We really don’t know when the media attacks against us will start (there is against bitcoin, it is reasonable that there will be against us as well).
Depending on when the bad people start using the network, it may even be during the tests. For those who don’t know, 2 years ago we kicked out a pedophile from the forum who was openly promoting himself.
We don’t know how long it will take us to build Fiat bridges to the network before the government bans direct access with CEX (my guess is that this will happen - the world doesn’t know anything like Safe, so it’s reasonable to assume and prepare for the worst. If things turn out pink perfectly for us, I will be very happy).
That is why it is important to act as early as possible in order to attract as many people as possible to the network.
The figures quoted are fine I am not calling them into question. I am questioning the methodology for extrapolating from the figures to the below estimation:
Sorry I did not explain the position very well I will try again from a different tact as concisely as possible:
Bucket (1): Longer term in development project is only listed on CEXs (like SN).
Trading volume on the CEXs is from people who actually want to risk their capital to trade and/or buy and sell at specific price points in the orderbook.
Some portion of the activity will be trading bots/wash trading
Non-traders, developers and/or people who have already bought in for the long term have heavy incentive to move their tokens off-exchange into cold storage. Given a stable long term project there is excellent case to be made that this will be the vast majority.
Bucket (2): That same project suddenly enables ability to list on liquid DEX like Uniswap (Omni → ERC20 swap for example).
The majority of token holders, all those with coins in cold storage, now begin to see they have a new opportunity open to them: There is now an incentive to securely move some of their coins out of deep cold storage to stake and/or provide liquidity and earn a return for doing so on DEXs.
This transition is a process. At first the higher risk takers will move some out of cold storage, some will stay in cold storage and others will wait and see and only slowly start participating as they see the all-clear and benefits to doing so are slowly realised. Point is we need some time to pass to see stable results after transition to assess whether there is much benefit or not.
This class of people is motivated by very distinct incentive structure to the ones listed in Bucket (1) above.
Bucket (3):
As DEX liquidity rises due to (2), new services can now come online such as the Kyber Network
New satellite KyberNet/Specialised DEXs/Smaller CEXs piggy back on that permissionless liquidity to start new avenues for trading as the DEX enables their their fee and spread based models to start up whereas before it would not have been possible for them to source liquidity as easily.
A) You have measured average volume in bucket (1) over a time frame.
B) Compared it to different existing projects that have been in Bucket (2) and (3) for a long time.
Estimated “50% more” ignoring the differences in incentives between the two.
A more accurate methodology would be to:
A) Find enough projects that had been in bucket (1) for at least your chosen averaging time period. For best comparison a longer time development with as little hype and marketing to better establish long term base case CEX volume over that stable period.
B) Compare those same projects against themselves in the future after they have graduated to buckets (2) and (3) for a significant enough period of time.
Run your chosen statistical method over the difference for all those particular projects to arrive at an estimation that is closer to reality.
Tauchain AGRS as last project to throw in the towel on Omni. This is not such a good comparison as they have only been in bucket (2) for a few months. Bucket (3) will be some way off, and the project is pretty small with negligible development (as far as I can see) so the numbers are too small and the time period too short to really draw anything from it. For illustration purposes only:
Green circle: Omni was used a lot more than today, Tether was only available on Omni. Project was newly launched still full of promise, hype and a general bull market underway. Discard this data perhaps only useful to serve as an idea of “what could be again”.
Bucket (1) Red Circle: Years of development, little hype, only available on one CEX: Bittrex. Note that the volume is not very natural looking during first three quarters of this this period. Looks like consistent bots/wash trading. End of period November 2020 volume drops off quite lot and price volatility spikes suggesting all the CEX volume was locked up in a few hands/the float was tiny and easily manipulated. Another reason why this does not make the best example.
Bucket (2) Purple Circle: Full ERC20 swap, Uniswap listing about 3 months ago. Natural looking volume starting to creep back into the project despite no real development announcements or progress that I can find. Price volatility stabilises better suggests price discovery going on perhaps.
Bucket (3) has not arrived for this project yet.
So to sum up: I question the accuracy of taking volume of projects in Bucket(1) the red circle like SN, and comparing it to different projects that have already arrived in bucket (2) and (3) for a significant time period.
As long as it involves a relatively small token it’s relatively simple. I can afford to do manual double checks when validating large transfers or many small ones that appear related or somehow out of the ordinary. MAID is much bigger though, so that would cost a lot of time and be less secure, because it’s a far more tempting target.
As as far as I know, there’s no way to make this process completely decentralised without it being a big cryptographic experiment by itself, so I understand MaidSafe’s hesitation. Personally, I’d rather have them focus solely on delivering SAFE, then we can simply convert all MAID to SafeCoin and be done with this issue.
You have to avoid at all cost that all Safecoin liquidity will be locked up in a secure, but closed and empty internet environment where nothing has been build yet.
In the beginning Safe will be forced to keep an open door to the clear net.
@Seneca, for the Safe network there is besides the technical danger and economic and social danger …
Bitcoin, for example, is pseudo-anonymous, but the Safe tokens are completely anonymous, plus they allow you to have a voice in a network without censorship.
