Quote from: chesthing on April 02, 2015, 08:13:09 PM

Quote from: djohnston on April 02, 2015, 05:52:46 PM

Quote from: chesthing on April 01, 2015, 10:36:13 PM

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.