Bad marketing aside,
If you dig through all the bullshit of the website. The facts are in the not well written whitepaper.
Pi wants to be a non corporate version of Stellar. If you wanted to run a crypto network with millions of users and thousands of nodes, stellar consensus protocol is a reasonable choice.
A non corporate version of stellar is also an interesting proposition.
This choice is probably related to the fact the Co founder, Chief Scientist of Stellar,
David Mazieres is a professor in the computing department of Stanford and
Dr Nic co founder of Pi is a computer scientist at Stanford teaching blockchain courses and doing social computing research (
Publications)
This is his latest course
BioE 60: Beyond Bitcoin Applications of Distributed TrustThis is the recording of
lecture 2 The first guy in the video is
Jan Liphardt Professor of Bioengineering who developed Fever IQ which was an internal feature of the Pi App that collected covid symptoms. That app, which originally had a github, has turned into this
Enya Launches FeverIQ COVID Health Check to Immediately Help Businesses and SchoolsThe plan of Pi, from what I can figure out, which is consistent with the use of stellar consensus protocol, is to distribute the majority of the mainnet premine to the users in order that they can kickstart an economy using all the applications that will be present in the Pi Mobile app. There is an
SDK and sandbox and people are making and planning apps. e.g.
YouPi. I'm no economist so I don't know if that kind of thing is even possible.
The mining is the means to determine the allocation of the mainnet pi and the KYC is to ensure one person one account. Stellar networks have a 100% premine.
Fake mining is not evidence of a scam since Electroneum did it first. They did it for marketing and to lead into the
Any task application. This was their plan all along as they paid for the "mining" with
~7bill of the etn premine.
Pi Network started a Stellar v12 testnet in June 2020. here is a picture of showing a non consensus node running stellar.
https://ibb.co/m02DdJLThe one thing about running software in a docker container is that you can simply extract the container and examine the files.
There's a lot of information on the
node page and here's one of the programmers taking about
developmentsThe node you can download first is a a test container with a nodejs script that replies on ports. This is the
Github of the script.
The windows app tests the open ports in the router and sends performance data of the computer to PI HQ on regular basis. This information is sent plain text and easily captured with wireshark.
Pi core have stated the main criteria they're testing for is uptime and some people with high uptime 90%+ over 3 months received a testnet container.
The consensus container runs debian 9 and contains stellar core v12 but the config file says it's running as a non consensus node at the moment.
The only thing I can say about the ads in the app is it's unusual that the app lets you turn them off, that there's only 1 a day and they include a >> which you can use to close the ad straight away.
edit: testnet has been reset to v15.2 and quorums are enabled and seem to be working.
