Sorry I am unable to provide public updates at this time about what is happening with ParkByte, As far as I am concerned it's still progressing very well but as mentioned in my previous post this project has now moved to a more commercial/adoption stage, where updates cannot be forthcoming.

Good to see we are still getting new people interested in PKB, watching the volume on Bittrex it looks hard to get a decent position without just buying into the sell wall and even then it's rather scarce.

There was no ICO on PKB only a rather short mining phase.

There isn't really much to report at the moment, a lot of work is going into the finer details of our services and approaching current operators of smart phone parking tickets.

There is only one person officially working on the project, myself, development is progressing but the current aim is to make it easily adoptable by getting partnerships using the proof of concept that is complete (It does look like any partnerships will be under a NDA until the partner is ready to launch/announce).


The project is far from dead, I do feel that project updates on this forum are going to be less frequent as I am now steering more towards the commercial part of the project which is not something I feel should/can be published on bitcointalk.

There isn't really any update to progress at the moment, I would say this project has moved into a detailed analysis of the market phase, proof of concept has basically been completed I have been able to demonstrate the basic concept to some people within this industry and they loved the idea. I now need to demonstrate with real facts why and how this could be a huge financial benefit to the industry.

I am still number crunching and awaiting more replies from many UK councils but it does seem like the average fees paid to use mobile parking solutions with a credit card are around 8-10% of total revenue as previously thought.

It is a real challenge to figure this data out as each reply seems to have a different costs setup.

So far I have received around 35 responses out of 120 to Freedom of Information Requests, This data is for the period between April 2015-April 2016

1) Total Revenue: £23.6 million
2) Total Number of Transactions: 9.5million
3) Cost to Car Park Operator (Card Processing and Service fees paid to mobile solution provider and/or directly to card processor by the car park operator): £2.2 million
4) Cost to Car Park User (Estimated Additional fees paid by car park users for using a mobile parking solution): £1.9 million

Note for Number 3: This should be "Cost of operating a mobile parking solution", regardless of whether the user or operator paid for it. I expect this to increase by around 50%, the fees paid in number 4 are either paid to the car park operator or the mobile parking solution provider depending on their specific costs setup, I still need to go over this data again to ascertain who gets this.

Based on the information collated so far I believe PKB could reduce this cost by around 70-80%


Interesting, I wouldn't mind discussing with them about how they aim to achieve their concept. From the information on that link I can see there being issues with adoption due to the ticketing data possibly being on a public blockchain, this data can be very controversial to the public and is in most parts commercially sensitive information.

It is however a good idea to have a decentralized backend and database, I have considered doing this with PKB in the future.

Well I think the APP has come a long way since the last update

If you would like to try it out please DM me on here or on twitter, or you can email me support@parkbyte.com and I shall send you the link to the APK for you to install. (There are still a couple of minor bugs that I shall fix next week)

Based on Coinomi v1.6.1
Expiring Notification 15 minutes before expiry
Expired Notification
Google Maps added
Extend ticket function added
Email Receipt added - Last email address used saved

Youtube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-phxRwMvSUM

Screenshots:

As far as I am aware, competition for accepting crypto for parking doesn't exist at the moment, the mobile parking solutions already out there use Credit Cards/PayPal you could say these are competition but I see them as future partners.

The plan of attack is to develop a full solution, do detailed market research and demo it to the companies that have a big market share that supply their services to the car park operators. This industry is pretty tight and it takes a fair bit of time to get the accreditation one would need to be able to attack this market.

I have had some recent interest from two existing companies that have mobile parking solutions, so its not a case of this is the time to do something but more a case of I am doing something now.

At the moment no company uses PKB.


Thats right, there are a few mobile solutions already. The idea is for them to add an additional payment method to their service, they won't have to do much development as they can use the ParkByte generic app, we will integrate into their system to aid adoption.

The whole solution is aimed to reduce their (or their clients) handling fees by around 75%, I estimate that the UK councils pay around £15-20m in handling fees a year, its a huge micropayment business ideal for blockchain tech.

The companies with mobile solutions may not be interested, and it doesn't need bitcoin enthusiasts to be in their company. Adoption will happen when their clients (Government Councils) apply pressure on them to reduce their credit card handling bill once a cheaper solution is available, money talks.

Crypto is becoming readily available and as more services start to accept it, the demand to use it should increase.

Page 4 of this document is what the car park operators are faced with ... http://rds.eppingforestdc.gov.uk/mgConvert2PDF.aspx?ID=20409&ku=ku


So if we use the 8.8% of revenue to calculate the fees; From 1st April 2015- 25th April 2016 London Borough of Islington took £6,128,815.08 over 1,578,480 payments using their PayByPhone service. 8.8% of £6,128,815.08 = £539,335.73.

