NKN Livestream AMA with Core Team - April 2019

Question on TG by Adan:

  • Could you explain tomorrow how Stephen Wolfram is involved in nkn project please.

Question on TG by Backen:

  • What’s the incentive to increase nodecount? Are there any definite plans to make it more profitable running nodes since I see a large decrease in node count.

Question on TG by Itluss:

  • We saw a video with a game like dota. Can we have some explanation?

Question on TG by Phil:

  • Would be cool to hear more about datapace partnership and if anything is going on there. read a brief article on datapace the other day. i knew they had a connection with nokia but I didnt know they actually work out of the Bell Labs headquarters. could be some good stuff there but we havent really ever heard anything more about it since the announcement last year.

Does NKN have an ambassador program and if not is it on the roadmap?

What happened to Bibox listing, which NKN won? The project that ended up first later claimed the listing was free.

Understand that you wanna get listed on honest exchanges, but most wash trading happens on ETH and BTC tether pairs, not on altcoins. Will we see NKN listed on Huobi, OKEx, Bithumb, Bibox? Your loved BTI https://www.bti.live/exchanges/ updated statistics recently and exchanges after exclusion of the wash trading still have high volume.

  1. We heard a while ago that NKN is working with several telecoms and ISPs in varying capacities. When can we hope to hear details about at least some of these?

  2. Many projects raised far less money than NKN and yet have gotten on several exchanges. So far we have not seen any paid listings from NKN at all. Does the current budget simply not allow for much money to be put towards exchanges, and if that is not the case, then why have we still seen no paid listings even with token swap completed? What happened with Bibox?

  3. We saw a large drop off in nodes in the past couple days, possibly because the one click free trials ran out. How does NKN team plan to incentivise growth of the network in the lead up to mainnet? Would you consider announcing a swap from tNKN to ETH (like the early redeem) at a competitive ratio at mainnet, to both incentivise early miners as well as to avoid a large sudden supply increase of NKN?

  4. There were discussions previously on telegram and reddit about adding holding incentives for token holders. Right now NKN is just a gas token with no benefit or incentive for people to hold, other than speculative price gain. Is the NKN team no longer considering adding direct token incentives like this? How do you aim to compete with projects where there are staking elements to consensus model (eg. Cardano PoS, upcoming ETH PoS, NEO/GAS etc) where holders have a big incentive to accumulate the coin and continue being involved with the project?

  5. Does NKN have any real significant marketing plans in the crypto space? So far it seems most of the marketing seems to just be the NKN official twitter, but over the past year the project hasn’t gained nearly as much exposure and interest as most expected it to. The tech is great, but few people really know about it - how do you aim to change this significantly?

  1. Bruce, in one of your interviews you said that NKN can help reduce expenses that mobile operators have when offering roaming and NKN can also help create real-time bills (that operators send to each other). Can you provide some examples of those expenses in more detail and how NKN can reduce them and become an integral part in roaming services?

  2. This is more of a fun question. Imagine I’m a high ranking manager in one of the big telcom companies, pitch NKN to me (I don’t get tech, I get money)? :slight_smile:
    2.1 Is NKN looking more in B2B direction or both B2B and B2C? If the last one is true, than can you make a short pitch to a heavy internet user (work + gaming), why NKN is nuts?

  3. NKN can help streaming services reduce their costs and latency, correct? Can you “explain like I’m five” how it is achieved? For example streaming games. How will nodes avoid having to store insane amounts of data? Will it be in constant transfer from one point to another? I hope I made myself clear :confused:

  4. I’ve read that there are cases of ISP throttling connection speed or preferencing certain services or websites. Can end users somehow use NKN to go around these things?

  5. Can NKN be also used as a low-cost anti DDoS’ing service (due to huge number of nodes in the future)?

  6. How will the token economy work in detail, how do you plan to make the token work AND reduce the entry barrier of using crypto? i.e. how will end-users of NKN buy NKN tokens or redeem them for fiat/btc? Will there be a more convenient way other that using traditional crypto exchanges?

