider and have in-game assets that they're able to facilitate the transfer of to and from gateway tokens on Peerplays. And what that means then is that people can then use these in-game assets as wagers for jackpots. And they can take these gateway tokens and when the tournament parameters are setup it can require any specific tokens as the buy-in fees and players can go on and say everyone throws into the pot and we play the game and the winner gets all of these tokens and assets and go back to the gateway provider and cash-in these assets and get all these new cool items in-game. Or they could sell them or trade them on the asset exchange on Peerplays.

So there's the ability to develop a blockchain based exchange for on-game assets combined with the ability to wager those assets in game. So that's really cool. I want to reiterate that all of these features that I'm talking about, many of the functions and operations on Peerplays will require some sort of fee. The fees will all be determined by the Committee and certain things will have less fees to reduce barriers of entry and things like that. But all of these fees will be distributed to the holders of the core Peerplays tokens. So there's really a good value proposition in the core Peerplays tokens.

Another type of gateway is sidechain gateways and that's coming a little further down the road. We do have a really solid plan for putting together Graphene to Graphene sidechains and that's part of our development budget. So that's a really interesting concept, but I'm not going to elaborate on sidechains right now, partially because I'm not fully technically qualified and partially because it's just a really long discussion. But I will just mention that in terms of gateway tokens there will also be sidechain gateways which are essentially a more trustless way to get into and out of the exchange that don't require a counterparty like User Issues Asset gateways do.

Another aspect is that players will be likely to be inclined to keep their assets in their Peerplays wallets or clients and not be selling or trading the core asset a lot on external exchanges. Unless external exchanges offer them the service of sharing the profit sharing distributions with them. Some of the exchanges have offered extra services in the past for share dropping for example. Exchanges like Bter and I think some others have offered to, "go ahead and keep your tokens on our exchange and we'll share whatever comes our way that comes with the ownership of that token".

So that may happen but nevertheless there's always risk involved in that too so we think the trend is going to be more towards people keeping their tokens on Peerplays and keeping their private keys in their own possession in other words, so they can directly receive those profit sharing payouts as they happen. And because of that there's a couple of benefits. One is that the security of the network theoretically will be improved because of that, because at the very least there won't be sort of external third party custodians holding a large amount of core tokens, the voting tokens. The core tokens are involved in voting.

The other one is that it's also going to make gateway tokens a lot more important to the Peerplays network. So there's going to be a lot of incentive and opportunity for people to develop reputations and reputable trusted gateway tokens.

Just to add at the end of this gateway discussion is that Peerplays will not have a Committee controlled smartcoin account. Which means that there won't be any network issued bitAssets on Peerplays. However, that said we will be including the privatized ability for individuals to create User Issued Assets and publish price feeds and develop their own models for creating private bitAssets. So that functionality will still be there, but it won't be dependent on the core token as a collateral instrument for bitAssets.

And because of that there's also less of a need for developing an externalized way of discovering the value of the core token, like BitShares is sort of still dependent on. Because in BitShares the Witnesses publish price feeds that are based on all these externalized markets for the BTS token. So that is sort of another aspect that ties into the reality of that.

CryptoPrometheus: The last two areas in which you can make money on Peerplays, the first one is running a Witnesses node. Witnesses will be paid per block. We're developing a hybridized way to bootstrap this. I forgot to mention in the beginning that there's not going to be any dilution of the Peerplays core token, however there will be a bootstrapping arbitrary amount that we determine in order to pay Witnesses for a period of time. After which the Witnesses will have their own profit sharing distribution smart contract that takes a portion of the fees and pays the Witnesses with the fees that are levied as the rake fees and all of the other network fees.

So essentially it will be building towards paying the Witnesses, paying for the maintenance of the network through Witnesses by diverting a portion of the fees that the network is actually making to the Witnesses themselves. However in the beginning it's still going to be, I think whatever BitShares pays its Witnesses now, $300-$400 per month in order to run their nodes and give them incentive. It is kind of a hassle sometimes depending upon what's going on. This code is just being developed, there are bugs, there needs to be hardforks, there's some work that needs to be put in their so that work of course deserves compensation and needs to be compensated to attract the right sort of breed of individual to want the position so to speak.

