[ANN][preICO] Dolphin BI: The first cryptoasset investment analysis marketplace

[Dhcold]

What is the maximum amount of investment from 1 address? For example, if there is no cap for 1 address then there will ne so called "whales" and manipulators who can whatever they what with the price of token on exchange, it will lead to the centralization

[Dhcold]

 I read your whitepaper and saw interesting point - self-promoting attack. Lets imagine the situation, for example, i am smart enough to create absolutely real fake accounts, and I will not only rate myself, but other amazing experts. If you think  that people lazy enough do not do this, believe me some are not. So, how you will protect honest and smart experts, who deserve big rating from this totally the same smart guys, which are a bit trickier and have a lot of free time ?

[van0k]

What is the maximum amount of investment from 1 address? For example, if there is no cap for 1 address then there will ne so called "whales" and manipulators who can whatever they what with the price of token on exchange, it will lead to the centralization

There is no maximum amount, I'm afraid. And setting a maximum amount wouldn't help either - the "whale" can quite easily create another address and invest from it. It's not possible to prevent this without introducing complicated (and potentially game-theoretically faulty) designs into the crowdsale model.

If you're worried that these "whales" could undermine the platform's economy - don't worry! First, the individual Subscriber's influence scales logarithmically with their wealth, so a crowd of well-behaving subscribers will overwhelm a malicious subscriber with ease. Also, there will be a voting mechanism that will allow Subscribers to rescale the platform's prices if the DoBI/USD rate changes significantly. So the capabilities of "whales" in manipulating the platform are very limited.

I read your whitepaper and saw interesting point - self-promoting attack. Lets imagine the situation, for example, i am smart enough to create absolutely real fake accounts, and I will not only rate myself, but other amazing experts. If you think  that people lazy enough do not do this, believe me some are not. So, how you will protect honest and smart experts, who deserve big rating from this totally the same smart guys, which are a bit trickier and have a lot of free time ?

                   

It is practically impossible to completely block such an attack - a person crazy enough to spend troves of money on an attack would probably succeed. However, observe Bitcoin - its total cap is $66 billion, so a wealthy enough entity (some banks could probably do that with ease) could buyout all Bitcoin for $100 billion (considering the price will start to grow) and completely crash the system. But nobody does that, because crazy people rarely have enough money to blast everything to bits

The idea here is to create the system where such attack is not practically impossible, but economically infeasible. The potential profit from an attack must not be greater than its cost. So we introduce the aforementioned logarithmic scaling to cripple a wealthy malicious subscriber and force them to buy new accounts if they want to perform an attack. And so we try to design the system in such a way that buying Sybil accounts will cost more than the revenue from the possible reputation gain. To evade automatic detection an attacker will have to rate other experts both positively and negatively; but when you rate others positively, you increase their revenue and decrease yours! There is also a number of votes threshold and other counter-measures that will make the attacker spend more than they gain.

[Dhcold]

What problems  have you already faced while preparing your project in terms of legalization of the project and the legalization of ICO?

[van0k]

What problems  have you already faced while preparing your project in terms of legalization of the project and the legalization of ICO?

I've added a response to your last question into my previous post. As for this one, I'm ill-equipped to answer it, but Pavel (zidorov) will come and answer it a bit later.

[UncleVlad]

So, you've described your costs in a table. Don't you think that there could arise additional spendings and how would they be covered with low initial investment prediction?

[oportunitas]

I'm curious about the work of the Authors. Will they be able to collaborate on the same widget within the platform? If so, how will they divide the income?

[van0k]

I'm curious about the work of the Authors. Will they be able to collaborate on the same widget within the platform? If so, how will they divide the income?

We are not planning such functionality in the platform, but it can actually be done in Ethereum itself. These Authors can create a single Ethereum address, create a new widget linked to this address and the widget's revenue will be sent to it. And this address may be a contract that automatically splits the earnings in any way the participating Authors want.

[oportunitas]

And what if the widget gets poor rating from an Expert? Is it going to be deleted? Or maybe the author will have to update the widget to satisfy the needs of Experts and Subscribers?

[van0k]

And what if the widget gets poor rating from an Expert? Is it going to be deleted? Or maybe the author will have to update the widget to satisfy the needs of Experts and Subscribers?

Only Subscribers can rate widgets. The widget's rating in the marketplace (unlike Expert's rating) does not affect revenue distribution, but the Subscriber can use it to decide whether the widget is worth buying. Even if some widget has bad rating, it will not necessarily be deleted as long as people use it. It makes sense to delete inactive widgets, though.

[UncleVlad]

OK, The subscriber will pay his fee and 80% goes to the authors and experts and 20% goes to the system. But will the user (simple subscriber) know exactly to whom his money got via using free widget? Maybe he wants to control the percentage of money going to experts or authors? Cause he may distrust widget fund in somewhat way.