  7. Can you describe full life circle of NKN token that is being used as intended (utility)? i.e. it’s being bought on the exchange, used to pay for a service, than what happens to it? Will it be used to pay the nodes (once the mining reserve ends)? And the circle will continue? Or…?

About the answer to:

NKN can help streaming services reduce their costs and latency, correct? Can you “explain like I’m five” how it is achieved? For example streaming games. How will nodes avoid having to store insane amounts of data? Will it be in constant transfer from one point to another? I hope I made myself clear :confused:

I’d like to clarify about the neighbor. So does he actually keep the burger in his home or do I tell him I want a burger and he goes to get it and when he gets back home I’m already there, ready to take the burger to my home? i.e. does he need a big ass fridge (file storage) to store all the burgers that his neighbors might want?

Basically I was curious if with modern internet speeds NKN will have to store big amounts of data on intermediate nodes (between 1st server and end user)?

That’s a good question. Actually it depends on traffic. For traditional type CDN that are mainly target at static files like images, big refrigerators help. But it don’t need to be huge if we smartly arrange traffic so that nearby traffic visiting the same site will tend to be directed to the same edge node. If we can have 100X more nodes (PoP) compared to traditional CDN, then each node just need 1/100 of the refrigerator space.

On the other hand, if traffic is mostly live streaming, then space plays a even smaller role here.

Thank you for the reply. That sounds good, but wouldn’t this “1/100” approach diminish the whole point of decentralization if we’re talking about its security part? I mean that instead of taking down hundreds or thousands of nodes a hostile/malicious party will just need to target “1/100” of nodes to mess/ruin CDN’s operation. Am I wrong, or is this somehow not a concern, or is there some kind of workaround?

I hope my questions are not extremely noobish. I’m just trying to get a basic understanding of this whole thing with my “hello world” level knowledge :blush:

This is actually not a concern because for CDN, there is typically a scheduler in front who will know which nodes are up/down and thus prevent routing traffic to them.

Oh, cool! Thanks a lot for answering my questions. I’m super excited about all of this! :slight_smile:

  1. (@philthyphil83) What’s the roadmap post mainnet? Smart contract integration etc / (@mbyelykh)What does roadmap for 24 months adoption looks like?

Answer: our grand strategy is similar to Amazon Marketplace: first we sell books and CD (flagship products) and perfect our platform; then over time we make the marketplace as our main product, so everyone can become a mini software service provider.

Regarding the short to medium term roadmap:

  • Upon mainnet launch, we intend to release two flagship products (Decentralized Pub/Sub and nCDN)
  • By the end of 2019:
    • Tech: Our mainnet will scale to a new level, e.g. 25-30K nodes. We will continue to enhance our mainnet, especially in terms of payment channels & NKN economic model
    • Biz: we intend to generate revenue from the flagship products, signing several large deals and develop a wide and deep opportunity funnel.
  • 2020:
    • Tech: scale NKN mainnet to new level in terms of node count and network performance. Further develop more flagship products and make a great marketplace for mini software services.
    • Biz: rapidly scale and grow our flagship product business, target the top right quadrant (Gartner), starting from visionary innovator and grow into an industry leader.
  1. (@zaxxxndx) Is the tech behind NKN’s MOCA consensus protected / patented? What stops big corporations with funding from reverse-engineering it and make their own NKN?

Answer: the NKN.org public blockchain software is open source under Apache 2.0. This is the beauty of open source software and ecosystem: the software itself is not a barrier to entry, but rather a foundation for more adoption. The more people and companies use it, the more valuable the software becomes. And the community developers, miners, and users will form a large ecosystem that cannot be easily replicated. One example is Bitcoin: anyone can copy their software (including JP Morgan), but nobody can actually replicate the ecosystem behind Bitcoin which makes it so successful.

So the business model is a bit like github, ngnix, or Redhat. Anyone can copy the open source code and use it for free, but the companies who use these open source software for their mission critical applications pay for professional technical support.