I have calculated that if all those transactions used PKB instead of card the council could have daily settlement of FIAT for around £140,212.15 rather than £539,335.73, thats a £399,123.58 saving a year. Obviously all those transactions would have to go through PKB but as blockchain tech starts to dominate the financial industry I wouldn't expect this to be a problem.

This project is aimed at the UK to start with but it is not limited to the UK and I would like it to be used globally, the current mobile solution providers already operate globally


Bitcoin is expensive in transaction fees, slow confirmations and the companies who dominate what payments the industry accept (car park operators/mobile solution providers) could take 5% of the total supply for partnering up.

I have thought about it alot and really there are two different things here and it starts to get rather complex.

1) Blockchain/Coins - "PKB" - Decentralised not controlled by anyone
2) The company - "ParkByte Limited" - Currently 100% controlled and owned by myself - This is where the equity would come from for the crowdfunding

I think the best way forward is to keep these separate. The main reason is to not restrict other established parking companies from adopting and integrating PKB into their own apps.

The thing is ParkByte Limited will start to compete for business against established companies like RingGo and PayByPhone while at the same time wanting to join forces to use PKB by providing much of the infrastructure.

The established companies are key to quick adoption and the success of PKB because they have established contracts already in place and they usually last 5 years+.

For these companies it should be as simple as offering a new payment method that drastically reduce the fees paid to the payment service providers (Credit Card processors).

I would like there to be 2-3 established companies partnered up with ParkByte Limited using the same APP/wallet for payments by PKB, each paying ParkByte Limited a "lifetime discounted early adopter fee" for an annual subscription to support the infrastructure provided by ParkByte Limited such as the APP, Support and other development. They would also get a slice of the premine as previously mentioned.

Any company wishing to join after the partnerships have been made will have to pay a normal annual subscription fee to use the ParkByte Limited infrastructure.

I would then look at getting ParkByte Limited competing directly with the early adopters by bidding for tenders, running services exactly like theirs maybe having to go down the Credit Card routes aswell.

My main focus at the moment is getting PKB adopted by providing real life benefits and solutions, if PKB gets some interest from established parking companies and there are signs of it being adopted that volume on exchanges would shoot up fast, Currently not many in the crypto community know about the project/coin and after all there are only 4.7m PKB around, 922k of which is held in cold storage from the premine.

The figures I mentioned in my previous post were all rough guesses and I have only received one response so far to my Freedom of Information Act requests. To give you an idea of the size of the market (This is a relatively small council, Edinburgh for instance have on their website they took £5,531,715.18 from cashless parking) ...

1st April 2015 - 31st March 2016 - £1,216,152.63 income from 209,751 transactions, using the parking industry basic handling fee of 8.8% (found on a few public documents, others listed per transaction etc work out around the same 8.8% seems to be the marker).

£107,021.43 was spent on processing cashless parking transactions in the last year by 1 council (there are over 200 with parking services in UK), needless to say ParkByte infrastructure costing £0.05/transaction and with a 1% PKB-to-GBP service like BitPay offer for BTC that would of been £22,649.08, not much of a saving   

I won't be doing any sort of coin sale like I think you are suggesting and I don't have any numbers really in mind for the crowdfunding investment into ParkByte Limited, probably maximum of 20% of equity in exchange for an unknown figure.

Thanks, At the moment there isn't really much that can be done by others I am mid process of sorting out the finer details.


I agree and will most likely be doing this sooner rather than later, I have been looking at https://bnktothefuture.com/.

Market research is key for this and it should be relatively easy to get some great stats, but can take some time.

Many car parks here in UK are ran by councils which mean they are required under the Freedom of Information Act to respond to me with information so I have recently sent off around 100 requests to various councils asking for details of how many transactions and how much revenue went through similar Credit/Debit Card services.

I also found a few Annual Parking Reports councils published where there were over 10million transactions for 2014/2015, I expect this to be a lot more in 2015/2016.

So soon i should have some actual up to date stats and from what I have found out from various public publications (Tender's submitted to councils) there will be some very interesting data.

Parking Providers like PayByPhone and RingGo charge between £0.10-£0.20 convenience fee per transaction, there is also reference to the council paying the provider between 5-9% processing fees. Extortionate!

