2bfree,
Do you mean for bot developers or users?  For users, there are many USPs.  The first one is that you can validate bot ownership.  If you have followed Civic and seen how they (and a few other companies) are using blockchain to verify personal identity, we are doing that for bots.  Since bots are starting to be spoofed, this is one USP.

The second USP for users is that the audit and compliance capabilities of the blockchain allow users to deploy bots in workflows that require compliance, which they can't do today because bots are not auditable.

The third USP for users is that they get a full marketplace controlled by the Botchain so that bots can find any new skills or information they need to do their work.

For developers, the  first USP is that they can now sell to enterprises because they can add compliance features to their bots.  The second USP is that they get faster growth and adoption because they get access to a marketplace shared by all bots.

So far, we have 12 other bot developers signed on, which we will announce closer to the ICO date.

Rob

Fonix,
Your statements about airline miles are incorrect.  You can indeed buy miles directly, and most times when you buy a ticket, they will offer you the chance to purchase extra miles.  You can also sell or trade your airline miles.  Google it and many sites will come up.  This is what you are missing - having a currency that ties to the underlying activity on the platform enables shared value creation. 

Your ebay and amazon analogy doesn't accurately characterize tokenization use cases.  Think about how it works today with bitcoin - most sites that accept bitcoin price in their local currency, but you can pay with an equivalent amount of bitcoin that varies all the time.  Why would anyone do that instead of just using local fiat?  Because bitcoin offers benefits local fiat doesn't.  Tokens are about programmable money that can take on new properties for the network as needed.

As for your concerns about transfer, when you send a message across the internet, it goes through multiple layers of protocols, and is transformed at every one as needed, from English text all the way down to optical pulses of light.  It's seamless.  And tokenization will be the same.  You will still pay in local fiat currency at your interface point to the customer, but the connections between people on the network will use the token the same way they use any other protocol.

Here's the issue, let's say I want to do bot validation, and I want to do it without a token.  How does that work?  I need a centralized server to do that, or, if I have decentralized servers, I need an approval process to add new servers, and I need to figure out how to pay them.  If your server is in Moscow and mine is in Seattle and we both need to validate that a bot is who it says, how does each party get paid?  One has to buy the fiat currency of the other and pay them, or at least, someone at some point has to do that.  It's actually a more complicated supply chain now. 

I think you are missing the big picture here.  Tokenization provides a lot of value for almost any kind of network use case beyond what fiat currency can do.  I think in the next 10 years almost every network will be tokenized because of these advantages.

Rob

Fonix,
I would add a few points.  First of all, lots of companies do have rewards programs that are very similar to cryptocurrencies.  I haven't been to a McDonald's in many years but perhaps they do have something similar.  Secondly, blockchain technology is new.  McDonald's may indeed have their own cryptocurrency at some point.  I fall into the camp that thinks many many companies will issue their own tokens.  The fact that they haven't done it yet doesn't mean they won't.  It's new technology.  They didn't have the opportunity in the past.

Secondly, this provides a new way to build marketplaces.  The current standard is that as a B2B company, once you get a decent size, you launch your own marketplace.  Each marketplace is different and this sucks for developers.  It stifles competition and causes winner-take-most markets.  For example, if you are building a CRM add-on, you probably build for Salesforce, not the rest of the market.  Wouldn't it be awesome if you could build once and there was a single CRM markeplace?  To get CRM vendors to agree on a technical standard and share a single marketplace is tough.  But a blockchain could help make that work.  It's probably too late for CRM, but the bot ecosystem could evolve this way.

We could indeed raise a Series B round and just build Botchain and own the whole thing, as you could with almost any blockchain concept.  We don't think that is what is best for the bot industry, developers, or customers.  The only way to get people to agree on sharing and trust is to use a system/network that is independent.

Rob

Hi Everyone,

We are a venture backed company ($12M in equity capital raised) with a strong team that has built and sold enterprise software companies.  Today we are officially announcing our token sale for the Botchain Network, that will start on January 16th.

