LISK MEETING n°2
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*I welcome everyone to the second official Lisk community meeting in which the Lisk team gives updates about the latest developments in terms of business, code, and marketing. At the end we have a Q/A with prepared questions by the community, this week A LOT were collected.
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Basically we will go through the following bullet pointsUpcoming China Conference
Forging Rewards Status
Team Growth Progress
gGmbH Creation Progress
ICO Funds Retrieval Date
Let's jump right into action so that we have more time for the questions afterwards.
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Upcoming China Conference
As you all know I will be in China from the 14th until the 26th. I will be in Shanghai until the 19th, and then drive with the train to Beijing.
In Shanghai I have a meeting with a very influential Chinese person and try to make a friendly partnership with him. If we can get him on board it would mean a big step forward for Lisk. However, at this point of time it is simply to touch bases. Learn more about each others, I will pitch Lisk and our vision to him. On a personal level he is a great guy and I'm really looking forward to the meeting.
I will also meet up with several Chinese Lisk community members from Shanghai. Be available, make contact points in one of the biggest cities of China.
The main reason for China is obviously Beijing. Luiz our awesome Chinese ambassador who is doing A LOT for Lisk at this moment in China, worked on a lot of meetings for Beijing.
Luiz delegate is simply called "China" and if you have a vote left you should seriously consider to vote for him.
On the day I will arrive in Beijing I will sit together with Luiz for a long time and he will update me about all his plans and achievements.
At this moment I know the persons I'm going to meet, but I don't know the exact timetable. Unfortunately, I can't tell you anything about the persons I'm going to meet. This wouldn't be a very good strategic decision. After China I will definitely write a big update about all things which happened, and will include as many persons as possible I met.
As you know when I was in Berlin with Oliver, we didn't update the community 1 day. I will try to come online every day when I'm in China in order to update you guys what is happening.
In China I will also attend the following conference:
http://www.global-blockchain-summit.com/beijing/en/speakers.aspThere are awesome people like Roger Ver Jeff Garzik. But also a lot of Chinese personalities which might not be very known in our western world. But indeed have a lot of influence in China.
University professors and I think even persons from the Chinese government will attend.
In terms of exchanges there will be Huobi, OKcoin, BTCC, Yuanbao, Yunbi, and a lot of others. I will try to speak with every single one of them. However, please note there is no guarantee that we will be listed on any of them.
I think showing them what is so great about Lisk and where we are going is a big first step. Making Lisk a name in China is a big step. Until now there was zero promotion from myself in China, everything was done by Luiz. He manages the QQ group with over 1000 people (I think) which is one of the most active cryptocurrency QQ groups in China.
There is a lot more going on in China and I hope after I'm back I can present you some nice Chinese initiatives.
It's the first China visit and it will be big. However, Lisk won't be build in one day. So please don't hype it up like there is no tomorrow. It will be one of MANY visits to China (and around the globe).
Awesome, that's all about my China visit. I hope you are looking forward to my tweets from China and the upcoming Chinese report which will be published during the first week in July.
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Forging Reward Status
As you know there is currently an artificial high threshold for the activation of the forging rewards.
We did this in order to have more time to stabilize, optimize, and secure the Lisk platform. As it currently stands, we might would have to fight with forking issues when A LOT of delegates are regularly switching delegate spots. Therefore, we have to work a bit more on the code and introduce a proper testnet to test the changes.
We are currently living and breathing Lisk. It's the topic 24h of our days. So please remember that we put our all into Lisk, therefore we absolutely don't want that it fails or break. Therefore, we decided to take the safer path. We don't want to put a $45M network at risk.
If it means that we have to wait 6 weeks to activate the forging rewards, then so be it. The first delay was also quickly forgotten, and even if this is not an argument. I believe that this initial beta stage will not be remembered later down the road. It's just a temporary state of Lisk, which is after all a highly technical, rocket-science, innovative, disruptive technology.
We are working on the issues and they will be resolved. We have the funds, we have the team, and we have the skills to solve them. We are all 100% certain of that. With Charles we also have the possibility to tap into a cryptography group, which might can give valuable input.
So to get more specific. We strongly believe that it won't take 5 months to fix the problems. The switch will happen much sooner.
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Team Growth Progress
Currently, the team consists of the following team members:
- Myself
- Oliver
- Joel
- Isabella
- Francois
- Ricardo
and the following advisers:
- Boris
- Axel
- Steven
- Charles
You may notice "Ricardo" who was not announced yet!