Lets do some rough maths  

Problem: Existing Credit/Debit Card Mobile APPs, going on the lowest fees:
]10,000,000 * £0.10 = £1m + 5% = £1,050,000
10,000,000 * £0.10 = £1m + (£1.50 * 10,000,000 * 0.05 = £750,000) = £1,750,000 spent on processing fees, I would guess most of that goes to the Credit/Debit Card processors

Solution: ParkByte
PKB/GBP @ £1,000 (Lol, it could happen you never know)
PKB TX Fee @ 0.00001PKB = £1000 * 0.00001 = £0.01
Lets assume there is a BitPay type service for PKB charging 1% to convert to GBP, average parking transaction is around £1.50 = £0.015
ParkByte Limited APP/Service Fee = £0.02
Total PKB Fee = £0.01 + £0.015 + £0.02 = £0.045

10,000,000 * £0.045 = £450,000

So that is £1,050,000 vs £450,000 .....
So that is £1,750,000 vs £450,000 .....

Clearly this looks like one of the best selling points of PKB, the coin.

As for the company; ParkByte Limited, if we did 10m tickets @ £0.02p fee/ticket that's a nice £200,000 income.

** Noticed I made an error in that calculation ... On the problem I did +5% on fees alone when it should be 5% on total revenue

Thanks

As I have always stated I still won't be giving actual dates for completion of different stages but there is still a fair bit of work to do.

Off the top of my head here is a list of stuff that still needs to be completed before the product is fully complete

ParkByte Web Frontend Management Console
   Variety of data interogation - Reports & Charts
   Different Tariff Structures
   Zone Management
   User Managment
   Company Management
   ParkByte Lottery
Enforcement APP
   iOS and Android needs developing in full
User APP
   Coinomi Commericial Use Licensing needs discussing in further detail
   iOS APP needs building
   Different tariff display layouts
Other Admin stuff
   British Parking Association membership
   Complete business plan
   Complete product information documents
   (Still Considering) Raise some capital to speed up the development to a release standard by selling some equity in ParkByte Limited on a crowdfunding service
   
All this said, the basic proof of concept is ready now so it is possible to demonstrate this to parking companies now

Thanks, if i do say so myself its a pleasure to use compared to other services like RingGo, Parkmobile etc. 

The APP now displays the notifications at the exact times, 15minutes before ticket expires and the second it expires, just need to do some tweaking to compare the device time to the server time and that part will be complete.

   

Thanks, I forgot to post it here

Android SDK has been updated to v23, Google Maps have now been added so users can see where they have parked and see parking zones nearby. I am also finalizing the GCM push notifications and extend ticket function so it will soon tell the user that the ticket is about to expire, extend the ticket.

       

Over the past week I have rewritten all my previous work on the APP and API. I am aware it has been a long time without anything but words and pictures from me so I plan to provide the APK to a couple of long term PKB supporters to try out and see the concept in action.

I have posted a quick video of the APP as it stands today, it does need some bugs fixing, error checking and a nicer UI design but all the major functions work nicely.

https://youtu.be/W-wvgvRe5GM

The transactions sent in the video can be seen on the blockchain First TX and Second TX

I've hardcoded the amount on the video to 0.01PKB for testing purposes.

I've just noticed the expiry time is out by an hour, that is just because the API server time didn't change inline with British Summer Time (BST) unlike my phone.

There is more to come very shortly  

Certainly is nice to see that there is some more interest in the project, but I've never really been worried about the price I believe that it was always going to be good which is why I have invested a fair bit time and money into it and will continue to put a lot of my time and money into it.

This could possibly be seen as a bad thing; 1 person controlling so much but I would say that I have 40-50% of the supply locked up until ParkByte is fully functioning. 922,178PKB Premine, 1,029,944PKB in (PQdJDTv9uUtRWtWvxcVh1wpDndjFe95UuB and PWhVi14jogiDFFxHY3UChv3FWf4gXppfCA) and probably another 400,000PKB scattered around nodes.

Once people start to notice PKB and interest grows I can see the price shooting up very quickly.

On another note I noticed we are now on 4% POS rewards, 5% ended at block 525600 on 1st March 2016, next reward reduction will be block 1051200, in 2017 reducing it down to 3% where it will stay until there is a hard fork which is very unlikely.

Just to show this project is still progressing and there is work going on in the background

The main infrastructure is now in place so I have now started working on the first version of the web based admin system for the PKB.

There is still alot to do on this part as it will display all the parking data in a variety of different ways and it will also control some parts of the APP such as parking tariff, app layout, parking zones and much much more.

It currently uses Auth0 for user authentication, JWT Secured API, AngularJS and NodeJS. Here are a couple of screenshots of the first version:

Login Page


Dashboard


Active Tickets


Parking Zones


It maybe rather quiet for abit but I shall post some more updates shortly.

I am back working on ParkByte now, thanks for your patience and support.

I have forked the latest Bitcoin Electrum client to work with ParkByte and built windows executables.

