Factoid - The Software Token For The Factom Network

[chesthing]

How are we going to be able to trade factoms - will they be on crypto exchanges?

[TomKoinify]

The sale passes the 12 hours mark with 320 BTC under its belt. Thanks for all the support so far for those who are participating.

[hector3115]

S I have a few questions.  How many factoids will there be at the end of the sale?  What will the cost be for users of this service and who will set the cost?  What are possible market caps for a service like this?

[chesthing]

S I have a few questions.  How many factoids will there be at the end of the sale?  What will the cost be for users of this service and who will set the cost?  What are possible market caps for a service like this?

There is no limit, they will sell as many as people buy. To make matters worse they will create new factoms after the ico to meet demand. I don't know what I'm missing here, but this looks like an extremely high risk buy.

[djohnston]

Just to be clear it is the decentralized network that creates Factoids over time as a reward for the Federated Server that do all the auditing / publishing of the hashes that users add to the network.

The rate of new Factoids is set a 10% of all the Factoids that are created in the genesis block. So over a period of 10 years the Federated Servers will have been paid out as many Factoids as were initially created in the genesis block. Which makes sense given they are the entities sustaining the function of the network over time.

It is important to understand that these new Factoids are non compounding in the sense that the 10% of the genesis block is static, meaning its not 10% of all tokens each year. Thus the percentage of new tokens declines year over year.

For example if 1,000,000 Factoids are created in the genesis block than 100,000 would given out each year to the federated servers for their work to sustain the network. Thus at year ten 2,000,000 Factoid would exist. So in year 11 the rate of new Factoids is only 5% and declines from there.

This is modeled after Bitcoin in that the rate is control by the Federated Servers and nodes that are running the Factoid client software.

[djohnston]

To answer these questions: "How many factoids will there be at the end of the sale?"
This will be determined by the market based on the number of Factoids purchased in the software sale. See my comment for some details directly above. The Koinify website also has good graphs on this topic. Here: https://koinify.com/#/project/FACTOM

What will the cost be for users of this service and who will set the cost?  
The end users will buy entry credits into the Factom ledger at an estimated rate of about a 1 tenth of a penny. These entry credits are converted from Factoids and assigned to a public address for the user.

What are possible market caps for a service like this?
Market cap has to be determined by the market. The root question you are getting at is what level of usage will drive meaningful adoption. You can see from the use case videos that a pretty wide range of companies are looking at the technology. The video are here on the Factom Koinify profile: https://koinify.com/#/project/FACTOM

[djohnston]

To answer the question:
How are we going to be able to trade Factoids - will they be on crypto exchanges?

Shape Shift has already announced their plan to integrate Factoids after May 15th when the software sale is complete.

[lakepopo]

they at 665 BTC now. first project to some around in a long time with working code before they sell. i gave them 10 BTC and see potential in the team. 

[chesthing]

To answer the question:
How are we going to be able to trade Factoids - will they be on crypto exchanges?

Shape Shift has already announced their plan to integrate Factoids after May 15th when the software sale is complete.

Shape shift is just a way to convert currencies not a trading exchange. What will determine the value of a factoid? The way I understand this is you want to keep the price of a entry credit to 1/10 of a penny and will create new factoids to keep this price at this level, so how will increased adoption increase the value of a factoid?
Thanks for your patience, I really want to understand this.

[lakepopo]

To answer the question:
How are we going to be able to trade Factoids - will they be on crypto exchanges?

Shape Shift has already announced their plan to integrate Factoids after May 15th when the software sale is complete.

Shape shift is just a way to convert currencies not a trading exchange. What will determine the value of a factoid? The way I understand this is you want to keep the price of a entry credit to 1/10 of a penny and will create new factoids to keep this price at this level, so how will increased adoption increase the value of a factoid?
Thanks for your patience, I really want to understand this.

yes, any exchange plans?

[djohnston]

To answer the question:
How are we going to be able to trade Factoids - will they be on crypto exchanges?

Shape Shift has already announced their plan to integrate Factoids after May 15th when the software sale is complete.
___________________________________

Shape shift is just a way to convert currencies not a trading exchange. What will determine the value of a factoid? The way I understand this is you want to keep the price of a entry credit to 1/10 of a penny and will create new factoids to keep this price at this level, so how will increased adoption increase the value of a factoid?
Thanks for your patience, I really want to understand this."

___________________________________

Thanks for the note. I'm happy to talk through the details. You make a good point, Shape Shift is a good way of convert tokens but doesn't itself have an order book and thus isn't an oracle for a price. I expect a number of exchanges will make the necessary integration with Factom to support the trading of Factoids. I'll wait to name, names until they much public statements.

The Federated Servers will determine the conversion rate of Factoids to Entry Credits, however yes the number that we putting out there as an example is a tenth of a penny for entries.

To be clear there will not be any "new Factoids" created for the purpose of maintaining or locking this price or ratio. The new Factoids that are created in the system go to the elected Federated Servers for the purpose of rewarding them for auditing and publishing of the hashes.

So think of it this way the Factoids are traded on the market at a dynamic price. The Federated Servers will react to this price change by increasing or decreasing the conversion rate of Factoids to Entry credits between the upper band of being cheap enough to attract users, but expensive enough to prevent spam. 

