Author Topic: [ANN] Moonstone.io development and crowdfunder diary  (Read 87583 times)

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Offline bitsapphire

kenCode asked yesterday a bunch of great questions. I thought I'd post them here for anybody else who is interested.

Questions:
1. If BitSapphire got seed or vc backing, then why are you crowdfunding Moonstone?
2. Is Moonstone open source like Jay (NXT)?
3. Is Moonstone trustless like jay?
4. Is Moonstone decentralized like jay?
5. Comparisons: What does Moonstone offer that blockchain.info doesn't? Blackcoin? Counterwallet? Omniwallet?
6. Crowdfunding: What will my BTS be used for?
7. Crowdfunding: Will I earn interest on my BTS donation?
8. Crowdfunding: If the crowdfunding does not meet its goal, how do I get my BTS back?
9. Is Moonstone entirely web-based, or do I have to download and install an app?
10. How is Moonstone more secure than most web wallets?
11. Does Moonstone rely on a traditional centralized server, ever?
12. Will Moonstone allow me to access my existing BTS account info?
13. Will Moonstone allow me to import my BTS (from Linux) json backup file?
14. Will Moonstone allow me to stop using the Linux BTS client software and migrate to Moonstone exclusively?
15. How do I get my grandparents to understand, and use Moonstone?
 

Answers:
1. Bitsapphire has no VC backing whatsoever. We are fully bootstrapped. In the market of exploding funding for crypto startups capable developers are a more scarce resource than money. We have been able to position our business model accordingly.
2. If we reach our fudning goal of 130,000 USD in BTC within our 30 day funding period we will release both the front and backend under the permissive MIT license. This will allow other projects and startups to use parts of our code and add value in their own ways. If we don't reach our goal then only the frontend will be released open source, but under the less permissive GPL 3 licence. This would mean that startups and projects would have a harder time reusing our components.
3. Moonstone is trustless in as far as we don't hold any private keys and only store encrypted wallet files. In a sense, we just help you not lose your stuff. If you don;t feel comfortable with that then you can host your own server too (provided we reach our goal!) The closest comparison to another wallet would be copay.io by the Bitpay guys
4. Moonstone is not decentralized. It accesses a full client server which however cannot forge any signatures as the server holds no private keys.
5. Well, access to BitShares of course! But beyond that we have a timeline to add native Bitcoin support and through the integration of Metaexchange in-wallet cross-chain exchange. For V2 or 3 which is pretty close down the line we want to make it possible to verify your ID on the BitShares blockchain so you can trade legal fiat, stock, and bond IOUs from around the world.
6. The crowdfunder happens completely in BTC which will be converted immediately to fiat for operation purposes. For your donation you will get 1.15 Moonstone tokens per BTS equivalent exchange value of your BTC. As an example: If the amount of BTC you donate is worth 10,000 BTS then you will receive 11,500 Moonstone tokens in exchange. We plan to buy-back all Moonstone tokens via our pre-selected but opt-out wallet delegates at a 1-to-1 ratio with BTS. This means that if everything goes according to plan can make a 15% return in terms of BTS.
7. Yes! If everything goes according to plan you will be able to earn a 15% return in terms of BTS. The cutoff duration for the buyback via the delegates is 30 months after the start of the buyback.
8. If the crowdfunder is not successful, meaning we don't reach our goal of 130,000 USD worth of BTC within the 30 day window, we will proceed to release the frontend under the GPL3 license without releasing the backend. The delegate buyback commences nonetheless and we will buyback the tokens in the same manner. No BTC can be taken back.
9. Moonstone is primarily a web application but can be downloaded to your computer similar to how the current BTS wallet can be downloaded. You can chose to either download only the thin client or the full package including the server.
10. Most BTC web wallet hold your private keys. Hence, they are effectively banks as they hold your funds for you. Moonstone does not hold any private keys, that is your job. You are in charge of your assets.
11. The full blockchain is stored in our server (or any server you wish if we reach our goal). We cannot forge any transactions and cannot steal your funds. So yes, with V1 it relies on a central server-client setup.
12 & 13. Yes. You will be able to import your existing wallet securely.
14. V1 of Moonstone won't support TITAN names. So complete migration will only be possible if you are ok with that. Future versions of Moonstone will be capable of doing TITAN transfers. There are some technical challenges we need to resolve first.
15. The design is simple and intuitive enough to understand it. In fact it's pretty close to traditional non-crypto wallets currently out there. We believe that in the near future our user base will primarily consist of people who want to hold multiple assets (IOUs, UIAs) as well as potentially multiple blockchain tokens (e.g. BTS, BTC, ETH, etc) in one and the same interface and trade between each of them effortlessly. That is our target group.

