WATCH AROUND THE BLOCK | EPISODE 1 | GENESIS BLOCK -> https://lab.paratii.video/play/GLdcTbPq9fXb
READ THE TWEETS -> https://twitter.com/ParatiiVideo/status/1043214529805672448

Around the Block is a documental webseries about technology, decentralisation and politics. It is made of interviews with well known figures in “cryptoland”, like Zooko Wilcox (Zcash creator), Gavin Wood (co-founder of Ethereum), Don Tapscott (researcher and author of Blockchain Revolution) and others.

Divided in four episodes, the series walks the viewer through the minds behind the creation and maintenance of blockchains, giving a historical perspective of bitcoin and the developing efforts that came after it.

The webserie highlights personal convictions, political beliefs and future hopes of those who’ve been dedicating their lives to decentralise power structures and build the foundations for a new web. In the first episode, “The Genesis Block”, you’ll see:

An introduction to the concept of blockchain in its first implementation, Bitcoin, and a historic view of previous attempts in creating digital money;
The mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, and that of the billions of dollars he/she/it/them mined in bitcoin and never spent;
Proposals to extend or reform blockchains, and disintermediate other industries rather than the financial one.

The second episode in the series, called “Scars of Consensus”, will be launched in the week following the first. Both subsequent ones, in the following two weeks. A timer for next episodes can be found on paratii.video/around-the-block, since Friday the 21st of September. All episodes will be available for free on the Lab (lab.paratii.video), a peer-to-peer video site, with a focus on the curation of high-quality crypto-related content, that aims to become a playground for experimenting distribution and monetisation models involving cryptocurrencies. It was created by the development team behind Paratii, and is all open-source.



Paratii is a non-profit entity that researches and develops open source code to decentralise the distribution, curatorship and monetisation of online videos. Represented by an Estonian foundation, it was created by Brazilians, and has spawned contributions from developers of 7 different countries. Lab.paratii.video is one of the products built by the initiative.

Please let me know if there are any questions I can help answer

http://paratii.video/around-the-block/

A documentary miniseries about the minds behind the Blockchain will be released soon on Paratii!

We're discussing possibilities for an upcoming Bounty Program and should have more information soon. What do you find important in a Bounty Program?

Transcoding is the process of taking a raw video file and reprocessing it into several different, smaller streams. It's what allows you to watch a YouTube video in 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p or 1080p when the original upload was only in 1080p. Livepeer is a decentralized network of transcoders that allows its users to hire transcoders as needed, on demand. Paratii will use Livepeer as its transcoding solution as soon as their codebase supports a few features that are important to us - we've been working closely together to make sure that we're aligned with each other's needs.

Hopefully that made sense, let us know if there's any other questions we can help with!

Here's an example of the player embedded on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/EuSouRye/status/1010022494101618688

It looks quite a bit nicer on Medium, but here is the Token Summary for those who don't wish to leave the forum:

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PTI: token summary
An overview of the token that incentivises the Paratii attribution and curation protocol.




I. PTI Token

The Paratii protocol relies on a native utility token ($PTI) that grants access to agents willing to provide value to the network and compete in earning its rewards.
The token is emitted according to the ruleset encoded in the main net versions of the ParatiiToken.sol and Curated Registry (TCR) contracts, and inseparable from the protocol. Network stakers who provide worthy curation services earn tokens via inflationary rewards. Tokens will be issued over an extended period of time.

II. The Protocol
Paratii is a protocol for attribution and curation. Its existence is justified by the lack of open registries and public monetisation tooling for the online video industry. To claim the ownership of a feature-length movie and go on to distribute and monetise it digitally, in Brazil, for example, a film studio undergoes a months-long, expensive process through a few public institutions. On the other extreme, YouTube allows one to self-publish a video and activate monetisation in a few seconds — the downside being the requirement to waive away 45% of future earnings by default, from the start. The “creative middle class” needs more alternatives in between — safe enough, easy enough, fair enough. We aim to offer video developers a next generation monetisation playground to build upon.
It all starts with attribution. For Paratii, an attribution is a claim, by any identity, that carries a unique resource identifier (URI), a proof of rights, and a stake. Claims are included in a token curated registry, from which applications can read semantic information to sort videos to their users and allow them to browse safe, curated content. For content owners or distributors, Paratii offers a unique entry point for monetising video beyond the limits of the currently dominant models. For app developers, a source of reliable media and semantic metadata, besides an open source streaming engine, if they come to build with Paratii.JS or any library that bundles disintermediated video service providers.