Source: https://github.com/parkbyte/electrumparkbyte
Windows Executables: https://github.com/parkbyte/electrumparkbyte/releases


I have also forked Bitpay's insight API and Explorer, the API will be needed for the PKB backend so I thought I may aswell host an alternative explorer aswell.

Live Block Explorer: http://insight.parkbyte.com/
Block Explorer Source: https://github.com/parkbyte/parkbyteinsight
API Source: https://github.com/parkbyte/parkbyteinsight-api
ParkByteCore Source: https://github.com/parkbyte/parkbytecore

I have also added some of my PKB addresses to the pool info file, this fills out the "Staked By" column. If you would like to be added to this list please PM me your staking addresses, URL and display names, alternatively please do a pull request on GitHub - https://github.com/parkbyte/parkbyteinsight-api/blob/master/etc/minersPoolStrings.json

thanks, I got a twitter notification on my phone 

I am still here and PKB is still alive from my point of view. At present though I just don't have the time to release any updates due to a family member becoming critically ill.




There are many benefits for a parking company to use a coin like this. Once some sort of contract is made public the involved companies will become official partners, influence the route I take with ParkByte, each get 5% of the coin supply from the premine amongst some other things.

How will the APP work? .... pretty much like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc8Ygg3Ag8Y

Car park users will initially buy PKB with BTC using an exchange built into the APP for example Shapeshift, there is also potentional for other means to buy PKB such as: Premium SMS, Existing parking machines, Gift Cards. Remember parking is usually a small amount of money £10 maximum on all of the "high risk" payment methods should be fine. In UK we can also send instant amounts from our bank accounts using services like Pingit, Paym etc, people use these now to buy bitcoin instantly. At this point I'm not looking too much into how people can buy PKB.

Sure there are already existing methods to pay, Cash requires collecting which costs alot of money as coins weigh a ton. Card Payments also cost money to transact, ParkMobile, Ringgo and other smartphone parking apps charge the users the £0.20p extra each transaction.

PKB costs 0.00000100PKB a transaction and could be much faster to get the FIAT into operators banks. There will also be a lottery type promotion where users can get their parking fee back directly from the premine.

Admittedly crypto is new tech, it might look complicated but humans are great learners and they adapt easily as adoption happens; just look at computers, internet, smartphones they were all complicated once upon a time.

Sorry, I have replied to your message.

I am still around, just have alot of family stuff going on at the moment.

Thanks, that is a very nice price indeed.


Sorry I don't understand, what magic keys?

Looks like we should be safe on 23rd, I do agree that it wouldn't be good for the visibility of the coin but there just isn't much new volume/interest at the moment.

Once I have a nearly complete prototype of the full system I would look at getting some reviews from some people/news sites (giving them the .apk and access to the backend systems) to get more interest in PKB.

I have to admit though, this has turned into a huge project where alot of code is needed.

This is what im working on, all links in together so parts of all of it are done

Centralised
Smartphone APP - Universal Crypto Wallet (Coinomi) with ParkByte's park feature integrated
API for Smartphone - Returns all required information depending on which zone ID is entered/scanned etc.
ParkByte Admin Panel - Zone's/Stat's/Active Tickets/Extend Ticket/Lottery
ParkByte Advertising Admin - local discounts/advertisements/impl the cashback site/stored discount coupons

Decentralised - Basic versions will be available opensource when complete
Partner/ParkByte Tariff Admin Panel - Modify tariffs on the fly or scheduled
Partner/ParkByte Tariff & Payment Engine - Generates expiry times available with complex tariffs available. Generates PKB payment address unique to walletID

I have alot going on at the moment though so when I have time I do as much as I can

Nothing to report at the moment, finalising the plan, features, researching, pricing, adding new ideas etc.

I shall be splitting the website into two parts in the coming weeks, one part for Crypto/Blockchain, one part for Services/Car Park Operators

Here is an interesting fact ParkMobile and Ringgo, two of the biggest current smartphone parking apps providers; charge the car park user £0.20 per transaction as a "convinence charge" for credit card payments.

Using this existing, accepted model, ParkByte Ltd aims to cut this down to roughly £0.01-£0.03 + 100 parkoshis tx fee per transaction using ParkByte and offering all hosting to car park operators for free, the end user would pay the "convinence fee" (or the operator) to ParkByte Ltd.

I am also future planning for re-using Zone numbers, numbers that are currently used by companies like ParkMobile and Ringgo, or other partners. So the services can go through them rather than ParkByte Limited's servers, all from one APP in the future, rapidly expanding the car park numbers.

Some nice forecasted figures ... (£0.02 * 10,000 tickets a day * 365 days = £73,000 [or 100k tickets a day, easy in london, £730,000]) ... to keep me very interested in keeping ParkByte alive and moving forward