One more thing. If we reach our fundraising goal we also pledge that V2 and V3 of the wallet will also be open source MIT licensed, the only potential exception being the ID verification module.
Register and get your personal Moonstone Wallet Beta here: https://moonstone.io/login-register.html

Offline rgcrypto

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I am buying. I love 10-15% return on my money :)

Offline arhag

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Based on the outcome of the poll we have decided to denominate the buyback in terms of BTS. This means that for every BTC you send in the price will be converted into the equivalent in terms of BTS at the time of donation, and you will receive 1.15 Moonstone tokens for every BTS equivalent you donated.

How about giving the user two tokens for every BTS worth of BTC donated rather than just 1? For every 1 BTS worth of BTC donated, the donor would receive 1 MOON.A and 1 MOON.B. You would first use the delegate funds to buy back MOON.A with BTS at a rate of 1 MOON.A = 1.05 BTS. You would not buyback MOON.B while you still have less BTS in reserve than 1.05 times the amount of outstanding MOON.A yet to be bought back and destroyed. Take the average price of BTS (in USD) over the past week at the time enough BTS has been raised from delegates to be larger than 1.05 times the outstanding MOON.A supply and call that price P USD/BTS. If the total amount of MOON.A originally created as part of the crowdfund (call that S) multiplied by the price P is sufficiently greater than USD value of the crowdfund (for example 1.05 * S * P > 150,000), then you would not need to buyback MOON.B and could instead simply retire the delegates. This means that if someone simply holds their MOON.A until all of it can be bought back for BTS, the maximum dollar value percentage gain of their BTS holdings from the time of donation to the time of buyback would be 15.4% (similar to what it was before when you wanted to do the 1.15 UIA per USD donated scheme).

However, if you buyback all of MOON.A but the price P is not high enough to satisfy the inequality 1.05 * S * P > 150,000, then you can begin the buyback of MOON.B so that donors can continue to receive some interest on their BTS. Actually instead of starting the actual buyback after enough BTS is collected to buy back all remaining MOON.A, you would instead start a stage 2 in which another reserve is allocated (which contains R BTS, where R grows over time as more delegate funds are added to the reserve) for the eventual MOON.B buyback. Stage 2 ends as soon as 3 years elapses since the start of the crowdfund or R * (the 1 week moving average price of BTS in USD/BTS) > (150,000 - 1.05*S*P), whichever happens first. After the stage 2 ends, the delegates are retired and the buyback of MOON.B begins at a rate of 1 MOON.B = R/S BTS.

The end result of all of this is that if amount of value raised by the delegates within a 3 year period can reach $150,000, then donors will get back their USD value (via BTS) that they donated with at least 15% interest (and at least 5% return on BTS donated). If 3 years passes without generating enough value, then the donors will obviously get back less money. However, there is no defined time limit on at least paying back the BTS donated (with 5% interest), assuming the delegates can stay elected long enough that is. This means if BTS value increases a lot, the donors will get paid back sooner (less than 3 years) and in this case they will always have more BTS then they started with (at least 5% more) and they will have at least 15% more USD value than they started with. If BTS value continues to stagnate or even drops more, then it will take much longer to get paid back and the returns will be less. If it takes longer than 3 years, then the donor will receive less than 15% additional USD value than they started with (perhaps they will even lose USD value), although they will most likely still get back more BTS than they started with (5% more, but over a period that is potentially indefinitely long).