A “curation market with infinite staking” allows for curators to signal in favour or opposition to particular listings, according to their conformance to copyright and other preset rules; PLCR voting (similarly as in the canonical TCR design) is used to achieve objective outcomes and maintain or delist particular videos (read about the Foundation’s decreasing influence on section X.e.).

Videos in the registry can be challenged by token holders willing to put up an amount equivalent to the list’s minDeposit. The less popular a video is, the less costly it is to “question” it, but also the higher the rewards per stake for those who choose to “back” it. Staking early on towards a video which ends up becoming popular is more profitable than just sprinkling around riskless stakes.
Note that registry applications fit the structure of a listing in the standard TCR implementation (given as arguments, below, are what we call the URI, the stake, and the proof of rights, respectively):
function apply(bytes32_listingHash, uint_amount, string_data

The Paratii protocol combines a “mother” token curated registry with potentially infinite “children registries”. Individual entities (humans or machines) that presume the ability to outperform the curation output of the lists currently available — what should initially be straightforward, given the generic nature of the mother-TCR — can deploy a bonding curve market maker contract to spawn a new token, that will be used to govern a sub-list of the main curated registry. To kickstart a sub-list, one must stake an arbitrary amount of PTI tokens as a collateral. A channel is a type of sub-list. A publication with shared access (as in Medium) would be another.
The deployed market maker mints newly created tokens for whoever wants to acquire them with the mother token, and allows for these to be redeemed against the collateral held, at any point. Prices are algorithmically determined and get higher as demand for the token increases, with redeemed tokens being burned to maintain a desired reserve ratio between the amount escrowed in collateral and the supply of circulating tokens (i.e. a bonding curve). This can ideally be simplified, for curators, by a “bond / unbond” interface that translates such specific engagement with a list.

We call these “custom tokens”, once they can be programmed with built-in functionality besides the natively enabled feature of “fractional equity ownership”.

• One can deploy a channel with an access token, that floats in price according to popularity of the content listed or broadcast, translating the demand for the content into objective value.
  
• One can deploy a list of “common goods” and coordinate for their well use. For example, think of unused recorded footage, that film production companies sit on, and don’t ever have an incentive to share or recycle. By deploying a list of such content, and a token that gives both access to consumption (hold or pay to download without watermarks) and right of entry (stake to apply your footage too), one can kick start a grassroots Shutterstock-like membership club, with a “ticket” that reflects its value, and that can also be used to redistribute further revenue (e.g. proceedings from sales).
• One can deploy a segmented list that is referenced by media promoters or advertisers and drives earning to listees[/i], yielding returns to the creator of the category through appreciation or commissions.
  
• One can deploy a crowd sourced channel, selling out rights or distributing them selectively (think an online school with teams spread out and in need of external contributors).
• One can deploy a normal subscription service, through autonomously selling non-transferable access tokens.

Read more about the Paratii protocol in our upcoming™ new white paper. Subscribe to our newsletter and don’t miss out.

III. Utility

Media-related p2p applications need “meta-layers” in order to leverage the network effects of decentralisation while minimising exposure to liabilities through forms of self-regulation. For a listee, being in the Paratii registry holds the inherent benefits of ensuring proper attribution of work and potentially being exposed to audiences via distinct applications. Besides, it grants applicants access to the native monetisation features available. This is not a fixed offering: we begin with simple direct consumer-to-creator payment methods (e.g. tipping), and expect to broaden the range of options consistently, while fostering experiments and incorporating whichever developer contributions that turn out to be valuable to creators.
In a broader sense, Paratii is a protocol for shared ownership of media assets, not in the aspect of equity, but in that of stakes. How to measure the utility of being in such a registry? What’s the value it provides? The science to formalize such questions and the procedures to answer them are in the works. We outline four approaches to assess the value of token curated lists:

• Measuring the amount of value being captured by listees in comparison to equivalent assets which are not in the registry: the amount of VC capital driven to Messari listees, the amount of ad-revenue driven to domains whitelisted by AdChain, the monetisation surplus being captured by videos on Paratii. Requires empirical data.
  
