Hey Cryptocurrency Community,
Firstly, I just wanted to introduce myself before getting into my post and questions.
My name is Jaco and I'm an entrepreneur from South Africa. We're a small team with a huge vision that's currently working on our latest project; which we all believe is really exciting. What started as a simple idea quickly evolved into something much more and we're now at the point where we are thinking about the possibilities of integrating the Blockchain and our own Cryptocurrency into our platform.
I'm fairly new to cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology so I have a few questions. Rather than spending hours trying to find answers I thought it might be best to ask the community! We also realise that if we do decide to integrate this into our platform it will not be an easy undertaking. We're just looking at all of our options here. If we do see that Blockchain and Cryptocurrency tech is a viable option, our entire team will do a lot of crash courses in the tech to get up to date. Just testing out the waters here before we invest a lot of time and energy into it.
Please allow me to explain our business in short:
Basically, our platform is a hybrid between Kickstarter, Massdrop and Referral Programs. Companies create campaigns similar to Kickstarter on our platform and then visitors can purchase their products with cash. In return, they get rewarded points/coins when as a group they reach specific set milestones such as XYZ amount of products sold and also rewarded points/coins as an individual when you refer someone to purchase an item on the platform. The rewards that they get are in the form of a coin/point system which can then be used as discounts on other products on the platform or go towards an entire purchase based on the amount of coins you have accumulated which you can spend. They also have the option to withdraw these coins/points for actual cash.
So, with that said, this raised a few questions. Initially we didnt think about integrating a blockchain and legit cryptocurrency, but after reading up we would like to consider it as an option.
My questions are as follows:
1) First and foremost, with the limited knowledge of what we're doing, are there any ideas that jump to mind of how we can integrate our coins/points as a cryptocurrency and also have it on a blockchain?
2) If we do decide to have our coins as a legit cryptocurrency, is it fine that they are generated via a smart contract in the platform and not by mining with either a PoW or PoS system? (ie. can we have Virtual Machines doing the validations that runs on a BaaS system such as Microsoft Azure BaaS?)
3) What are the chances of us doing an ICO so that we can get some funds for operations but also distribute some coins?
4) If we do an ICO and it's successful, should we keep a set amount of money/eth/bitcoins aside since the coins we distributed will be used in the future to actually purchase products on the platform? Not exactly sure how this works or what I even just said makes sense?
5) Since our Startup is quite a bit different from other companies that have done an ICO and developing their software as an open-source project, would it be a problem if all the code is not open source? Reason being that a lot of our platforms success is determined by the sales we make in actual USD and a portion of that getting converted into Coins. Our CTO just finished our "foundation code" with what he called the "nean stack" which can be seen here:
https://github.com/CharlBest/nean-stack-starter - As I said, we'll definitely open source a big portion of our code, just not sure yet about how we'll go about all of it.
I'm a total noob to all of this and at the time of posting this, I've been up for the past 31 hours reading/watching as many articles/videos as I can. I feel like I've come far in that short amount of time but realise that I'm just scratching the surface here. Still so much to learn!
Also, please bear with me if any of these questions don't make any sense or are seen as silly. We all have to start somewhere!
Thank you in advance for any help, it's appreciated tremendously.
Cheers,
Jaco