[ato996]

What if volatility made connecting tokens with ETH become loss making? And if that way, may be there a possible ways to choose other one?

The presale tokens (DBIP) will be converted to DoBI at 1:1 rate before the main TGE. We recognise that if ETH price will rise, one can buy more DoBI per ETH during the main TGE (remember, that we price DoBI in USD and not in ETH), so the volatility risk may actually exist. We decided to split the volatility risk with our investors 50:50. If the ETH price rises, then we will cover 50% of early investor's loss from the founder reward fund. You can read more in Section 5 of our WP.

I mean, if using ETH as a currency/platform became ineffective, what could be substitute? ( taking into account that Waves remain the one which left)

[van0k]

OK, The subscriber will pay his fee and 80% goes to the authors and experts and 20% goes to the system. But will the user (simple subscriber) know exactly to whom his money got via using free widget? Maybe he wants to control the percentage of money going to experts or authors? Cause he may distrust widget fund in somewhat way.

The author sets a static fee at widget creation (e.g. if they set a 20% fee, then experts get 100-20-20=60%). Now, calculating how much money each expert gets is a bit trickier, because the final distribution is resolved at the end of the month, but it can be approximated using the expert's historical (3 months average) rating, which is known at all times.

[van0k]

What if volatility made connecting tokens with ETH become loss making? And if that way, may be there a possible ways to choose other one?

The presale tokens (DBIP) will be converted to DoBI at 1:1 rate before the main TGE. We recognise that if ETH price will rise, one can buy more DoBI per ETH during the main TGE (remember, that we price DoBI in USD and not in ETH), so the volatility risk may actually exist. We decided to split the volatility risk with our investors 50:50. If the ETH price rises, then we will cover 50% of early investor's loss from the founder reward fund. You can read more in Section 5 of our WP.

I mean, if using ETH as a currency/platform became ineffective, what could be substitute? ( taking into account that Waves remain the one which left)

It is a valid concern - it may become too costly to maintain the platform if the ETH price or gas price keeps going up. In a case where it becomes impossible for the platform to continue functioning, there may be some alternatives:

• Running everything on our own brand new blockchain.
• Switching to an alternative EVM-based smart-contract platform (e.g. Qtum, Rootstock).
• Switching to Plasma (probably the ideal solution, but it is not implemented yet).
• Switching to non-EVM-based smart-contract platform (e.g. EOS)

Of course, such measures are drastic and it only makes sense to resort to them if all possible cost optimization techniques are exhausted.

[zidorov]

What problems  have you already faced while preparing your project in terms of legalization of the project and the legalization of ICO?

First of all it was a SEC investigative report on the DAO.
Second was a decision of People’s Bank of China to ban ICOs.
Both causes us to rewrite the whitepaper so that our Token will be an utility token for 100% and rewrite token generation event terms.

[Cyber_777]

To say the truth, it's a very interesting and ambitious project. It unites consumers and sellers in efficient way. But it's intersting for me personally, are there any limitations on or max level of price/fee which is set on widget by authors themselves? I mean that if the author sees his widget is becoming more and more popular, won't he establish too high price, so that the widget will be affordable only for small percentage of users? Does your company consider it's as aproblem?

[zidorov]

So, you've described your costs in a table. Don't you think that there could arise additional spendings and how would they be covered with low initial investment prediction?

We are sure that planned product development fund is huge enough to cover all development costs until the platfrom starts earning money.
And yeah, our platfrom is more like a traditional business: we plan not only to create a product with crypto tokens but to earn this tokens by ourselfs to develop further the platfrom.

[oportunitas]

As for the interactions inside the platform, will the Subscriber be able to somehow contact the Author in case he/she has any questions or suggestions about the widget?

[zidorov]

To say the truth, it's a very interesting and ambitious project. It unites consumers and sellers in efficient way. But it's intersting for me personally, are there any limitations on or max level of price/fee which is set on widget by authors themselves? I mean that if the author sees his widget is becoming more and more popular, won't he establish too high price, so that the widget will be affordable only for small percentage of users? Does your company consider it's as aproblem?

Thanks for warm words!  

We think that it should be a fair marketplace: if there's a great widget then rivals are also here and can work hard to take their own piece. So competition should bring the best value/cost to the subscribers.

[van0k]

As for the interactions inside the platform, will the Subscriber be able to somehow contact the Author in case he/she has any questions or suggestions about the widget?

Again, not by default, but it is possible: the Author can provide information about themselves, including contact data, and, considering the widgets basically can contain any HTML, it is possible to attach a feedback link.