Because of that we're going to have a pool, what does BitShares call it, a reserve pool, but it will be hard coded that there's no worker contracts. The only thing that reserve pool will be reserved for is for paying Witnesses x tokens, whatever that is. That parameter will be set by the Committee and once that reserve pool is out or once the Committee chooses to stop using that reserve pool and begin to divert enough of value is coming in through the fees that can be cut off and then that's the end of that. Then it will be a fixed amount of core tokens.

Everything that we've worked into this design as a result of about four months of planning and designing was to develop a DAC. I know that's kind of thrown around, but the reality is there are things we can do now with this technology. We've got the majority of the tools and a good deal of what we're doing, we're building on a platform, a lot of the code is written and it works and we've seen it work and we've seen the implications of it economically. So we are very grateful and at least three members of our team, I haven't spoken to a couple of them regarding this, were AngelShares contributors for the BitShares project roughly two years ago.

So we all feel part of this Committee, we've all been behind developing through our own resources or donating time and money to the BitShares project. To develop these tools so that we can all build platforms and increasing levels of complexity and usefulness. So this is why we're really excited about this because this is going to be a truly next generation platform. We're talking about a demographic that's just astronomical. Even capturing a very small corner of that demographic is going to be able to reap huge benefits.

Thom: Are you preparing for any kind of regulatory influx or the scrutiny by the regulatory agencies should this take off big time?

CryptoPrometheus: Yes we have consulted with legal counsel in a few different places. We are at this stage I think that the way to answer that question would be to say that first of all like I said last week we take all of our own legal, the implications of what we're doing, what Bunkerchain Labs what their part in it is and our developers and everyone else very seriously in order to insulate ourselves.

The other aspect is designing the platform itself so that specifically the Witnesses and Committee members and the sort of operatives within the DAC are insulated. A lot of that ground work was laid very brilliantly by Cryptonomex in designing Graphene, designing the Delegated Proof of Stake protocol that splits up the responsibilities of the different actors within a Graphene ecosystem.

But furthermore I'm not qualified any questions in terms of whether something is legal or not because reality is there are so many laws and so many jurisdictions all around the world. So I think that moving forward there will be issues, I'm sure people will have questions.

Questions from Community on PeerPlays

Thom: I think you addressed the point really well in saying that most of the groundwork was laid by Cryptonomex because if you've studied BitShares at all you understand the rational and the reasons for why they did what they did in changing the architecture in BitShares 2.0. So I think you answered my question quite well CryptoPrometheus, I think that's really good.

CryptoPrometheus: Great! At this stage I have a few more minutes here. If anyone else has anymore questions.

fuzzy: Talkinator here ask, "As I understand it, 3rd party sites will be able to access the blockchain indirectly through the Peerplays.com web API. But won't it also be possible for third parties to access the blockchain directly via the blockchain API?".

CryptoPrometheus: I believe the answer to that question is yes. I'm not the technical lead, so I don't know if Jonathan can answer that question better than I can but it seems to me that is how we're setting it up on the information that I understand. Let me put it this way, anyone can access the BitShares blockchain through the blockchain API, so anything can be accessed through the blockchain API. As far as the web API goes I don't understand the technical architecture at that level to answer that questions thoroughly.

fuzzy: Maurits answers here, "the third parties need to interface with the blockchain. So it seems that would be a yes". And Maurits, would you like to offer any input?

Maurits: Not really. I looked around a little bit but Python [inaudible] API it's just a little bit of logic that third parties also need to [inaudible] blockchain otherwise [inaudible] decentralized aspect wouldn't be [inaudible]. That's why [inaudible] can also talk directly to the blockchain [inaudible] on Graphene.

CryptoPrometheus: Yeah I believe that how roadscape has setup Cryptofresh.com -- I remember talking to him months back and he was -- I just briefly remember part of what he was working on at that stage was interfacing everything directly with the blockchain through the API. So yeah I think that's pretty standard in terms of how it works on the technical level.

ingenesist: So how about my idea that BitShares Lifetime Members get some kind of special deal for the referral program?