  1. (@zaxxxndx) What has NKN team learned from other projects that are still struggling to find adoptions / massive user base? What are the measures that will be taken to ease adoptions?

Answer: an influential VC once said: for a small startup, it is better to sell one great product than sell a giant platform. So we should not pin all our hopes on launching the mainnet, and then developers will come in droves to build on top.

We identified very early on, that we need to build our own great products that not only can compete with blockchain projects but also compete with non-blockchain solutions. We need to swim in the ocean with sharks, not be satisfied with being the biggest fish in the fish tank. We picked two products to focus on: decentralized Pub/Sub, and new kind of CDN. All of these products have universal appeal and can be used by millions or billions of people. We will take the future into our own hands by not only launching mainnet but also two great products on top of our mainnet.

  1. (@zaxxxndx) As we know, NEO has openly supported NKN (proven by Da Hongfei’s tweet suggesting people to vote for NKN in the Binance poll that we participated). At the moment, is the NEO connection still standing? Has the decision to migrate from NEP-5 to ERC20 affected any positive influence that NKN has with NEO?

Answer: NKN has always had good relationship with NEO project team and NEO ecosystem, before and after the swap. NEO is one of the first public blockchain projects in China, with its own developed technology. And we are on good terms with Da Hongfei, Erik Zhang, Johnson Zhao, and the colleagues at NGD.

NGC invested in NKN, but our mission and use case are quite unique.

CryptoBambi (@cryptobambi1):

I have a couple of questions for the ama and please note that these are questions for the team:

  1. how can a blockchain operate securely if nodes have no stake in it (no pow or pos)? i think this one is really big and noone has explained in a way that most people can understand it

Answer: NKN has a useful proof of work which we call Proof of Relay. You can think of it as a PoW but it’s useful, meaning that instead of computing hash that are not useful to anyone else, the work done in NKN is helping other people by relaying data. Therefore, it is secure and resistant to many blockchain attacks. In fact, this is an area we have spent lots of research and development effort.

  1. how many developers are currently actively working on the code for nkn?

Answer: we have 10 software developers actively working on the NKN code, including core networking and blockchain, SDK, frontend and tools. Plus a strong and expanding base of community developers contributing actively.

  1. why is nkn using 1 minute block times while newer generation blockchains have much shorter?

Answer: Our testnet block interval is 20 seconds, NOT 1 minute. Can we make it shorter? Yes, but only to a degree. Fundamentally, the block generation time cannot be shorter than the time needed for new block to be propagated to the network if we want instant finality. Since we are designed for millions of nodes worldwide (no other blockchain can do that) and a typical home Internet, there is a certain limit of how fast block can be generated. But the good news is, it could be faster as the Internet infrastructure becomes better, and it usually grows faster than people can imagine.

You have seen some blockchains using much shorter block intervals, but you also have to understand that they typically have a few consensus nodes running on high performance computers with super fast network connections. That’s not the decentralized design goal we had for NKN.

  1. how are you planning to approach the adoption aspect, are there any marketing plans for the future and if there are could you please elaborate more on the exact ways on how you are approaching this?

Answer: The flagship products we will be launching in conjunction with mainnet are used by mass market consumer applications but by itself not directly visible to consumers. Our customers are enterprises and developers. Therefore it is more B2B marketing in terms of selling our products.

On the other hand, we will use a combination of social/viral marketing with traditional industry focused PR/marketing. For example, once we can announce our main media customer for our nCDN product, we do intend to promote our solution using traditional media channels as well.

  1. What did Bruce mean by the big bang and when is it coming?

Answer: what I meant was big news regarding technology and product, exchanges, and business partners/customers. More details will be announced when the results are approaching ready, until then, please stay tuned!

Tanner:

  1. Do we have any inclination when we may hear about these mainnet products? Will it only be after mainnet?

Answer: We are focusing on two flagship products.

The first one, decentralized Pub/Sub, which we have already published information on. We are now working with customers and channel partners.

The second one, new kind of CDN, will be launched before or around mainnet launch. We want to announce it along with some tangible adoption if NDA and PR review allows by our partner.