« Last Edit: April 06, 2015, 03:37:26 pm by arhag »

Offline bitsapphire

You seem to have a large talented team, good business acumen and can see the potential in what this technology can offer but at the same time you've seen how BitShares has struggled price wise these last 6 months.

Have you ever thought of starting a BitShares competitor instead?

Thanks for the kind words!

We don't think that the price decrease has to worry anybody as Bitshare should be a longterm play for most people. Our only worry is that BTS (and really currently any crypto tokens) are first and foremost digital commodity tokens, then secondarily in the case of Bitshares actual shares. Because BTS are such hybrid tokens, market cap has almost no meaning as traditional market cap evaluations currently used for stocks simply don't work.

Generally speaking, we are against starting new "competitors" or alternative projects, primarily because blockchains are in our opinion codified social consensus/contracts. As such the actual value of the network is in the social network, not the code itself. In a sense, the community here is what actually back the value of BTS.

That said, we are working with 3 guys part time internally on a project called Pactum. It is blockchain tech, but does not compete in any way with Bitshares. Our plan is actually for it to use DPOS. We are expecting another 6-12 months of stealth development time until we have a PoC to show... if our hypothesis works out (some pretty big ifs).
Register and get your personal Moonstone Wallet Beta here: https://moonstone.io/login-register.html

Offline Empirical1.2

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You seem to have a large talented team, good business acumen and can see the potential in what this technology can offer but at the same time you've seen how BitShares has struggled price wise these last 6 months.

Have you ever thought of starting a BitShares competitor instead?
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Offline kenCode

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Offline bitsapphire

Based on the outcome of the poll we have decided to denominate the buyback in terms of BTS. This means that for every BTC you send in the price will be converted into the equivalent in terms of BTS at the time of donation, and you will receive 1.15 Moonstone tokens for every BTS equivalent you donated.

To accomodate the changes and to do some more testing on our crowdfunder setup we are postponing the start of the crowdfunding campaign to April 9th.

Once the wallet is released as version 1.0 the buyback with the d delegates will commence. Our delegates will be operational and can be voted in by May.

Final Timeline:

  • Thursday, April 9th 2015 12.00 PM UTC (noon) the crowdfunding campaign will start
  • Saturday, May 9th 2015 12.00 PM UTC (noon) the crowdfunding campaign ends.
  • May: The wallet software version 0.9 final public test release will be made (with the MIT license if the crowdfunder reaches our goal of 130k USD)
  • June: Version 1.0 of the wallet is released after extensive public testing.

If you have any questions please let us know!
Register and get your personal Moonstone Wallet Beta here: https://moonstone.io/login-register.html

Offline clayop

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Offline mdj

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We have decided to hold the fundraiser exclusively in BTC, there won't be a BTS or bitAsset option. The reasons are that the liquidity between BTS and BTC is so low that selling 130k USD worth opf BTS into BTC to cash out into fiat would according to our calculations move the market simply too much.

Disappointing but your reasoning is certainly justified. This further emphasises how desperately we need t BTS/USD gateway! If I didn't live in a country so against cryptocurrencies I'd be pursuing that very lucrative venture...

Offline bitsapphire

We have decided to hold the fundraiser exclusively in BTC, there won't be a BTS or bitAsset option. The reasons are that the liquidity between BTS and BTC is so low that selling 130k USD worth opf BTS into BTC to cash out into fiat would according to our calculations move the market simply too much.

However we would like everybody to take part in the poll in this thread and let us know whether you would like to get 1.15 USD or 1.15 BTS through a buyback. Our original plan was to do a bitUSD buyback but it seems there might be interest in doing the unit of account in terms of BTS rather than USD. After all, the community is long on BTS.