CryptoPrometheus: I can't comment on any promotional offerings at this stage. We are working to develop a number or to put together a number of different incentives and offerings that will be beneficial to the BitShares Community and also one's that will be sort of outreach initiatives. I don't want to say yeah that's a good idea or yeah we should do that because I'm not really authorized to make those type of statements. We've got a marketing team. But to answer your question in a more broad sense, yes we are working to figure out some incentives that will help to strengthen our ties between the communities that are sort of our home bases, specifically all of you in the BitShares community.

ingenesist: I'm also wondering if this could be another way to onboard people into crypto like STEEM does if people could get involved without having to buy Bitcoin, by maybe the mega jackpots being distributed by some of the gateways to get new users onboard without them having to buy Bitcoin in the first place.

CryptoPrometheus: Yeah absolutely. Not specifically with mega jackpots because those are fully organized and controlled by the smart contract on the blockchain. But if you just mean jackpots in general, third parties can offer -- as a registrar you will have the ability to supply your own jackpot. So if you want to offer promotional jackpots in order to get people to come play on your platform or come play on Peerplays in general, that's possible to do and that will all be a part of the gaming partner platform aspect of Peerplays.

So yeah absolutely. Another aspect of recruiting people who are outside of crypto or just in general -- opening doors for people I like to think of in terms of mental doors, giving people "aha" moments, making it click, making people realize, "oh gosh that's actually what's happening". Part of the open source GUI that we'll be publishing when the initial blockchain is launched will have some features that will make it clear to the user.

The user will be able to toggle through and look at the blockchain and say, "oh wow look at that the blocks are flying buy in 1-3 seconds and all this information is coming in and we've got all this data". I don't know exactly how it's going to be laid out but the reality is that will be a part of it that is going to be in people's mind, it's going to be up front. They're going to know they're playing on the blockchain when they use the open source GUI.

And of course just like BitShares and just like OpenLedger uses right now, they just clone the basic open source GUI that's maintained by svk and cass and others and they host that. And that his -- that's not his entire business model of course, but that's his graphic user interface, Ronny specifically that runs OpenLedger. And also freedom ledger is another site. Freedom Ledger is actually Bunkerchain Labs has recently launched a clone of the BitShares GUI as well on FreedomLedger.com.

Anyway, this is essentially what Peerplays open source GUI will be and then of course gaming partners can develop their own interfaces pretty much however they want and interact with the BitShares blockchain via the API.

fuzzy: Well if anybody has any questions or comments that they'd like to speak out loud feel free to do so otherwise I want to dig into a couple of comments that have been put into the chat here. The big one for me is DanTest[?], "the design is such that there should be no need to do anything except talking to a blockchain node and external servers could provide additional services similar to what CryptoFresh does for BitShares", which I'm assuming these are just web services that connect up to the blockchain via the node and read the data from the node -- what the node has stored locally right? After syncing the blockchain. So that's correct.

fuzzy: There's one question from GChicken, "How many initial tokens are up for the sale of phase 1 of the ICO?".

CryptoPrometheus: Perfect segui, so we have 200,000 tokens are up for sale. I'm sorry we have two phases for this ICO. Phase 1 will be 100,000 tokens at $2 each and phase 2 is an additional 100,000 tokens at $3 each. There are 1 million total tokens. The 500,000 tokens will be released in an option style ICO which will happen after the release of the testnet and the GUI and a whole bunch of promotion that's coming in the coming months, including worldwide and multilanguage promotion.

And that will be an AGS style fundraiser. So that will be a set amount of tokens we haven't determined if it's going to be a full AGS style, meaning tokens sold every day, every 24 hours or whether it will be a sort of total auction sale where it's just all the money collected is then split amongst the 500,000 tokens. But in any case that will be coming soon after the release of the -- yeah sorry AGS style, what I meant by AGS was AngelShares. Sorry I use all these acronyms that are specific to the BitShares ecosystem.

Yeah if you want to look up exactly how an AGS style token auction works, if you're curious, the website is www1.agsexplorer.com. So that will tell you a little bit more about that. Thank you very much everyone for being here and for asking great questions. Thank you again for all the support you guys have provided so far and we're really excited about this and can't wait to share more with you in the weeks and months ahead. This is Mike Maloney CryptoPrometheus signing off.

fuzzy: Does anyone else have any projects they're wanting to plug that they think is important that anybody who's listening might need to be aware of? Just so anybody here knows if you guys have crypto-communities or anything that you feel is important that is going on that should be covered by Beyond Bitcoin please post that stuff in Steem under the Beyond Bitcoin heading and I will go through and make sure to upvote it with the stake that I have early on.