• Finding a proxy for the amount of value the list secures: in the absence of empirical data, one can estimate, for a given industry or sector, the value in being compliant with a specific rule set, (transparence standards, in the case of Messari; fraud-preventing practices, in the case of AdChain; attribution rights, in the case of Paratii). Coordination tools can have inherent value: think what Content ID would be worth, if stripped off from YouTube and redistributing “faulty” monetised revenue to worthy contributors.
• Calculating the cost to permanently diverge the list from its focal point: if the value of the Bitcoin network is proportional to the cost of breaking its objective function (i.e. double-spend), a list’s value can be seen as that of “bringing its ruleset” down, through bribery or any other forms of attack. Ideally, as a result of effective design, this comes down to a natural equilibrium: the cost for attackers is equivalent to the price interested network participants are willing to pay to keep the registry secure (attacks costing a function of active stakes at any given time). How much would the collective of crypto projects pay to self regulate and avoid external regulatory interference? How much are domain owners and advertisers willing to put up to ultimately combat fraud? How much are creators and publishers willing to stake to earn more than they currently do, in legacy monetisation platforms?
• Ultimately, TCR-like tokens become the unit of account for a kind of specialised curatorship work. Assessing the value being paid to equivalent work by real-world businesses can yield good proxies. How much, on average, does a video platform pays for its team of content filterers (Paratii)? How much SSPs spend on verifying the domains they pull inventory from (AdChain)? How much is spent by investors on “crypto diligence” (Messari)?

IV. Categorisation
The PTI is a work-token, where “a service provider stakes (AKA bonding) a native token to earn the right to perform work for the network”. Work tokens address free-riding: holders with idle tokens that are not put to use forgo cash flows opportunities and end up having their ownership diluted. The work, in our case, is that of curatorship.



This is similar in nature to the designs of AdChain, Messari, Civil, Relevant and Ocean, when it comes to the usage of a tokenized registry for weeding out pieces of content that do not abide by an overarching rule set, through rewarding righteous curators and slashing misbehaving agents.
The PTI can also be seen as a proof-of-human work[/i] token. In this sense, it is akin to Numerai, Earn.com, Steem and other crypto-assets which reward work that’s not fully objective (or that has to arrive at objective outputs from partially subjective inputs). We believe curated registries will accrue value efficiently, once their token’s price derives directly from the value provided by the registry over which the token confers the power to govern.

V. Usage
We foresee two immediate forms of usage for the PTI token, and three to be developed further:

• Curators who find their way to earn reliably — by constantly helping surface good content — will use the token as a ticket to play the underlying crypto economic game.
• Mid-size creators or publishers interested in opening channels in a global registry that offers out-of-the box monetisation tooling will acquire tokens to stake and bootstrap their content/lists among others. They may also “feed lists or channels” with consumption incentives (paying watchers directly to watch, instead of going through ads).
• Custom tokens with flexible monetisation properties for playlists / channels can be issued using PTI as a collateral (applies to developers, and, depending on their products, to creators and curators too).
• Engaged network participants (end users) willing to take part in rewards may delegate PTI towards curators and contribute to the security of the Paratii registry.
• Weighted influence on broader governance decisions (e.g. altering the registry’s parameters; accepting new types of collateral).

It is important for widespread adoption that direct monetisation, in the eyes of content consumers, is agnostic when it comes to the underlying means of exchange. Users willing to pay for whichever content format shall be able to do so in ether, in dollars, in a stablecoin, or whichever option is more convenient for them. We’re constrained by the realm of ERC20s, initially, but can think of anything up to allowing seamless fiat on/off-ramping with an integration along the lines of a Coinbase widget. In the beginning, PTI can also be used for these purposes.
An exemplified interface for interacting with a video registry and staking tokens from a web browser follows:



VI. Value drivers
PTI will afford initial liquidity through the deployment of a bonding curve contract, collateralised in ether, for any Ethereum address to PTI tokens with ether, or redeem them for ether according to an algorithmically set buy/sell price curve. The same template shall be applied to custom tokens issued by creators or curators to monetise specific videos or playlists under dynamic priced access (e.g. where early fans can redeem their access tokens later on, back for the network’s native token, profiting if the content’s popularity has grown — or just keep the access rights for the increasingly valuable content).
Factors increasing demand:

• Creating channels has been “paying out”, and there’s increasingly more creators or publishers willing to stake to do it.
• Staking towards other videos and earning for being a trendspotter has been paying out, and there’s increasingly more curators willing to join the game.
• Deploying sublist begins to be profitable, such that “categorizers” or segmentators start to require more PTI to back new segmentations and compete for either audience or external revenue sources.
  
• There’s positive reception towards the token, communications are scaling and there’s demand from exceptionally engaged new users willing to become active network participants.

Factors reducing circulating supply:

• There’s a frequent flow of PTI getting collateralised for the issuance of custom tokens by creators or curators.
• Participation in staking gets and remains high.
• Outstanding PTI are being being frequently redeemed back for ether via its market maker contract.
  
  

VII. On monetary Policy

A total supply of 150 million PTI will be emitted by the network. Emissions of block rewards will follow a primarily linear curve, combined with a slow exponential one. The Paratii protocol will emit 75% of tokens in 8 years. More details are in our upcoming™ new paper.