We will announce him later today. He is the awesome developer who developed the Lisk paperwallet (liskpaperwallet.com).
As you see he took self initiative and is now part of our team. We really liked that and we are also very impressed with the code quality he delivers. Therefore, we decided to hire him. First for smaller tasks, and then we will see how it evolves. More information in the blog post later today.
That means we now consist of 6 team members and 4 advisers. That's a lot already for a network which launched about 2 weeks ago.
We also received A LOT of applications by front end, back end and app developers, and designers.
Initially, we wanted to sort them this week and take a look. However, this week was really crazy. We properly designed our internal processes regarding team communication and management. With the upcoming China and Russia visits I also had a lot to do and prepare. After we announced Steven and Charles as advisers a lot of news outlets were interested in interviews which I'm currently working on.
So I will most probably take a look at the applications tomorrow, sort them and review them. Looking forward to it, there were some very interesting individuals.
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As an intermediate item between "Team Growth Progress" and "gGmbH Creation Progress" I would like to announce something life changing for Oliver and me!*
We are moving to Berlin!
After working very efficient for the past 5 months on Lisk, we saw huge potential to get even more efficient by setting up an office. This way we really can work together, discuss new features more easily, and build a dedicated team of core developers around us.
This is a big change and we are quite anxious about it! I think it will be great. We reviewed several cities and Berlin was by far the best choice.*
- Awesome city with a HUGE, international startup community.
- Good pool of employees.
- Bitcoin meetups with 1500 members and 100 participants on one event.
- NodeJS meetups with over 1000 members.
- Good infrastructure to other cities.
- Cheap (e.g in comparison to London).
I hope that you all see the benefits of moving into an office. We will still have remote workers, because it's not necessary to have everyone under one roof. However, having Oliver and myself, plus a few core devs in one room. Well, this just means good things.
Before more suggestions for other cities come. It's not only a decision for the above reasons. It's also a personal decision. Oliver and I both have families. Berlin offers so much more than just a good city for startups.*
It's also a great city to live in.
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gGmbH Creation Progress
I just met Axel this morning in Cologne. For everyone who doesn't know him, he is our lawyer, legal adviser, and ICO escrow partner. He really helps us a lot
That means all profit we might earn in the future, will have to go back into the company which goal is to build, maintain, and promote Lisk.
*It also means that we can't pay ourselves absurdly high salaries. Everything is controlled by the state and will be investigated every few years. So this gives you the security that we are not wasting the money or spending it on something else.
We have to document very carefully every expenditure, everything has to be for Lisk.
The state doesn't decide anything within the company. What I meant with "everything is controlled by the state" is, that they (ty reaper) audit our internal books.
This gives as I said the LSK holders the security that we are not reckless or act for our own benefit. Additionally, we don't have to pay any taxes on the collected BTC.
Please note that the non-profit character requires some sort of an "application" and review process. So it might happen that the state doesn't accept the non profit character of Lisk. That means we would have to change some internal processes and sentences on the charter.
There are a lot of companies, especially frameworks, which act under a non-profit company. So we are pretty certain that the gGmbH will be accepted. I just wanted to mention it.
We believe that the last two bullet points, i.e. "Berlin Office" and "gGmbH" will give Lisk the credibility it deserves. We are a real startup and here to stay for many years ahead. Lisk is not something for the next few months, it's a part of our lives for the next years. We are proud to say that.
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ICO Funds Retrieval Date
I mentioned earlier that the non profit company allows us to not pay any taxes on the ICO funds, because the funds will be used for something non profit oriented. With Lisk we offer an open source, decentralized alternative to the other currently available App Stores. We also offer a framework to build blockchain applications and services, which can be stand alone programmes or being implemented into existing apps. Expanding them with blockchain/decentralization technologies.
In terms of the ICO funds that means they have to flow directly into the company itself. I.e. we are not allowed to lay a finger on them for even one second. *However, this is not a problem!
We have secured enough funds for several months through private (family-related) channels. So rest assured, we have enough money to operate without a problem until the gGmbH is founded.
You can see the results of this in our 6 man/woman strong team, various conference visits around the world, a proper infrastructure for our internal processes, and so on. So everything is going smoothly right now in terms of business development and promotions.
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*Ok! Awesome guys! With that we have cleared up all bullet points for the meeting!
