#1 Will any Factoids exist before 5/15 besides those sold in the crowdsale?
#2 Will any Factoids be created after 5/15 besides the annual 10% emission?
#3 Will there be a cap on the total number of Factoids or will the annual emission continue into perpetuity?
#4 Will Factoids be available to trade on the open market after 5/15?
#5 Does Factom the organization hold any Factoids, or will they?
#6 How will Factom provide for off-chain transactions?
#7 How much overlap exists between the functionality provided by Factom and that provided by Counterparty?
Thanks for the questions. See here below.
#1. The genesis block of the Factoids (to be released post May 15th) will contain all Factoids from the software sale, early contributor and early sale pool participants as described in percentages on the Factom Koinify profile:
https://koinify.com/#/project/FACTOMSo to answer the question directly. No. The genesis block will contain all Factoids that will be valid in the protocol and they will come into existence at the same time, no Factoids (beyond for testing purposes) will be created before the Factoid Chain is released.
#2. No Factoids will be created after the Genesis block of the Factoid Chain, except for the 10% annual emission you highlight. Its worth highlighting that this 10% annual emission is multiplied against the genesis block Factoids and is thus non compounding. Specifically the number of Factoids in the 10% annual emission is set by the genesis block and stays the same in absolute terms year after year. Thus the percentage of the Factoids rewarded to Federated Servers declines as a percentage of the total Factoids that have been issued over the history of the network.
#3. There will not be a cap on the number of Factoids. The emission will continue in perpetuity.
#4. Shape Shift has committed to integrate Factoids into their system and so yes it is anticipated that Factoids will be tradable after May 15th, though this is out of the control of the Factom Foundation and will depend on third parties conducting integrations.
#5. The Factom Foundation does NOT have its own pool Factoids separate from the early sale, early contributors and software sale. Though the Factom Foundation is able to hold Factoids as part of its endowment in addition to the BTC that is collected during the software sale or later via donations from sponsors.
This question of holding Factoids has come up as one the purchasers in the early sale pool failed to complete the committed amount of the purchase and the Factom Foundation ended up holding these Factoids as part of its endowment. Though not originally planned this scenario resulted in the Factom Foundation holding a minority of the Factoids in the early sale pool.
#6. On the question of if "Factom" will provide "Off Chain Transactions" I could interpret this question is several ways. Provided you are asking about Factom supporting financial transactions off the bitcoin blockchain, I'd say that any record can be recorded in Factom, though generally speaking this is data records and not financial transactions. Though given Factom doesn't have any gate keepers or restrict the type of data a user adds to the system its possible users will add financial transactions to the Factom system. Will these qualify as "off chain" I suppose in a way they would, though given Factom places an anchor every 10 minutes into the Bitcoin Blockchain this data is secured to the blockchain periodically though without having to place nearly as many transactions into the Bitcoin Blockchain to accomplish this security and audit ability.
#7. Factom is a general purpose data verification layer in which the user can write and read from an immutable set of records that have been secured to the blockchain. Factom does not have any application layer features. Anyone issuing tokens, securing records, creating transactions on top of the Factom data verification and auditing trails would be doing so independent of the core Factom protocol which only provides for the writing and reading of data. In short, there is virtually no overlap between Counter Party, Omni Layer, or other decentralized applications which have features such as decentralized exchange, token issuance, smart contracts and so forth. In fact the goal is as Factom proves itself a stable protocol for the publishing and reading of data done in a way that is secured to the blockchain, but allows for much greater scaling, speed and cost efficiencies, that platforms such as Counter Party and Omni will integrate Factom into the way they secure meta data for their different features.
I hope those answers are helpful.