I would really like to help benefit those who are bringing valuable content from the crypto-sphere from tehir own Communities to kind of really teach one another about these technologies and what we're all doing in this space. And if I can help to give people a little bit of funding by upvoting them; I've noticed that my upvotes give like $150 to $200 to post currently. I mean I will gladly upvote the content that is under Beyond Bitcoin heading and I will even look into covering some of it in these hangouts in the future. The Steem platform is opening up a lot of opportunities for me and I'm just foaming at the mouth nowadays.

ingenesist: Does anybody know if your posting or upvoting on Steem with just the initial 10 STEEM you get from logging in with Facebook, does that have any impact or do you really have to have more stake for your feedback and contributions to matter?

Thom: I can address that degree. I've fallen into that category quite well. I just made my first reply, a reply doesn't count as much as an original piece of content, but I just have the initial wallet faucet amount and I got less than the other poster that replied ahead of me and that amounts to zero, at least as far as the amount was that was posted. So it doesn't count for very much but you gotta start somewhere.

fuzzy: How it works is that if Brindle, you go on there with 10 STEEM, you don't have a whole lot of voting power, which means if you go and you find a post and you upvote it you're not going to affect the ranking of that post that much. However, over time if you choose; let's say you upvoted a Beyond Bitcoin post and then I see it and a bunch of other people see and they upvote it afterwards and it becomes one of the more trending topics, now you're going to; because you identified that, you're going to get rewarded more of the percentage of the rewards because you were among the first people to upvote it.

It doesn't mean that your stake is going to really do anything as far as upping it at that point in time, but if you pick it before other people you're going to get a pretty good stake anyway as a payout which you can then turn around and buy Steem Power with. Which is replacing Steem Vest and is used as the voting power mechanism. So the voting is really where you; the curation is what we call it essentially, and participating in that curation market you are going to be rewarded if you find the tokens that are among the top.

Now if you post something, that voting weight has no bearing on how valuable that post is. All that has a bearing on how valuable that post is, is how many people upvote it compared to downvoting it and the relative weight of each vote. Does that make sense?

ingenesist: Yes.

fuzzy: Well I will gladly, like I said, if you guys find content that is in the crypto-sphere and you post it on Beyond Bitcoin I know that I'm going to be personally upvoting a lot of that stuff first because it promotes what we're doing here and it also helps to fund you guys for covering this stuff. And at the same time the stuff that finds it's way to the top of the Beyond Bitcoin trending list, I will know our topics that are very valuable for me to cover and for us to talk about.

This is also potentially; you know somebody post a white paper for something amazing and it gets upvoted then I can say, "well I need to probably reach out to their Community and bring them on to talk about what they're doing because there is obviously a lot of interest". Then all of you could be there to upvote the hangout afterwards because you know that if all of you are upvoting the hangout it's going to be one of the trending things and you're going to get a cut in that.

So it works as a synergistic relationship where it works to help everybody in a 360 way as long as I'm not upvoting pictures of stacked rocks under Beyond Bitcoin.

ingenesist: They're called "cairns" and some people really like them.

Thom: What value do they have to society though? That's the bottom line in my view is there's a lot of stuff like this that will trend and get really popular. You know it's like pet rocks. It's that kind of value to society and I myself would like to endorse things that do have value to society. I'm not discounting the fact that there's artistic characteristics that might actually have value to some people in society, but I don't know, that to me seems like it's stretching it. It's very subjective and that's what this is all about is subjective content, so if there's a huge group of people that like to take pictures of stacked rocks and post them, well let them win from that. And apparently that's what's going on.

fuzzy: Definately. But what I think you're going to see is you're going to see different camps essentially who find different topics more important than others and they will work together to upvote those topics. You might have a group of people who are cancer survivors who say, "you know what dangit, we want to make sure that all the cancer stuff is upvoted and we're going to give away half of what our little cancer upvoting group upvotes this stuff and how much we make from it to help find solutions to solve this problem for humanity".

So you might have all kinds of stuff. There might be the rock stackers collectors club because they know that this is an actually very valuable means of communication in some places of the world and it's considered an art. These are things, that yeah you're saying subjective value and I 100% agree.

