Hello everyone.

Yes, we are alive.

No, we are not abandoning bitcointalk.

You're right in that we've been active in other communication channels and not as much here - and we apologize for the silence.

We've been quite preoccupied with the other aspects of our ICO.

Attempting to capitalize on the recent Facebook scandal without a plan would've been a misstep and a misapplication of our resources.

We could still potentially use it to our advantage, but there are other matters that take priority at this time.

Right now, the devs have been largely focused on tackling bugs and the issue of monetization.
As well as economics for the token.

Meanwhile us members of the marketing team have been busy applying to many different exchanges that are big and small. It's been a very rewarding learning process because we're getting to know the industry more, as well as many of the different standards across the industry when it comes to listing a token.

We've been making many small changes to the site, such as the news portal and web application.

The web application is actually still available. Here is the link to the page:
https://sphere.social/hello/

Token distribution will take priority for the time being since we're doing it manually, one by one.  So we ask that if you're a supporter of our project, please remember to enable custom tokens on your ERC20 wallet. Many of our users actually haven't added their address yet.

We are pleased to say that we are making some progress on getting on a larger exchange as opposed to a smaller one.

The market has changed, there is no denying that.

But it hasn't and will not hinder us from moving forward and continuing development. Markets change, and so will we.

Right now, giving back to our supporters is our number one priority.

For April, we are focused on fostering growth and substantive development for our network.

That is why in the very near future, we plan on announcing a closed beta for a new feature that will become available sometime later this month for the app.

The ICO will end April 9th as planned. Afterwards we will shift our marketing strategy.

Blank.

Greetings to all Sphere Supporters!

We actually have more than 500k users that registered for SAT now.

We are glad to report our progress is growing since we are drawing closer to the ICO.

Some of our users have been inquiring about the status of the Pre-Sale as of late. So we feel obliged to shed some light on these questions.

Starting with statistics about the Sphere App.

So far, we have over 40 thousand users on the App. This generates plenty of activity — so we are pleased to report the following numbers:

There have been 27,326 photos uploaded.
606 videos shared.
384 groups created.

This is a good sign that app users are anticipating our marketplace.
We also now have over 6800 community in our telegram.

Here is some data about the amount of SAT we have distributed thus far:

We have reached our minimum soft-cap as well with over 1.5 million USD raised.

Roughly 70 million SAT, or 11% of our SAT hard cap has been sold in the presale so far.

Please stay tuned for more updates.

I feel like you are fundamentally misunderstanding what stage of development the company is in, and even what the purpose of an ICO is.

Sphere is not yet decentralized.  We are not trying to fool anyone about that.  We don't "claim we are decentralized because we offer a reward token"- that doesn't even make any sense.  

We have a plan to put our social network- which is only in beta right now, so people can try it out and get used to the interface- on the blockchain and make it decentralized.  To do that, we need money.  To raise the money, we have created the Social Activity Token (SAT), a new form of digital currency designed to be used within Sphere – to connect people online for advertising, finding, sharing, buying, selling, and trading products and services.  

 You write the words "for profit" as if they were some sort of crime.  Maybe someday this world will be a socialist paradise where all our governments are handing out that sweet universal income.  Alas, until that day we all still have to make a buck and feed our families,  and Sphere Social wants to share the profit with our users. We  will use the proceeds of the ICO to decentralize, improve, and add features to Sphere Social.   Hopefully, SAT will increase in value due to the features we add, since they will include ways to use the token. This would benefit both the company and the token holders.   Read our whitepaper- we will give users the choice of whether or not to sell their personal data and which parts to sell- and if they do sell it, they get a portion of any profit we make on it.

Open-source has its place, and it's certainly fun for those working on it, but there are benefits to not being open-source as well- namely fast, organized decision-making, and being able to pay the experts we need to make the code work, rather than just hoping someone will come along with the expertise needed.  

This is not our coin. It is a different company.

