Time for another Q&A – this one featuring Simon Wajcenberg, one of the founders of the POW Token. We’ve been intrigued from the get-go – so we thought we’d ask a few questions of Simon. (We’re including our referral link throughout – we’re compensated with POW tokens if you use the link to sign up.)
Q: You launched on October 3 and had one of the more compelling value propositions: you were giving away the token to anyone and everyone, they just needed a Facebook account that wasn’t brand new. Why take that approach?
A: We believe that Ethereum will be part of the widespread adoption of Blockchain throughout the planet. Right now, the UI for decentralised Apps and services are pretty horrible. You’ve got to be a real believer (we are!) in order to persist and actually use a decentralised App or service. This will takes years of development by the crypto community until the UI is as easy as that which we expect on mass market web applications. In the mean time, we believe the only way to get mass market adoption is to build a bridge between the centralised “old world” and the decentralised “new world”. POWtoken hopes it is that bridge!
Q: Were you surprised by the initial reaction? (I mean, the servers couldn’t handle it at first…)
A: No – if anything we were slightly disappointed by the lack of PR for the launch. We really believe when the project takes off, we’ll be looking at hundreds of thousands of claims each day.
Because we had so little PR at the launch, we decided to cancel our AWS (Amazon) servers and stick with a cheaper, less scalable server hosting service. Yes this meant that the server could not handle the spike at the time of the launch, but within 30 mins we were back down to levels where the server had 90% spare capacity again. The whole project is done on a shoestring – we are not raising any money, and none of the team get paid in any form. We are all POW holders, just like everybody else who has claimed. We were careful to only give the founder team a collective 6.5% of the POW, to align our interests with all the other users. When the server utilisation starts to approach 75% utilisation we’ll start planning for AWS migration – we are still a way off that!
Q: You make the case on the site that each user of Bitcoin could have an implied value of in excess of $10,000. Care to elaborate on what that could mean for users of POW?
A: Much of the per user value in Bitcoin reflects expectations for the number of Bitcoin users growing to billions from their current level of possibly just over 10 million users. As the number of users approaches 1bn, the per user valuation should fall. Let’s assume it falls to just $200 a head – we’ll use the figure again below.
Our allocation structure accommodates 1bn claimers. We want the Twitter and Facebook users of the world to come and claim their POW allocation and to get their friends to as well.
So let’s look at the numbers. If we got to 1bn users, we would have a total supply of POW of 231b. If we assume the market cap of POWtoken.com at that point was $200b (1bn * $200), then the price of 1 POW would be 0.86 USD. That means the lucky person who got 10bn POW on 3rd October (the first claimant) would be worth over $8bn USD! The current free POW allocation is over 70,000 POW’lite’, and the referral scheme means you can earn another 70K for every person you refer who joins. It really is an extraordinary opportunity for us all to work together to increase adoption and share the benefit. *Editor’s note: as of this writing, 15 November, users claim 73,000 or so POW”lite.” This figure will continue to decrease.
Q: In the interest of full disclosure, not only am I using my referral link to earn more tokens, I’m also a “validator.” Can you please walk us through why that’s important work to be done?
A: In the first few weeks we had quite a lot of accounts claiming that clearly had been created on Facebook purely to claim POW’lite’ This was against our Terms and Conditions. Our initial plan had been to use parameters from Facebook’s OAuth “Sign in With Facebook” toolkit to establish the creation date of each Facebook account and hence only allow accounts that had been created for at least 3 months to make a claim. At the time we were unaware that Facebook do not allow this, and do not allow work-arounds such as using the earliest post in the user’s timeline to estimate the creation date. We are in Facebook’s debt for allowing us to take advantage of their amazing OAuth technology, and want to be very careful to respect the letter and spirit of their guidelines. For that reason, we had to come up with an alternative, which is what the validation step does. We ask our existing users to take a look at the public profile page on Facebook of each new claimant, and determine if the account was created before a specific date. Every fake account that is avoided, saves a significant amount of POW, and enhances value for everybody in the network.
Q: As a validator, I’ve noticed quite a few users from Asian countries. Is there any part of the world that you’d like to see more traction for the coin?
A: POW is very popular in the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia. We are seeing increasing take up in South America (Venezuela and Brazil are hotspots). In the African continent, Nigeria is the leading edge. It’s exciting to see claims from such far flung communities as Greenland and the Cook Islands.
Q: How are things coming along with respect to the other milestones, such as Twitter users being able to send POW back and forth, or when the tokens can be traded on exchanges (beyond the EtherDelta ERC20 tokens that we can trade now)?
A: Twitter users sending to each other – within next 7 days
Twitter users and Facebook users sending to each other – within next 14 days
Extended Twitter referral scheme (sending POW to followers who are not POWtoken.com users) – within next 14 days
Twitter ‘TipBot’ – allowing Twitter users to “tip” each other POW’lite’ – within next 21 days
Bridge between POWtoken.com and Ethereum Blockchain – complete by end December.
Q: Any final thoughts for POW Token users and the future of the coin?
Let’s work together to increase crypto adoption. Any ideas you think can help, please get in touch via our social media channels – we are listeners!
Editor’s Note: You can find them on Twitter – and yes, they’re responsive folks. Thanks to Simon and the team for weighing in!
You can also join the community at the Telegraph group https://t.me/joinchat/FC4cJQ_VYuq74N6hVe8Aqw
Let’s work together to increase crypto adoption..lovely keywords, and i am so keying into it,just finished sharing the q and a to friends so they too can read this up.