VIII. Token supply allocation
The distribution of PTI Tokens is designed to incentivize network participants to support a thriving ecosystem for the creative middle class. Significant work is required to build the public tooling, software and integrations needed to serve all of Paratii stakeholders as the project evolves.
We follow an industry-wide, non-formalised convention of allocating at least 6/10 of issuance to the network’s native capital reallocation mechanism (minting block rewards). Also pretty conventional is the allocation of 12% of the supply to the non-profit Foundation backing the ecosystem.



IX. Token Generation
The Paratii Foundation aims to incentivise early adopters to use, criticize, build upon and experiment with the Paratii protocol and product suite. Dozens of approaches have been tried out in search of the fairest or more distributive token generation designs. On one extreme, are the most capital concentrating ones: ICOs, multiple pre-sale round-juggling, hyperflexible hype-riding hard caps. On the other, organic distributions on which a network’s issuance is simply kickstarted, and contributors begin to get rewarded (the most extreme case being bitcoin itself).
Staking protocols, particularly, require circulating tokens in order to function. There needs to be a mechanism to make tokens available to stakeholders so that there are tokens to be staked after all. Some projects go for airdrops, others allow users of a mother network to MerkleMine tokens (e.g. Livepeer), there’s even those who bootstrap a network with PoW and switch to PoS on the fly (e.g. Ethereum).
We aim to launch our first alpha applications on the Ethereum public test net first, in order to battle-test the curation machinery still without programmed economic incentives. When in Test Net, the Foundation aims to sponsor rewards to top performing content owners, in the eyes of curators / token holders, giving purpose for the crypto economic game to start functioning, even if with test tokens (more in our separate go-to-market document). Towards the end of 2018, we’ll launch the PTI token contract on the Ethereum Main Net. Extrinsic rewards may continue indefinitely, but creators and curators will be henceforth playing by the economic rules agreed upon. In the beginning of 2019, we aim to start allowing for the deployment of sub-registries and custom tokens, broadening the possibilities to videos in the Paratii registry.



X. Distribution Design
The guiding principle behind the PTI token distribution design is fairness. With a broad set of stakeholders (videomakers, editors, researchers, curators, archivists, studios, publishers, the crypto-community, the larger digital media ecosystem, the Foundation’s team, open source contributors), we aim for a smooth offering that respects each groups’ values.
X.a. High-Level Design Objectives

• Funding the ecosystem responsibly, at a maximum 6.8m dollars hardcap under a total supply of 150m tokens, and pushing for as much as two thirds of oustanding tokens to be in the hands of network users, to help ensure a decentralised community.
• Treat creators and curators as first-class citizens, and prioritise fairness in rewarding them, avoiding capital injection mechanisms that may favour one-time speculators (e.g. an ICO).
• Reward long-term acquirers, strategically influential entities, and believers in the value of the network.
• Ensure that the Paratii Foundation receives the required funds to support the network, activate the ecosystem and have a “cushion” to be able to meet any potential liabilities.
• Ensure that the distribution is transparent and inspires confidence towards large content providers and enterprises, so that they are comfortable in participating and transacting within the network.
• Respect and comply with applicable laws.

X.b. Previous Purchasers
The Paratii Foundation has committed to exchanging 15% of the total PTI supply with acquirers:

• Angel (3.45% tokens)
• Seed (5.10% tokens)
• Private (6.45% tokens)

X.c.Seed and Private Purchasers
We have flexible plans, the most expending one requiring no more than U$6,8M in total for the initial deployment of the protocol, network and ecosystem.
These phases are reserved for early acquirers and advisors that provide product, technical and business feedback leading up to our go-to-market plan execution and expansion. In return for early access, they will be subject to specific lock up. It is key that these contributors are strategically onboarded, as their share will constitute a relevant portion of the circulating supply in the early days of the network.

X.d. Network Launch Distribution
90 million tokens (60%) will be directly made available to network participants, ultimately. Instead of selling a large allocation of tokens to public unsophisticated investors (e.g. an ICO) before true users, we’ll bootstrap the emergence of the network by setting a “dilution rate” that assigns a share of issuance to on-boarding users (more details in our upcoming™ paper). This will begin at an abnormally high parameter and diminish in importance (can’t state the same as for nominal value) as more accounts start participating in the protocol. The decrease is designed not to be asymptotic but laddered, reaching “lower degrees” (not literally ½ halvings) as the amount of addresses interacting with the Paratii registry reaches exponentially distancing milestones.
These adjustments alter a share discounted from block rewards, but not inflation itself. In the first 7 days of its life on Main Net, the Paratii protocol will issue between 1% and 2% of the total supply of tokens. In the following week, that relative value is expected to drop by anything between 1.5 to 6 times, depending on network participation. The rhythm of issuance decrease is expected to remain sharp until normalisation - the curve is asymptotic and approximately 75% of all PTI will be issued within 8 years.