  1. When we’ll see the tests of the network for TPS, estimate date and what do you expect to achieve?

Answer: We plan to do more performance testing once our mainnet 0.9 branch is feature complete, stable, and have more test nodes.

TPS expectation: first of all, absolute TPS number is not that meaningful. There is no use cases or application existing today that require super high TPS, even for payment systems like Visa or Mastercard. Our main use cases are networking, and we intend to design our TPS goals according to our applications and the amount of users we will have.

In addition, there are lots of parameters that can impact the result. For example the performance of the nodes (CPU and I/O capability), the quality of interlink between nodes (network speed, latency), and the type of transactions. So it is difficult to give one single number.

Lukas:

  1. What’s the block size and block time for mainnet and how it was picked? Can it be a major hurdle in the future for adoption?

Answer: on our testnet, block time is 20 seconds

We do not see this as a major hurdle in adoption. Why?

  • Our data transmission or relay are entirely off chain and runs as fast as your network connection allows. This is absolutely independent from how fast the block can be recorded on the chain.
  • We pick 20 seconds block time, so we can actually scale to millions or even billions of full consensus nodes. Nobody can do it AFAIK.
  1. Free or paid asset transactions (NKN transfers)? In my opinion there should be at least optional fee to not get into situation where NEO happened to be that the network got spammed and no wallets supported optional fees. Also provides next income stream for miners.

Answer: Our NKN network and blockchain are designed to charge for transaction fees, so we can and will charge fees for transactions.

The question is really when to start charging and what to charge. We don’t want to throttle adoption by charging transaction fees too early, when there are not so much traffic or transaction on our network in the beginning. Later on, when we have greater adoption and more transactions, we will charge fees.

Another consideration is what type of transaction need to be charged. Technically all txn can set a fee, and the amount should be set by the market rather than us.

Sybod

  1. Have you considered a different token model, including double token model to incentivize more holders and miners? If yes, is it possible that there will be a change announced soon?

Answer: We have been thinking long and hard on the token economy and how to boost it. And we actually have an almost ready draft.

To disappoint you, it is not a dual token model. But the idea is to make NKN tokens more useful for more applications, further incentivize mining, and using fiat revenue to purchase tokens to pay for NKN products running on NKN network.

  1. Rebrand?

Answer: Yes and no. NKN.org and New Kind of Network is not super famous, but at least many people know about it as a promising public blockchain project. Getting rid of it will only reduce our brand capital.

However, we do need different branding and corporate identity for the for-profit company and the products that are built on top of NKN. We have collected some of our own ideas as well as community suggestions. Some of the criteria are: easy to pronounce in most languages, lively and fun, and convey the image of NKN. If you have any good suggestions, please feel free to propose. We plan to finalize before or around mainnet launch.

  1. NKN team in numbers, how many developers are in the team at this moment full time and how many people in business development? Will you start hiring to progress faster after mainnet?

Answer: Developer question already answered above.

In addition, we have a strong community developer circle. They have developed blockchain browser, wallet, mining portal, SDK in different languages, and more. Even more people have contributed to creating marketing and technical content, and promote NKN by their own initiative. This is the strength of open source community.

Since we already started to launch products, more staffing forces will be placed on sales and customer support, as well as developers to work on new features. We are always actively looking for quality candidates to expand our team, Beijing office currently has openings for engineering and business development. Submit your resume to [email protected] if you want to join the NKN team!

  1. We haven’t heard yet anything specific about these telco companies, when are we going to hear first bits, this year? This is as exciting as when Samsung partnered with Enjin. How’s the progress with carriers/isps? Can these partnerships have profound impact on NKN ecosystem?

Answer: Carriers and ISPs are some of the biggest companies in the world, and they are also some of the slowest moving customers. We are still engaging with them regularly, but our latest two products have clearly shifted our focus towards enterprise and developers.

We believe these two products will create short to medium term real adoption, as well as revenue. These revenues can be used to purchase tokens to pay for NKN services.