And I think that the cool thing about the Steem ecosystem is that you're going to have Communities that are going to have to essentially work together to upvote the things that they think are the most valuable because otherwise they might live in fear that there will be things that they feel are not valuable that will be up lifted instead. So there's multiple incentives to upvote and work together to upvote content that moves forward and an agenda that people feel is beneficial to them.

fuzzy: If you guys have other coins or projects that are really cool bring them on and we can work together to help you guys get something in return for it. Smartcoins POS systems (mentioned in chat box), all I know is that you were talking about free connection to just about any cryptocurrency through the POS systems.

Kencode Discusses Smartcoins POS, OPENPOS and BitShares Munich

Links : Smartcoins POS - Wallet Features - Upcoming Wallet - Blockchain Innovation Awards - Website

kencode: The videos are all up on our BitShares Munich Youtube channel, but I'm going to try to find that image, it's better to look at closeups.

(Shows image in chat box)

kencode: That will kind of give you an idea right there that the main screen is for the merchant and our new systems work the same way. Right now we've got two point of sale systems done. We've got a standalone system for small business that don't really have a full fledged point of sale system like Odoo or SAP or Quickbooks POS like that.

For really small businesses the standalone system is great. Because all you need is like is an old cell phone or tablet and you just install the free app and then when the customer wants to pay with a crypto like Ethereum, DASH, Dogecoin, BitShares Smartcoins or Bitcoin, whatever they have; all a merchant cashier has to do is just tap on that particular coin and it gives them a QR code and the customer scans it with their Mycelium wallet or whatever wallet they have and the few cents that usually gets charged to the merchant for the network fee gets charged to the user.

So the merchant doesn't have to pay anything. So there's no fees for the merchant, you know like when you typically accept payments as a merchant with BitPay you have to pay like 1%. So really this is a very simple way for merchants to start accepting any cryptocurrency without having to pick the right coin and worrying about the exchange getting hacked or price volatility of the coin or anything. Yeah Thom go ahead.

Thom: That process you just described where the fees are charged back to the customer, how does the merchant advertise the price if that happens? Is there any kind of surprise from the customer's standpoint or is the amount so small that it doesn't matter, where they wouldn't care if it was 2-3 cents or something like that if it's added to what the price the merchant advertises? So the buyer doesn't really notice it that much or how does that work exactly?

kencode: I'm going to give you another screenshot real quick. This image is an example of the standalone POS system. Systems like Odoo, SAP and Veritone and so on, they work the same way. It basically just shows the customer the QR code with the price, so the cashier enters $10 or something then the price displayed to the customer is $10.03 or whatever it's going to be for the customer at that moment.

If you look at that picture it shows in print the amount that the cashier typed in plus a 3 cent network fee. And one cool thing too is now that BitShares has it's rate limited free transaction fee coming up, that should make it even cheaper for the customer.

Thom: So I guess what you're saying is underneath the price is the amount that is going to be charged as a fee that is going to be added on to that price will be charged to their wallet, is that how that works?

kencode: Exactly. The QR code itself is a version 10 QR code so it holds tons of data. So if you're doing some grocery shopping and you've got like a mile long grocery receipt, if you bought like $400 in groceries, that's all stored in a JSON file and then we compress and encrypt it and Base58 encode it and then that generates the QR code and then the customer generates that QR code and they now actually have a PDF receipt automatically on their phone of their entire grocery receipt.

So merchants don't have to print out any paper receipts any more unless they want to. But this also makes accounting really easy, so when you go to pay your taxes all you have to do is use your wallet to send all of your PDF receipts to your accountant.

ingenesist: Ken if I go to Las Vegas and I approach merchants who are already accepting Bitcoin and show them your system in which they won't have to pay any fees, what economic incentive is there for me to do that if they're not buying any hardware but just using your software?

kencode: Good question. Because it doesn't cost them anything, so really it's good to talk about it because it gets crypto in the hands of businesses and gets us one step closer to mass adoption, but unless you're an OPENPOS holder you're not going to get any real reward, but one thing Chris and I have been talking about is possibly doing some kind of an IPO in the future so all of these integrations with SAP, Verifone and Intuit and so on, that the people who invest in the company in the BitShares Community can now get rewarded by being a holder.

Our original plan was just like, let's just make separate tokens for every single integration we do. But the problem with that is if you're an investor it's like well, now I have to choose the winner; is this POS system going to get adopted or not? Even though Odoo has over 50,000 retail chains using their software, that does not guarantee mass adoption or OPENPOS holders are going be be getting any kind of reward for holding that token.