X.e. Foundation’s reserves
18 million tokens will be held in reserve for the Foundation to sustain further development of the technology and expansion of the ecosystem. A percentage of the liquid amount in reserve, in line with a participation target publicly stipulated, will at any given time be actively staked in curating the registry. This means the influence of the Foundation in curating the registry will be noteworthy in the network’s early days, allowing for agile coordination when necessary, but will diminish over time as the community of token holders and its culture mature.

X.f. Token distribution schedule
PTI will be released to network participants according to the following plan:



The reason why we aim to release a subset of previously acquired or earned tokens soon after launch is the requirement of circulating tokens for the stake-based curation machinery to work. The distribution prioritises agents who most likely will do good use of them, in line with the vision being put forth by the Paratii community (join it!).

XI. Use of Proceeds
The capital raised will be allocated mainly to expand the team and keep hiring world-class technical talent, fund the activation plan described in our separate go-to-market plan document, ensuring widespread liquidity and covering general expenses. An itemised table can be seen below.



🔎 XII. Factsheet



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Thank you for the comments! We do want to be as transparent and professional as possible in sharing our vision for the project and it's great to get good feedback in that respect.

Speaking of investor information, we just (literally minutes ago) released our token summary. It's super in-depth and goes into every aspect of the PTI token's use, distribution and development:
https://medium.com/paratii/pti-token-summary-edf048d36245

Please check it out if it interests you and let us know your thoughts here!

https://twitter.com/ParatiiVideo/status/1008732724138520576

This twitter thread goes into the potential of TCRs as tools for curation, which is quite relevant to Paratii - check it out if you're interested!

Looking at the other threads and projects we don't really fit the same profile, but we're also not dependent on ICO funding (in fact, we're not doing one). Having this thread works as a place to point people who want to get to know the proejct and to introduce those who are actually interested in learning more about how it works. Quality over quantity and all that.

I don't see it on there, @GodSatoshl

Appreciate it!

We're far from being the only fish in what is - thankfully - a very large pond. We're excited for other projects in this space because we believe that cooperative competition is the way forward for decentralized video and crypto in general. In fact, we work closely with other projects such as Livepeer and IPFS.

I need to do more reading on Buzzshow to be able to respond to that specifically, but from what I have seen their strategy has been to build a platform that is centralized and then convert it, while we're building a decentralized platform from the ground up. Right now, on Buzzshow.com, you're actually watching YouTube videos, while on portal.paratii.video they're hosted on IPFS, which is decentralized. In fact it may be that we have very different goals, though, and that they don't even plan on hosting content in a decentralized fashion, just the coin rewards, but I don't know enough about the project to tell.

It's also important to note that Paratii is far from being a closed protocol or platform. In fact, we welcome developers to build their own niche-specific applications on top of it, and services like Buzzshow could eventually pull their videos from Paratii instead of or in addition to YouTube if they so desired, expanding their scope (win-win!) It's also worth noting that we're the only project of our scope in the second largest video market in the world, Brazil, and our market activation is very focused here. In a country that has so many of its own wildly successful services (eg. 99Taxi for ridesharing, OLX for marketplace, Zap for real estate), we find that a big reason to believe in our potential.

In terms of competition, I have this to say: we're building what we're saying we're building. It's up to you to make a judgment call on whether you think that will bear fruit, but our team, advisors and investors are sure enough to put all of our effort behind it, and we believe that it brings something new and relevant to the table. Keep an eye on us and you just might be pleasantly surprised.  

The future of online video is unfolding before our eyes. Last month, Livepeer went live on the mainnet with its pioneering distributed network of transcoders. It was a big step for the team, and a huge one for the ecosystem - we’ll start to witness more and more ‘migrations to mainnet’ as the year progresses. The omnipresence of Big Tubes and Flixes may be on the verge of being challenged by their blockchain-inspired counterparts soon. Paratii aims to be an important player in this transition.

This ANN post is longer and more informative than most. Reading through it, you should have a pretty good understanding of what Paratii is all about. If you don’t want to, here’s the TL;DR:
Paratii is a peer-to-peer peer-to-peer curation protocol and modular streaming pipeline that opens up ways of earning a living from video without depending on middlemen. Through a content management portal, an embeddable player and the underlying protocol, Paratii aims to help disintermediate online video and unlock the value of the “creative middle class”.