You can read more at our blog here. https://medium.com/@sphereofficial/updates-and-new-ico-date-moved-to-feb-12-2018-e6d8e124e374

You can. We use shapeshift. You need to sign in. Fill out the info and go to the next page. You will see "Pay with altcoins"

No. All SAT that are unsold will be destroyed. No new SAT will be minted ever.

Yes, this will be inside the network itself. You can download the app to check out our beta prototype.

This is of course a subject that is very complicated and our solutions to it will need to keep evolving over the years.  Sphere advocates free speech, but some content simply must be prohibited.  We will be removing :

• Speech that would incite hatred or violence
• Advocating illegal activity
• Copyright trademark and patent
• Illegal contents such as child pornography

We can easily create a "Report This" button and incorporate it in our next release as suggested by KryptoTark to remove such content by community voting.

I'd like to further clarify our plans to incentivize SAT so that it will increase in worth:

1. Social transactions - Make use of SAT to send money to another user.
2. We plan to integrate a Marketplace. - Users can simply create products or advertise services that their friends can see and purchase using SAT
3. Sphere Ad Platform - Users can easily advertise their products by displaying targeted ad pieces in the news feed. Users will have to pay for the advertising space. The platform will feature per-click and per -impression functions and cost will be deducted automatically from the seller's wallet.
4. Users will be getting paid if they allow a portion or all of their of their data to sold. 

Your wallet/backoffice credentials are not the same with the app credentials. Have you created an account on the app?

Hello!  There’s been a lot of talk about dividends on the thread.  We’d like to thank you for bringing this to our attention, because our marketing team actually used the wrong word.  “Dividends” is not in our white paper, but it was on our website.  This was a serious error on our part and that word has been removed and replaced with “rewards”.   We apologize deeply for the confusion.

As for the questions about how SAT will be utilized on our platform for profit, we have plans to have users spend SAT as a currency within our network. We will incentivize the use of SAT in many ways, including the marketplace to trade tokens for goods or services, paying users micro-transactions for ad clicks, and various types of social connections.

Users will also have the choice of remaining anonymous or getting paid by making decisions about what personal information and browsing data to sell.  Several other incentives are still being planned and developed and will be announced to the public at a later date.

All information will be encrypted and stored on the blockchain which provides anonymous and secured structured data.

Recall the recent data breach of Equifax not too long ago. Some 150 million people were affected because their data was centralized and operated by a single company - Equifax. Because Sphere is decentralized, there will be no single point of failure and no single entity can dictate how things work. The funds raised from the ICO will partially go into further security improvements.

With Sphere, all of our user's personal browsing and search engine results are privately secured and stored away on anonymously on the blockchain. This way users can decide how their data can be used and be compensated.

Hello and Thank you for your responses and interest in Sphere.

We plan to focus on our own platform rather than "taking out" the competition. We're not trying to push old-style networks like Facebook and Twitter out of business.  Decentralized social networks are unquestionably better, but at the moment there's room for us all, and lots of overlap in users.

We have significantly different features from Steemit, which is more blog-based.  Sphere's social network will let users create groups to share interests, create campaigns and we are planning a marketplace that will use our Social Activity Tokens (SAT). We will implement new ideas suggested by our community and will constantly improve features to attract more users.

Right now we have an overwhelming amount of positive feedback. People are loving the project. They are looking forward to its success.

Hi you got 1200 SAT for first week. 6000 SAT for 2nd week. Only 10 post each week will be counted. Your total now is 7200

We do accept ETH and other forms of Altcoins thru Shapeshift. Pick a currency you wish to convert to (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin. Please don't forget to fill in your Sphere username (email). Then click "Place Order." On the next page click on "Pay with Altcoins"

No Datum is not our competition. Like one of the members have mentioned we are quite opposite from Datum.

This is a new project. We do not know of any other Sphere.

The wallet is disabled until the end of the ICO. We are working on a new wallet and testing it.