We do not know how the central government will react to this. It’s good to keep access to fiat.
If only it was that easy I would wholeheartedly agree with you. How will we tell the majority of the world to jump on their mobiles, buy SN Tokens, and start using the network? That is the heart of the issue and fleshing out how exactly this is to be done on the first truly private decentralized network. All avenues to fiat are and have been blocked in other examples that we have to draw on, and they do not rival the privacy of SN.
My last sentence was oversimplified I suppose. But after launch we’d ideally onboard new users mainly by getting them to farm SC. Exchange support is important mostly for existing MAID owners. Having a larger MAID market would incentivize exchanges to support SC later, that’s true.
Thanks for the detailed clarification @krnelson, really valuable and I appreciate it a lot.
I wonder what level of risk is acceptable here? Like, to get just something small started?
I don’t know the space very well, but what about Storj? Tether omni-vs-erc20? PDC?
I wonder, what if a single person here made an erc20 coin with 452552412 coins available, announced it plus an omni deposit address, then list it on a dex?
It’ll mean some work for the single person to manage the swaps, so they have to be happy to do that work, but they’ll get part of the liquidity pool rewards for doing it. Maybe after some time they will identify the main operational pain-points and the community can help smooth them with some software automation or community participation?
Anyone can look at the omni address/txs and the erc20 contract and the dex liquidity pool to see if it’s operating as expected, no fraud etc.
It’s still a risk to both the contract owner and the trading participants, pretty high risk perhaps, but some traders will probably take it up, right?
What I’m getting at, I feel we’ve been aiming for a solution with very low risk and won’t ever get off the ground. It seems to me there’s a simple-but-high-risk way to get started on dex with a small-but-present audience. Why not try it and at least see how much of the market is open to this high risk option? It adds complexity to the maidafecoin ecosystem, but it’s reversible complexity.
If it works, maybe others will repeat the process. Then there’d be multiple erc20 coins (which is messy), but the liquidity pool can smooth it out and it also means there are various degrees of trust instead of one big multisig single contract. If one erc20 bridge fails, the others continue. A plurality of markets rather than a single community-run market.
Why doesn’t someone try implementing a very-simple-but-very-high-risk option and see if the tip of the iceberg comes to the party?
I can tell you right away why I haven’t done it yet.
USA.
Someone will launder money through this scheme and then the Bulgarian government will extradite me to the United States and I will be in prison there for the next 10 years…
I think the conversion has to be done by Maidsafe.
It will be a lot of work, but they are the only trustworthy party to change Maid-omni to a Maid-erc20.
I am not sure how easy it is to automate this process, from Bitcoin to Omni was not difficult, because it was the same blockchain. Anyway there are some very bright minds on this forum that might have a solution for this.
I don’t think this would be anything more than a change of protocol, but I am no expert.
Kin went from ERC20 ICO to Stellar token to stellar fork to Solana token in about 3 or 4 years. That is 3 full token swap/migrations for a 100 million dollar ico with many participants.
I dont know how complicated the process is but they apparently did not find it incredibly daunting if they did it 3 times in 4 years
Yes elephant in the room… 100 million dollars raised. I think there is still something to take from that.
Is this risk specific to Bulgaria or is this something that is broadly applicable? Could the same (or similar) kyc+aml risks also apply to maidsafe (the company)?
Perhaps there’s a simple half-way option that can satisfy both traders and holders. Maidsafe sets up a burn address. This is trivial for them to do, they could do it in ten minutes. The burn address has two purposes: 1) it allows holders and long term believers to burn their coins to be converted into ‘real’ tokens at network launch and 2) It also allows traders to ‘vote’ by burn that they want to be issued erc20 coins.
If the burn address receives enough coins (what is enough?), then maidsafe is motivated to issue an erc20 coin. If not popular, then traders are not much worse off because they couldn’t trade their unburnt omni coins anyway due to lack of liquidity. Traders can keep some of their funds unburnt if they want to still trade omni.
It’s just a quick idea, happy for holes to be poked, but I think it might work as a way to measure the current level of desire for moving away from maidsafecoin. It seems to satisfy both holders and traders. Will it work?
Well that is exactly one of my worries, and why I don’t think we should bouncing into this without being absolutely certain.
It’s funny that folk want MaidSafe to take this risk even though it might jeopardise the entire project. (Some folks have even suggested David take this risk personally because he “will have to do a McAfee anyway”! As if there haven’t been enough personal risks along the way already).
That’s why any approach has to be legally watertight.
From that perspective the Wrapped option appeals, at least to get things going as perhaps the first of a few options, as that’s a path that has been trodden before and AML stuff is handled by Anchorage.
A probably controversial suggestion.
Nobody that holds MAID is to blame for OMNI falling apart.
If tax is a hurdle here nobody should be punished for the failure of OMNI.
Perhaps a vote.
When the ERC20 token is minted 20% extra are created.
These are a bonus when you convert to cover tax obligations.