Why video? Who’s the “creative middle class”?

2.1 billion people watch online videos every month. The medium is responsible for ~80% of global internet traffic, and grows 25% annually. To keep up with demand, creators, publishers & media companies run to the self-publishing platforms (e.g. Youtube) or video-as-a-service providers (e.g. Kaltura) that dominate the market.

Ultimately, Google and AWS are the de facto private backend for most videos in the web. Both “silent overlords” have the final word on everything from infrastructure-access pricing and privacy policies to algorithmic recommendations. Their service bundles are extremely convenient for customers, although they come with the corollaries we are already tired of discussing.

Only around 3% of actively monetised Youtubers make earnings above the US poverty line, today. From 2006 to 2017, the top 3% went from garnering 60% to over 90% of total views in the platform, leaving just 10% of the audience to the remaining 97%, raising questions about the elitist nature of the incentivisation and recommendation policies in place. Approximately 99% of monetised creators today have less than 2.2M followers, and they arguably make up a lot of the value produced and offered by the platform. We call these the “creative middle class”.

Paratii’s existence addresses the lack of open registries and public monetisation tooling for the online video industry. To claim the ownership of a feature-length movie and go on to distribute and monetise it digitally, in Brazil, for example, a film studio undergoes a months-long, expensive process through a few public institutions. On the other extreme, YouTube allows one to self-publish a video and activate monetisation in a few seconds - the downside being the requirement to waive away 55% of future earnings by default, from the start. The “creative middle class” needs an alternative in between - safe enough, easy enough, fair enough.


Wait… I’ve heard of that Youtube-in-a-blockchain thing before

We know. Sometimes it seems like the concept is more hyped up than stablecoins, decentralised exchanges and non-fungible tokens… combined.


It’s no secret that there are many distinct efforts currently aiming to provide decentralized alternatives to tubes and flixes. The ‘boom’ was iminent for those watching the space from the beginning. There are a few elements that make Paratii stand out from everything else that’s out there in the ecosystem right now:

• It does not have its own blockchain; it’s also not a specific dApp (the player can be seen as an application, though, just like our alpha portal) - it’s a protocol for distributed curation and an open streaming pipeline built partly on top of an existing blockchain (Ethereum).
• The liberty to choose your own model for monetization. Paratii is not against ads, like DTube, or against micro-tipping, or against paywalls - the only things we’re opposed to are imposing a single model instead of allowing the creator to choose, and taxing transactions.
• The embeddable player that serves as an ephemeral node in the underlying p2p network (wherever it is).
• Everyone who uses the player can be rewarded by the player itself without having to be tied to a single platform or environment, as it’s made to be freely embedded on the web. This is made possible through an in-player wallet.
• Less capital concentration. By forgoing a traditional ICO and prioritizing distributing tokens through minting once the network is live, we avoid giving control over to whales or turning what was supposed to be a democratic system into an oligarchy of sorts.
  
• Fully open source.
• A specific decentralized curation framework derived from TCRs.
  
• First and only of its kind in Brazil (+200 million people market, second biggest one for YouTube, after the US).
  
  

It should still be noted that practically no video platforms today are truly 100% decentralized yet, except maybe for torrents. In the blockchain space, we reserve two “honorable mentions” to projects ahead of most: Livepeer was the first distributed transcoding network to ever go live in the Ethereum mainnet. It is pioneering a service model that suits a specific part of the video streaming pipeline, and we’re excited to follow its evolution as we also experiment with ways to integrate it into Paratii’s flow. DTube is a Youtube-like portal that monetizes on top of the Steem blockchain - it’s operational, and if you’re just looking to a place where you can escape youtube and make some bucks, we recommend you give it a shot.

With Paratii, we’re trying to achieve a model that permits sustainable revenue for small-to-mid-sized creators, puts in place a truly distributed curation framework, is less prone to valueless tokenisation, and also can tailor to publisher-grade needs.

On the needs of Publishers

The de facto benefits of distributed-ness in the context of media streaming are largely overhyped. Storage today can be treated as a commodity: why would a publisher want to store its stuff on clunky, fully-visible IPFS, if AWS costs are negligible and allow for much broader control? However, there is a sector decentralisation can prove itself invaluable: Peer-to-peer assisted streaming can offload CDN traffic and reduce distribution costs by up to 98%.

We have already released a JS library to give ETH and IPFS superpowers to developers willing to build video-driven decentralisable applications. We’re also working towards setting up our player so that any interested publisher can simply embed it, pull files from a given source, and save on distribution costs by unlocking the unused bandwidth of their audiences for streaming.