Depending on the outcome of the poll we might have to postpone the corwdfunding campaign another day.

Please vote in the poll in this thread and let us know what you think!
Register and get your personal Moonstone Wallet Beta here: https://moonstone.io/login-register.html

Offline monsterer

If the majority of users are BTS holders, running the fundraiser in bitAssets like bitUSD will cause the same amount of downward pressure on BTS as if you just sold the UIA into the BTS market, since BTS holders would need to buy up bitUSD in order to then purchase the UIA.

If the goal is not to move the BTS price down, then running the fundraiser in BTC only is one way to achieve this.
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Offline merivercap

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It may be easier to pay back in BTS since Moonstone delegates will be paid in BTS.  I agree that most crowdfunders will expect BTS to rise over time and the primary reason people will be supporting the crowdfunding is to greatly help the Bitshares ecosystem rather than another ecosystem.  Hence the preference for crowdfunders would probably be to be paid back in an equivalent BTS amount.

Anyways I think this is an incredibly important project and an MIT license would really open things up for the ecosystem.  I was never a fan of GPL licenses.  It is better for people to view open source software as a gift to the society and those that contribute should be recognized & commended for it, but it's better for the ecosystem to not have strings attached.  If people wanted to make money off it instead of view it as a gift, then they could keep it closed and just sell it.  If people want to build branches off the an original open source project and make money off it that will help the ecosystem even more.  Contributers and donors to projects can always make free branches to compete against for-profit branches.  I'm a fan of Linus Torvalds, but I'm also a fan of economics and I don't think I would have had to live so many years with buggy & insecure Windows software all my life if someone could make money off building an easy-to-use Linux installation under a different license.  I know it's sacrilegious to say in tech circles, but I actually preferred Windows to Linux because it was and probably still is easier to use.  I know some of the tech elite don't really care to make things easier and would rather just have everyone start coding, learning advanced cryptography, cold store their coins etc. and it's fine to have that opinion.  One question I would ask is do they want to make money?  0.1% of the consumer market is not very big.

Anyways I shouldn't blab on too much... I think the Moonstone project is great and important.  I think the MIT license is better for the bitShares ecosystem & the Moonstone team. 

Sidenote: I do agree with onceuponatime the dollar is overvalued.  The Yen & Euro have depreciated via competitive devaluation and that trend  can extend for some time, but I would expect what goes up will go down and it will be the dollar's turn to weak significantly probably between 6 mo's to a few years time.  All speculation.
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Offline clayop

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"This could only work in terms of BTS. We have pondered this option for some time. What we could do is issue 1.15 moonstone tokens for every BTS we receive (or BTC in terms of current BTS market price) and then repay directly in terms of BTS from the delegate proceedings. Some really early Bitcoin mining operations used to do this. However this would mean that only people long on BTS would donate."



I will make a substantial donation if it can be in BTS and the return is 1.15 x BTS donated.
If that is not possible, I will still donate - but much less.

It's plausible IMO, but will take 52 months.
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Offline clayop

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I think 15% is a considerably high rate, if Moonstone will buy back in guarantee. I don't think it will take 30-ish months, but expecting 12~18 months. It's 10~15% APR. while Chinese banks have 5% interest rates now. So it's better to save your spare money in Moonstone than traditional bank in terms of profitability.
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Offline onceuponatime


"This could only work in terms of BTS. We have pondered this option for some time. What we could do is issue 1.15 moonstone tokens for every BTS we receive (or BTC in terms of current BTS market price) and then repay directly in terms of BTS from the delegate proceedings. Some really early Bitcoin mining operations used to do this. However this would mean that only people long on BTS would donate."



I will make a substantial donation if it can be in BTS and the return is 1.15 x BTS donated.
If that is not possible, I will still donate - but much less.