The carriers and ISPs are still in our business development funnel, albeit on a slower burner.

  1. How do you plan to attract devs after setting the foundation with the mainnet release? Not always the best platform wins, we need rich community of developers for NKN to succeed.

Answer: open sourcing code and launching mainnet do not automatically guarantee that developers will come. Yanbo has been an open source contributor for many years, starting with his WiFi driver for Linux kernel networking. His observation is that the technology has to be interesting, and the core developers have to be high quality and good people. Often money is not the main driver.

Our main focus is really to make the project meaningful, interesting, a bit challenging, very welcoming, and fun. I quote a recent tweet from our community developer Christian who built nknx.org together with Andrew: “I’m still flashed by how much I learned on creating the @nknX_org project. The most important one is that participating in a community gives you something that money can’t buy: a network of people who do what they love and lots of new impressions and knowledge! Thank you, @NKN_ORG!”

Once we unlock the foundation tokens, we do intend to use it to reward community developers and members who make significant contribution to NKN.

  1. Do you plan aggressive marketing for mainnet and rest of the year to raise awareness about the project and attract people? By aggressive I mean real change from the current way marketing is done. Most people in crypto don’t know about NKN yet. I feel you got the best tech, but you gotta know how to sell it.

Answer: I agree that preaching to our own choir via existing Telegram members, Twitter followers, and Discord channels are not enough. Awareness and growing the audience should be our biggest goal for mainnet, product launch, and the rest of the year. And we have allocated enough budget for this plan.

We will use a combination of social/viral marketing with traditional industry focused PR/marketing. For example, once we can announce our main media customer for our nCDN product, we do intend to use traditional media as well. That includes both crypto specific media like CCN, Coindesk, Crypto Briefing, as well as technology focused media like Forbes, Fortune, WSJ, Techcrunch, and etc.

Question on TG by Adan:

  • Could you explain tomorrow how Stephen Wolfram is involved in nkn project please.

Answer: Stephen and his colleagues at Wolfram Research, help us identify areas that can be improved, and help us with simulations and consulting. For example: are there better consensus rules than simple majority? Are there better routing algorithms?

In addition, Stephen is also offering CEO mentoring, i.e. how to run a startup and grow into significant company.

Question on TG by Backen:

  • What’s the incentive to increase node count? Are there any definite plans to make it more profitable running nodes since I see a large decrease in node count.

Answer: As a decentralized system, there will always be nodes joining and leaving. And the economic model is dependent on token price. We estimated that once mainnet is launched and if the token price is around 5 cents, we can have 25-30K nodes breaking even if they are all running on $5 per month virtual machines.

But we can potentially have more nodes because:

  • Some nodes are computers, WiFi routers or Raspberry Pi running at home, whose running cost is essentially zero.
  • Token price can also rise

We are still in testnet phase, so the economics is not as good as mainnet. So it is natural to see large variation in node count. But in 2 months our mainnet will launch, and we are quite confident that we will see a lot more nodes than today.

Question on TG by Itluss:

  • We saw a video with a game like dota. Can we have some explanation?

Answer: Sure, it’s actually a custom map in Dota 2 arcade, but the interesting part is, the game is not running on the laptop where I’m playing. It’s running remotely on somewhere who are willing to provide the game streaming service and I can, very soon, pay NKN token to him by bandwidth usage. We haven’t quite announce and release it yet though.

Mike

  1. Does NKN have an ambassador program and if not is it on the roadmap?

Answer: I guess ambassador means special community members that help promote and organize local events in different countries and locations. Yes we do intend to expand our country reach.

  1. What happened to Bibox listing, which NKN won? The project that ended up first later claimed the listing was free.

Answer: we have not yet reached a commercial agreement with Bibox.

  1. Understand that you wanna get listed on honest exchanges, but most wash trading happens on ETH and BTC tether pairs, not on altcoins. Will we see NKN listed on Huobi, OKEx, Bithumb, Bibox? Your loved BTI https://www.bti.live/exchanges/ updated statistics recently and exchanges after exclusion of the wash trading still have high volume.