Target audiences

First and foremost are the small-to-mid-sized content creators who find themselves dissatisfied with the monetization and revenue sharing options available through current platforms. Replacing rent-seeking intermediaries with public infrastructure permits 100% of transacted revenue from their videos to go directly to them, with no one else taking a slice of the pie, while also allowing for new monetisation models.

Developers can build web or mobile based video-driven applications with paratii.js, our simple but powerful open source library for decentralised streaming.

Our open source technology will also benefit publishers who wish to use video streaming on their website. They can already easily embed the Paratii player and pull their content from its original source into our pipeline for reducing distribution costs with the assistance of peer-to-peer, and will soon be able to experiment with novel forms of monetization.

Advertisers will also eventually also benefit from increased transparency by bidding on cheaper, crypto-verified impressions on their ads while inheriting the workflows and practices already used by the industry today.

Most of the Paratii team is located in Brazil, where we have the support of Bossa Nova Group, the country’s second largest film production company. Technical know-how from industry leaders in online video (including the engineer responsible for serving live footage from the 2014 World Cup to hundreds of millions) and studio production experts give us familiarity with the needs of our potential markets, while influence in Brazilian media grants a path to growth and adoption domestically; then, internationally.

Technical Structure

Paratii nodes ‘talk’ a simple peer-to-peer message-based protocol that facilitates passing jobs around and entering types of data-exchange agreements. The system presently relies on IPFS for distributed file storage + delivery, and Ethereum for identity and financial logic execution. The code is running on a permissioned testnet, in test mode. Paratii is comprised of several different bits of software that interoperate:

Paratii.JS: a library that abstracts the on-demand streaming pipeline with methods and convenience functions for developers to simply put videos, and get a playable URL for them, while the whole thing is processed (distributedly!) behind the scenes. Reading its documentation is a good way to get a grasp of our current architecture.

Paratii Player: a customised Clappr player that can be embedded with a single line of code into apps, webpages, tweets, Medium articles and other social media outlets which leverage oEmbed or Embed.ly (about ~half the internet). It has a built-in wallet and serves as a node in the underlying peer-to-peer network every time it plays.

Paratii Portal: a custom React interface on Paratii.js, making use of the Paratii Player. It is the main interface for creators to open an account, upload & manage videos and for their audiences to browse through content. You can try a demo right now at https://paratii.video/join. We expect different interfaces (e.g. for niche-content) and applications to push the boundaries of user experience, and envision this portal as evolving towards a creator-focused content management tool.


Video streaming is complex. We’re headed towards fully-fledged decentralisation, but that means breaking oligopolies in a range of closely related services, and it’ll happen gradually. Using IPFS, for instance, incurs particularly challenging issues when it comes to indexing and querying data efficiently. Besides, relying 100% on browser-to-browser communication for streaming is risky, and the safest approach is one that takes into account gateway nodes too.

The Paratii Portal is ‘where’ token distribution is going to occur (see the token section, below). It’ll happen organically, and, instead of doing an ICO, we want to simply program the network to “boost” reward distribution during a “Token Launch” period before falling towards a predicted rate. This way, early adopters (those who use the platform, upload content, and help curate it) are the truly most benefited group.

Did you just say “no ICO”?

This may be unusual, but yes. We aim to launch our token in Q4 2018, along with a public, mainnet beta of the Paratii Portal. We’ve managed to stay relatively lean, and are privately funded so far. We believe it’s more important to prioritize rewarding the early community than having dozens of millions in cash.

The PTI Token

YouTube pays over 10.000 people to manually review over 2 million flagged videos a month. They do this (what’s the cost like? ~U$20 million/month?) because it’s unaffordable to host illegal or copyright-infringing content. For permissionless file sharing systems (e.g. torrent), it’s a tough problem to tackle. Roughly speaking, the PTI token serves this purpose.

It fuels a stake-based curation machinery (read more about it here), whose design borrows heavily from that of TCRs (Token Curated Registries). Instead of paying an army of people to do the job, Paratii employs a challenge-and-vote system to determine what gets to stay on the system and whether it abides by the ruleset that is agreed upon. Every user earns tokens upon registration, and publishing a video somewhere requires staking a security deposit behind it.

Newly minted tokens go mostly to active stakers, meaning that if you have a lot of videos published, you’ll get a fair share of rewards, so that, in the long-term, creators who behave should be free to publish as much as they wish, and “bad guys”, who lose stakes and rights to rewards, are disempowered.