Official site: https://botchain.talla.com

Telegram: https://t.me/botchainICO

Email updates: https://botchain.talla.com/#subscribe

Webinar next week for questions:  http://pages.talla.com/webinar-botchain-whitepaper

Medium post (with updates coming): https://medium.com/@robmay/explaining-the-botchain-network-part-1-b2f6fa2f2860

If you want to learn more about Talla, I recently gave a talk at Launch Scale on ICOs and how we decided to do one.
https://twitter.com/TWistartups/status/930990099612950528

The challenge in building any network is that you have to show value when the network is small, so that people will use it even before the network effects kick in, otherwise you risk not getting to scale.  But, you also need a system that grows stronger as more people join the network.  Botchain has both pieces.

To start, botchain uses the immutable ledger features of a blockchain to provide archiving, compliance, auditability, and proof of existence for bot activity.  If a bot of some sort has to be part of a compliance workflow like HIPAA or SOC2, that will now be possible.  We have already signed 5 bot partners and will be announcing them as the ICO date approaches.

On top of that, Botchain has features that enable it to become a marketplace for bot skills and knowledge modules, which we expect partners to build and enhance.  In addition to that, we support bot identity, registration, and validation features.

Token details:
There will be 30M tokens.  We expect to sell half publicly through SAFTs, a pre-sale, and the ICO.  Any unsold tokens allocated to the public will be burned.  We will use escrow for a $15M minimum raise.  We will probably impose a cap as well but the final value has not yet been determined.

Everyone who wants to develop for Botchain or use bots on Botchain will need tokens.  If you are a developer with a dApp idea for Botchain, we would love to hear from you. 

We believe in the future, bots will need their own currency as more and more happens in the bot-economy.  We believe Botchain can be the anchor of that economy.  Thank you for taking a look and we look forward to your questions and ideas.

To clarify some things based on questions some of you have asked:
- We intend to sell 50% of the tokens
- Minimum target is $15M, cap is $50M
- 5% of tokens will go to a governance foundation, which will have a Board consisting of 5 members who will make decisions about things that come up
- 20% of tokens will be reserved for partners and advisors
- 15% will go to founders

Why use our own token?
- I think of a token as an abstraction layer for a blockchain.  We know we need to move blockchains as they advance and improve, and so having our own token allows us to abstract that work away from our customers.  It would be a terrible experience to go to a customer and say "we know you've been buying Either to use botchain but we are moving to X and now you have to buy Y."  Using botcoins allows us to abstract away the underlying technology changes.  I think of tokens as a virtualization layer for blockchains, the way VMs are for servers.

Hi Everyone,
Next week we will officially announce a new project, which you can preview at https://botchain.talla.com/  We are a venture backed U.S. company, with an experienced team, and we have gone through a lot of legal and technical analysis to do this the right way and run a very strong transparent ICO.  What we would really love from this group is some feedback to help us finalize messaging and issues before the announcement.  If you are into A.I. and blockchain, you may like reading our whitepaper at https://botchain.talla.com/draft-whitepaper.pdf

The basic idea is this - as autonomous agents proliferate in organizations, particularly as reinforcement learning becomes more popular, these bots won't always behave exactly as predicted.  In addition, many of these bots will be part of work processes that require certification, like SOC2, HIPAA, or something similar.  How will they be audited?  How will bot owners enforce compliance?  Can bots be spoofed?  When two bots talk, where should the conversation be recorded?  We believe the blockchain is a great solution for some of this.  Our vision is that every bot action creates a digital certificate, where that certificate is a hash of the state of the bot at that moment in time, and stored on a blockchain so it is auditable and verifiable.  Our top advisor on this project is the former Blockchain CTO for Ernst and Young.

The feedback has been strong, and we will have some early bot partners to announce, but will wait until just before the ICO so we have a longer list.

Our biggest point of struggle on the messaging is that, because there are so many promising blockchains, we want to start on Ethereum but intend to move to a new blockchain as we see how the ecosystem plays out.  We don't yet know which blockchain will have the right feature set for us, but we know the current options are limited in what they can do.  The biggest thing we could use your help with is how to talk about this in an intelligent way to the token buying community.  Maybe what I've said here is fine, but, it seems like many token buyers expect things to be well defined and this part of our roadmap isn't.  We would love to hear any ideas you have about the project, and about the roadmap question in particular.

Thanks
Rob
CEO, Talla.com