Community is having issues with explaining why Bitcoin/blockchain is needed. I summarized some thoughts about what is wrong with the approach of promoting Bitcoin as an investment.

https://medium.com/@pavelkravchenko/bitcoin-showed-a-new-way-for-society-to-interact-but-something-went-wrong-3fdf5daa771d

https://medium.com/@pavelkravchenko/does-a-blockchain-really-need-a-native-coin-f6a5ff2a13a3

It seems that cryptocurrency industry is mostly driven by speculators now. I lost track of different ICOs - in many cases they are either illegal or scam It was always a political discussion whether a blockchain project must have a coin. So here is my opinion - and I understand that many people won't like it.

It seems that all the buzz about “permissioned vs permissionless” is distracting us from the deep analysis of business problems and solutions which should be the true focus. Community members have to take sides. It feels wrong because we are talking about technology — there is no such thing as “good” or “bad”, just use cases. Here is some analysis.

https://medium.com/@pavelkravchenko/ok-i-need-a-blockchain-but-which-one-ca75c1e2100

I believe blockchain technology can disrupt a lot of industries. But how to distinguish real cases from imaginary?

Key thoughts from the Medium post:
1. Blockchain is needed only when scarce asset is managed
2. There are 4 main scarce assets - value, identity, status, objective history
3. Permissioned or permissionless (or public vs private) as well as consensus doesn't matter when defining applicability of blockchain
4. The rest assets can use open network that doesn't restrict behavior of the users
5. Multi-blockchain systems lie in between, they manage assets that are scarce within certain environment (examples - reputation on the forum, IOU)
6. Answer to the question who need to validate transaction from a business point of view will help to define whether you need multi-blockchain
6. Examples of industries that don’t need blockchain directly: 1) cloud storage market 2) micro jobs market 3) internet of things 4) web-of-trust (different from PKI!) 5) cybersecurity
7. This industries need blockchain for identity or payments but not directly
8. + Examples of cryptocurrency projects that don't need blockchain or own coin

https://medium.com/@pavelkravchenko/investor-guide-does-this-cool-project-truly-need-blockchain-bdde70a26bfb#

Hi all,

Here I expressed my opinion about what is wrong with promotion of "blockchain" projects within fintech community, why it happens, what to do with monetization, how to move forward towards bright future and other thoughts.


https://medium.com/@pavelkravchenko/decline-of-blockchain-hype-and-rise-of-a-common-sense-8de5789a794d#.xq7v44a7t

This option was considered in the beginning, but wasn't selected due to several reasons:
1. Existing Cryptonote codebase (for example Monero) is designed to work with built-in coin - and we needed to have multi-asset system.
2. Cryptonote approach is permissionless (referring to Tim Swanson's terminology - http://www.ofnumbers.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Permissioned-distributed-ledgers.pdf) which means that you cannot enforce that miners only process transactions that contain proof of identity.
3. For the same reason Cryptonote requires mining which we tried to avoid - because in this case you need your own coin.

Obviously, you can apply Proof of Identity idea to any coin - it just depends on requirements to the final system.

Shorty,

1. Tembusu just provides infrastructure for companies worldwide that will do KYC.
2. Yes, base functionality is inherited from Ripple, but in MVP there are many things added and modified - such as removed the XRP, added identity and anonymity layer, mobile library created so your keys are always stored on your device, key backup process is created and many other things.
3. Yes, transactions will have many inputs/outputs.

Draft of the whitepaper released - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pqeAD7OhP9nEmwqEm6SucGaSGhJMW_GCf2Ggo0BXX5c/edit#

The goal of this research was finding the solution for “regulation vs privacy” battle. We believe that identification and reputation doesn’t mean traceability and user’s identity can be stored in a blockchain.

Cryptocurrency protocol was designed:
1. That enforces that all participants pass KYC
2. While transaction are still anonymous
3. It is decentralized – no central authority that does KYC
4. Impossible to link transactions of the same user
5. Audit might be possible in case of the suspicious transaction

Short solution overview:
1. Unlinkable proof of identity is attached to each transaction
2. Stealth/one-time addresses are used. Mixing and zerocoin techniques are welcome!
3. Decentralized identity verification is done by independent licensed agents
4. Revocation is possible, doesn’t breach anonymity
5. User controls private keys and identity

Features:
1. KYC process is independent from the payment network
2. As many KYC environments (groups) as you need
3. Group manager selects own KYC policies
4. Group manager is only able to register/audit/revoke users that belong to its group
5. Possible to build groups where privacy is absolute
6. User can be part of many groups

Example

Circle - country
Star - authority that does KYC
Dot - user

There is no coin in the protocol!
Private beta of the system which is based on this technology is running and using Ripple/Stellar codebase.

Pavel Kravchenko
email: pavel@tembusu.sg skype: ideateam_macuser
linkedin: https://sg.linkedin.com/in/pkravchenko

Yes, according to the latest announcements (https://stellartalk.org/topic/83-stellar-updates/) distribution is done in several transactions. It can take up to a week.

Kikan, please fill this form - https://docs.google.com/a/gostellar.org/forms/d/1EvLu5w0UPdsl47PJm8dqBkgPiKM7X_j6LbyeiM_e-rg/viewform.
I suppose that we will be able to help afterwards (I cannot tell you exact time, maybe week or so). Next time please remember your password if it is clearly written to do so.