Curators, in turn, can stake PTI in order to challenge a video and kickstart a voting round, having the original video’s stake distributed between the challenger and voters (if the video is deemed rejected) or the challenger’s stake (if the video is accepted).

This is meant to be abstracted into a separate specific interface, while normal users will likely only see warnings or notifications if anything seems to be wrong with their stuff.

The PTI token may or may not be used as currency for tipping creators, purchasing pay-per-view videos, bidding on media, or subscribing to “Flix-like” services within the system. This depends on the evolution of stablecoins along the next couple months, and on further mechanism design iteration.

The Paratii Foundation’s share of the outstanding token supply (12% in total, distributed over three years through a locked smart contract) will start relatively strong and dilute itself as more tokens are minted. In essence, this means that the power we have to curate and curb infringing content is gradually reduced as the network matures and more people have more PTI.

To get there in good health, we must educate audiences in respect to cryptoeconomic mechanisms (what we like to call crypto-citizenship), incentivise proper community diligence over videos, help creators experiment with novel monetisation models and welcome any party willing to help us #BUIDL a better future for video and the people who make it.

Current State

We started assembling as a team in late 2016, and have released 2 versions of our embeddable player and a developer preview of the Paratii.JS library. We've also opened the alpha portal for public testing, and creators have already started uploading their work and sharing it on Twitter, Telegram and Reddit, where the player can be natively embedded.

In the coming weeks, we will be taking action to further expand the Early Uploader program: creators who are testing the platform, filling it with original content and pushing its infrastructure to the edge. Promotional materials that explain the concept and structure of Paratii to content creators are already in circulation and we’re working hard to expand our user network.

Our player is in version 0.0.2, with 0.0.3 coming shortly and including features like in-player account management, live view counts and tipping. The portal is getting basic discovery and browsing features implemented soon.

Team, Advisors and Roadmap




Bounty and Incentives Program (coming soon):
Our bounty and incentives program will be focused on three main areas:

1. Content Creation
The success of any video platform rests on the breadth and depth of its content, and Paratii will be no exception. People who apply to the platform as content creators and post their work (be it exclusive or not) on Paratii will be rewarded during the token launch. Rewards will be weighted by views and whether the content is original and/or exclusive to the platform.

If you wish to join Paratii as a content creator, you may begin experimenting at http://paratii.video/join.

2. Promotion and Growth
This is where the more standard bounty program actions that involve social outreach and participation come in. Joining our group on Telegram, liking and following us on social media and sharing the platform through a referral program are all part of this category, as well as translation of our material and promotion of Paratii in the media (e.g. translating our website to Chinese).

3. Technical Contributions
These are rewards awarded for reporting bugs, making pull requests to fix them and contributing in the documentation of our code and libraries.

More details on the bounty and incentives program and quantification are forthcoming. Feel free to join our group on Telegram to stay up to date on the latest news.

This is an early field with lots of experimentation happening, so don’t hesitate to ask questions, make suggestions or point to stuff we can help clarify.
We’re always happy to answer, and to discuss questions to which we don’t necessarily have answers yet.

Don't just think about currency exchanges as in buying and selling coins to hold. Think about blockchain services that use different tokens working together seamlessly: that's why decentralized exchange protocols are a game changer. For instance, a video may be uploaded on Paratii (PTI), transcoded using Livepeer (LPT) and stored on IPFS (FIL) - doing those operations without decentralized exchange would be a huge pain in the ass, but 0x (for example) makes it easy and practical.

Related: would you be interested in the ANN of a project that doesn't have an ICO?

Já usei a Foxbit e o Mercado BTC, nunca tive problema com nenhum dos dois.

Por que você vê deflação como essencial?

O problema não é comprar a Lambo - é fazer uma conferência de crypto e alugar um monte de lambo pra parar na porta. É reduzir o espaço e a tecnologia aos memes relacionados ao dinheiro.

A cultura de ostentação relacionada ao universo das criptomoedas tem dado o que falar. Muita gente critica os eventos extravagantes em hotéis luxuosos, os carros esportivos e o foco no dinheiro e na demonstração do dinheiro, enquanto as aplicações reais ficam em segundo plano.

O que vocês acham dessa cultura? É inevitável dado o tanto de dinheiro que muita gente ganhou nesse espaço? Serve pra atrair gente nova ou distrair do que importa?

Pessoalmente, acho um grande desserviço às pessoas que estão trabalhando pra trazer aplicações reais e transformadoras nesse espaço, e polui a discussão em torno delas porque tudo se trata de dinheiro, lambos, iates, eventos... enquanto a única pergunta na cabeça de quem se interessa é "vou ficar rico com isso?" esse interesse não tem muito valor.