So I think the smartest way for us to move forward as far as growing our company is maybe in a couple of months doing some sort of an ICO or IPO or whatever you want to call it, something like that. Then you don't have to choose the right POS system, the right wallet or the right app that we're developing, like Echo and these other projects.

We've got so many different projects going now, STEALTH and all of this stuff. So just invest in the company so that these projects can be funded, like Apple. Would you invest in Apple or just invest in one particular iPhone model? So it's a lot easier to just invest in the company. You'd have to talk about Chris about all that financial stuff, but I thought that was a pretty darn good idea. It wasn't actually my idea either it was somebody else out of our company.

fuzzy: Just real quick for those that are holding the OPENPOS tokens, their going to be benefiting from all of this stuff, but if you guys are going to have other wallets how do you find a way of ...

kencode: Wallets are not profitable unless people are upgrading their account to Lifetime Memberships or something like that. Our first wallet we did, in my opinion, was just dog slow, because we have to run Apache Cordova on it and it was already in ReactJS, which I love. But the problem is running that server on your phone just brings it to a crawl, at least on my phone; some people said they didn't notice any slowness issues.

Really my intent was to get as many people forking our code as possible, so please fork our code. If you go to Github.com/kenCode-de, that's my Github page and we keep all of our code there. So if you want to fork the BitShares wallet and just tweak the URI or something and make a whole new wallet under a different brand and everything, please do it!

So the more wallets we get out there that work with point of sale systems and the e-receipts and the loyalty point systems that all of our stuff works on now. We even have overdraft protection there.

fuzzy: So you see this project as gaining from more wallets out there that people are able to use the better off we're going to be?

kencode: Yeah. I suck as a designer. Honestly man I know my strong points and my weak points. Please fork the code and make your own version of it. It's all up there for you. We've written all the libraries for you it's all ready to go. If you look at Cryptofresh.com and you look at the homepage and on the lefthand side it's got all of the referral accounts, BitShares Munich jumped up real high on the list because BitShares Munich is used as the referral account.

Every time somebody creates a new account in the wallet. So if you want to start getting referrals, it's like $80 per referral. And BitShares Munich in just the first few weeks had 600 something referrals already. So fork our code and make your own version and start getting some referrals. It's a super easy way to start getting yourself a nice little side income.

fuzzy: Definately. I guess my question that I was asking would be more from the perspective of OPENPOS holders.

kencode: Yeah OPENPOS holders are getting rewarded from the POS system, not from the wallet. The wallet doesn't generate any kind of income or anything. It's just a referrals machine basically to bring people into our ecosystem.

fuzzy: And you're saying essentially, the POS system is going to just gain from every wallet that comes out that allows people to spend with it?

kencode: Exactly. That's why I designed a POS system so open like this. I did a lot of research before I even started this thing with the POS system because, why is Bitcoin not really being accepted at merchants like it should be? Why is it not getting any traction? Why are some merchants, even the one merchant here in Munich that is accepting Bitcoin, stopped accepting Bitcoin.

We come to find out it's because of all of the things we mentioned earlier. Because of the volatility, they've got to pay 1% to BitPay, the Customer is fumbling around with their phone all day trying to figure it out and the cashier doesn't have time for that, especially when you start looking at and this was just in a small establishment.

But if you start looking at it in a retail environment or a grocery store where you need to have transactions going through every 10-15 seconds, you cannot spend more than 8 seconds; a cash transaction takes on average 8 seconds, and this is why we designed another native Android wallet too, because you need something that's super fast.

Why would a merchant start accepting crypto? Because it's fast, it's safer, because they don't have to pay any fees, because it's already integrated with the system they already use; this is why. These are all of the things that Bitcoin did not solve, they weren't solving any of these problems. And now Bitcoin is just slower than crap.

Thom: What do you think is going to happen in July with Bitcoin?

kencode: Well the price is going to probably pop and then it's going to restabilize probably around $500, that's my guess.

Thom: It's an interesting segway. I've heard some analysis of it. I can see where it will stabilize and it's not going to go to the floor or the ceiling, I really think it will stabilize. I think there's too many people with big money at stake to let it change too rapidly. It's not decentralized enough where the people that have a big investment can't more or less nudge it and move it in the direction they want.