[chesthing]

How would you best describe factom compared to current cryptocurrencies - what is it most similar to? how difficult would it be for current exchanges to implement it?

[TomKoinify]

Update: 725 BTC has been raised in under 48 hours.

You can check https://twitter.com/factom_sale for a live feed of the sales!

[FACTOM]

Update: 725 BTC has been raised in under 48 hours.

You can check https://twitter.com/factom_sale for a live feed of the sales!

That is good going, we are thrilled with the support received so far.
A big thank you to everyone who has contributed so far.  

[pinkman12345]

I've just brought 1000 factoids on koinify. Do i have to send them to a wallet or something? or just wait for an exchange to store them on. I just want to hold onto them for a few years.

Thanks

[TomKoinify]

I've just brought 1000 factoids on koinify. Do i have to send them to a wallet or something? or just wait for an exchange to store them on. I just want to hold onto them for a few years.

Thanks

Your Factoids will be locked in your Koinify wallet until May 15th, then you will be able to withdrawal and send wherever supports them.

[FACTOM]

We have sold over 1,600,000 Factoids in just 48 Hours.
A massive thank you to our community and supporters.

Head over to Koinify to get yours before the rate change in 5 days.

https://koinify.com/#/project/FACTOM

[djohnston]

How would you best describe factom compared to current cryptocurrencies - what is it most similar to? how difficult would it be for current exchanges to implement it?

Thanks for the question.

Factom isn't very similar to existing cryptocurrencies as its main function is not to act as a payment network or currency, but rather as a decentralized platform for publishing and reading generalized data from an immutable ledger.

If I were to pick any project I'd say Side Chains is a good analogy (though very different in function). Where Side Chains is a means of moving value (in the form of coins) from one blockchain to another, Factom is a means of securing / time stamping data that has been hashed and anchoring it into the bitcoin blockchain. With the ability to trace back that merkle root into the Factom directory layer and audit the hashes that have been published.

So perhaps one could say Factom is to data what Side Chains is to coins. That is a means of scaling the blockchain in that particular function.

It not a perfect analogy, but I hope that answers your question.

  

[chesthing]

How would you best describe factom compared to current cryptocurrencies - what is it most similar to? how difficult would it be for current exchanges to implement it?

Thanks for the question.

Factom isn't very similar to existing cryptocurrencies as its main function is not to act as a payment network or currency, but rather as a decentralized platform for publishing and reading generalized data from an immutable ledger.

If I were to pick any project I'd say Side Chains is a good analogy (though very different in function). Where Side Chains is a means of moving value (in the form of coins) from one blockchain to another, Factom is a means of securing / time stamping data that has been hashed and anchoring it into the bitcoin blockchain. With the ability to trace back that merkle root into the Factom directory layer and audit the hashes that have been published.

So perhaps one could say Factom is to data what Side Chains is to coins. That is a means of scaling the blockchain in that particular function.

It not a perfect analogy, but I hope that answers your question.

  

Why did you decide to accept bitcoin rather than fiat for this ipo? Why are you holding an ipo, isn't this already developed? you could have simply started selling factoids to end users.

[djohnston]

How would you best describe factom compared to current cryptocurrencies - what is it most similar to? how difficult would it be for current exchanges to implement it?

Thanks for the question.

Factom isn't very similar to existing cryptocurrencies as its main function is not to act as a payment network or currency, but rather as a decentralized platform for publishing and reading generalized data from an immutable ledger.

If I were to pick any project I'd say Side Chains is a good analogy (though very different in function). Where Side Chains is a means of moving value (in the form of coins) from one blockchain to another, Factom is a means of securing / time stamping data that has been hashed and anchoring it into the bitcoin blockchain. With the ability to trace back that merkle root into the Factom directory layer and audit the hashes that have been published.

So perhaps one could say Factom is to data what Side Chains is to coins. That is a means of scaling the blockchain in that particular function.

It not a perfect analogy, but I hope that answers your question.

  

Why did you decide to accept bitcoin rather than fiat for this ipo? Why are you holding an ipo, isn't this already developed? you could have simply started selling factoids to end users.

Thanks for the questions. Firstly the software sale is using bitcoin because it is a non reversible type of payment. If one were to accept a reversible type of payment for a non reversible application specific digital token, then one would encounter a fraud problem. A fraudulent buyers would send funds (from a credit card for example) the buyer receives the digital token and then simply calls up his credit card company to reverse the charge on this card. The seller of the applications specific digital token has no way to reverse the send, so the fraudulent buyer walks away with the digital token, but the seller has kept no value.

The Factom protocol and clients have been developed to the Alpha stage and the Beta will be released after the software sale post May 15th. As part of releasing the Beta and the Factoid chain capabilities requires there to be an number of tokens created in the genesis block at the launch, because the reward in the Federated server system is a multiplied by the number of tokens in the genesis block (10% of all tokens in the Genesis block).

Its worth understanding that if the Factom Foundation or some central entity had been the one selling Factoids that it effectively becomes a gate keeper in the system. Factom is designed to have no gate keepers so a centralized issuer was not an option.