Answer: the criteria we use for exchanges are: are they operate professionally and securely; do they have large new customer base that we are lacking; do they provide real trading volume and liquidity for altcoins; what are the costs and potential risks.

Arviee

  1. Bruce, in one of your interviews you said that NKN can help reduce expenses that mobile operators have when offering roaming and NKN can also help create real-time bills (that operators send to each other). Can you provide some examples of those expenses in more detail and how NKN can reduce them and become an integral part in roaming services?

Answer: Today, roaming is done with an archaic system of using large clearing houses to reconcile call records between various service providers. This is not only expensive and time consuming (usually more than 30+ days after a call is made) but it opens the opportunity for fraudulent activity. By using NKN’s network and blockchain as a trusted record between parties, operators can share call records in real-time and even more importantly, can reconcile roaming payments in real-time via NKN token. This way, operators do not need to wait an additional 30 days for payment and with real-time call records, have an opportunity to spot fraudulent activity and react. Its a much needed upgrade to the existing roaming processes.

  1. I guess this one is for Allen Dixon. Imagine I’m a high ranking manager in one of the big telcom companies, pitch NKN to me (I don’t get tech, I get money)? :slight_smile:

Answer: Good question and in fact, much of our conversations with Telco companies are exactly that:what is blockchain and how can NKN help them increase revenue. Simply put, NKN unlocks the value in the unused bandwidth that already exists in their network. By using NKN, service providers now have an opportunity to share their unused bandwidth and earn new revenue streams. Operators can dynamically share bandwidth when they have extra capacity and take it back for their own customers during peak traffic periods.

  1. 2.1 Is NKN looking more in B2B direction or both B2B and B2C? If the last one is true, then can you make a short pitch to a heavy internet user (work + gaming), why NKN is nuts?

Answer: NKN is actually B2B + B2C + B2D. B2B is providing enterprise service, B2C is providing consumer-facing applications, B2D is providing SDK. For B2C, imagine that you can play resource-consumption high quality games on your laptop running Mac OS while the game is actually running remotely somewhere on a windows desktop, and you pay for what you use (by bandwidth usage). That sounds attracting right?

  1. NKN can help streaming services reduce their costs and latency, correct? Can you “explain like I’m five” how it is achieved? For example streaming games. How will nodes avoid having to store insane amounts of data? Will it be in constant transfer from one point to another? I hope I made myself clear :confused:

Answer: This is a really a broad question and the solution depends on the specific use case. But I can give you two examples. The first one is that, instead of having to drive an hour to get a burger, we might be able to incentivize your neighbor to be a local store of your favorite burger place, so you can simply walk and grab. The second one is that, although most people don’t know, the current Internet routing is actually far from optimal in many cases, and we could solve it by having an overlay route. You can think of it as a proxy or VPN but decentralized and with much more point of presence.

  1. I’ve read that there are cases of ISP throttling connection speed or preferencing certain services or websites. Can end users somehow use NKN to go around these things?

Answer: Actually it’s possible. We are building something that could be used as a tunnel between end user and the provider of some services. You can think of it like a proxy, but not restricted to web page. It might be helpful if you’d like to go around those restrictions.

  1. Can NKN be also used as a low-cost anti DDoS’ing service (due to huge number of nodes)?

Answer: Good point,we see more decentralization DDOS (with thousands of nodes from all over the world to DDOS the target ), NKN nodes could be used as decentralization CDN (we called nCDN to keep the host running cause it is a decentralization ways, the DDos attacker lost the big target (hosts) in this case. So NKN have nature advantage compared with traditional ways for such kinds of DDOS

  1. How will the token economy work in detail, how do you plan to make the token work AND reduce the entry barrier of using crypto? i.e. how will end-users of NKN buy NKN tokens or redeem them for fiat/btc? Will there be a more convenient way other that using traditional crypto exchanges?

Answer: TBA

  1. Maybe more use cases in simple terms! :}

Answer: sure. will you be interested in helping us? :grinning:

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