Quote from: bigfryguy on September 11, 2016, 08:04:37 PM

here is the latest Q&A transcripted for those of you that have an attention span that can last more than 1 paragraph.

Intro: Ok, so, let start with this question. Im starting from the September 7th questions. The question is from wavesnode.net_clipto.
Q: Will asset creation be in the next test net build?

A: Its a good question actually because we wanted to have it be in the next release. But, it looks like we can release the test net code that we have now, probably next week, because people want to have the full nodes. It might make sense to release the code without the assets, for now. We are coding assets with all we have; two coders are doing this now, but we have to change the storage a little bit in Scorex. It was a very modal thing. It has to change a little. It CAN be released like that, but I dont really want to do that. I want to release a decent product. It can be an alpha release, but it has to be a decent product. I cant release buggy code or code that doesnt seem to be sophisticated enough. It has to be constructed in a normal way, and it has to have a good architecture. So, I think that we could release the code that we (currently) run on test net now, and our first release can be this code, for the full nodes. Later we can just add assets there. Its not decided yet. If we can see that the assets coding is moving forward really fast, we can combine both and release the code with assets. Its not so complicated, but some things come up, and they have to be made properly.

Q: When is the hacker test round, and what are the bounty conditions?

A: So probably we will have the hacker test next week, probably in the middle of the next week. The task will be to break the current test net. There are some attack vectors that we have to check, and we hope that people can help us with this. The bounties will be announced a little later. We will have to think a little about how we proceed with the bounties.

Q: Can we expect some video of the main office while programmers are at work?
A: Yea sure, why not? I thought to install a web camera, but it is probably a little bit too much as it would distract people. However, it is not a problem to have some interviews with the developers. It wasnt announced yet actually, but we will have a regular show about crypto and about Waves. It will be a general show; not just about Waves but about crypto in general. We will have a section in the show about Waves. I think we could make an interview about the current developer team. We will probably do the pilot show over this weekend and if all is good, we could have it every week.

Q: When can we expect the LPOS white paper?
A: That is a good question. We are focused on another paper now. It is about authenticated data structures. We are working with a cryptographer from Boston. I will not name him for now because I dont want any additional pressure on him. He hasnt interacted with the crypto community yet. When we release the paper, you will know his name The focus is on this. You know what we are trying to do. We want to create some way to verify transactions without a large overhead like the one you encounter now, like in NXT. This is a very nice development that stems from Merkle trees. You can improve on this, and move it further. Its not a white paper, but a proper scientific paper that we will try to have published in a reference journal. We are working on this now...When we launch LPOS, there will definitely be a LPOS white paper. I will be working on it because its more or less my idea. Naturally, account leasing is not my idea, and delegated POS is not my idea either, but the combination, I think, is my idea.

Q: Have you started programming the LPOS system? How is the progress on that?
A: Not yet. We have just finished normal POS. We have to decide how we should proceed with LPOS now. There are about 2 or 3 different options and we need to pick one option. We have to decide what we do with things such as transparent forging. For example, you can predict which node is going to generate the next block, and it is not always a good idea to have this. We will probably have to do it some other way, because you can have DDOS attacks with transparent forging. So, there are a couple of things we have to think about, and we are thinking about it now.

Q: How are things going with the new offices in Germany, the U.K., and Asia?
A: We have registered the U.K. Company. It is not operational yet, but we have submitted registration. It is a matter of a very short time. I will be going to Germany probably by the end of September. Im not going anywhere now because I want to finish the full nodes Later, I will go to Germany and register a German Company, and we might open an office. Its not decided yet; if we need one, we will open it. We are working with some developers from Germany who are working on our mobile applications. It is the Toms Apps Company, he is one of our slack members; you might know him, he is Hawky here on slack. In Asia, we will probably not have an office until the end of this year.

Q: Do you have any meet-ups or conventions planned in the near future?
A: I will be going to many conventions and conferences as soon as we have the full nodes and the network is properly decentralized. I might go to Kiev in September for a conference, and October I know a couple of conferences I could go to. The emphasis now is on the full node launch.

Q: Will your team or a PR team be promoting Waves at the International Blockchain Week in Shanghai?
A: Probably not. As I have told you guys, I want to launch the full nodes and have the zero-version, the alpha version of the network, up and running. It is not time to promote; it is time to get things done. Later, I will be promoting the hell out of it.

Q: Which features will be realized in first quarter, second quarter, and so on?
A: Our goal now is to launch the decentralized network. Then well add LPOS. Then well add gateways. Then well add decentralized trading (centralized matching with decentralized order settlement). This will be the first production version of Waves. Later we will be working on smart contracts and many other important things that should be in any valid blockchain system. We have a couple approaches to anonymity that we could realize, but that is a matter of a year, I think. The focus now is on the network and the assets on the trading.

Q: Will there be PR people hired to do the promotion when the full nodes are released?
A: Guys, if you think that we have some problems with promotion, you are very wrong. We are not promoting at the moment because we do not have the product. As soon as we have the product there will be a very heavy promotion campaign. Please dont worry; its not a problem. As you know, we raised a good amount of money, and it was done through our promotional efforts. So, we know a thing or two about promotion. So relax, the promotion campaign is going to be really heavy; some heavy artillery will be there. Dont worry please.

Q: Could you please do some kind of live walkthrough around the office during business hours?
A: Sure guys lets do this on Monday or Tuesday. It is not a problem. Now, there are like three people in the office, so you will probably not be satisfied by this

Q: Geth77 is asking for more details about our development team. Okay, let me open the website right now...
A: So, from left to right Me, you know me.
Tobias Schwarz. Hes our German developer. He was working on our front-end. Currently he is on vacation and we have to decide how to proceed with him, because we have a front-end team in Moscow now, and we have some other guys in Germany working on the mobile application. Tobias has done a lot for Waves, and I think we are going to cooperate with him further.
So the next guy, with the happy face is Guy Brandon. Hes in the U.K. We know each other from the NXT community. Hes a very good copywriter and he creates great content. We are happy to work with him; a very humorous and nice guy.
Ivan Scheglov is a coder but he is not coding now. He has been working for various banks for 20 years. He is a java programmer who is very experienced with banking software and the whole banking infrastructure. He is in the U.K. now and hell be cooperating with payment systems and with banks that want to integrate our platform. He is working on our U.K. Company now, too.
Cyrille Wetter is a German guy. Well hes not German; hes actually from Switzerland. Hes a very experienced crypto-community manager. He managed many projects within NXT community. Hes managing some other projects now. He is a very nice guy, and he is also the moderator of the German Waves topic at BitcoinTalk. He is very good at community management.
Ted Cheng is our Chinese team member. As you know, China is very important for crypto, and it is very hard for a non-Chinese person to understand what happens in China and to interact with Chinese investors. We are very glad to have him on our team to help with Chinese promotion.
Martin Spodymek is our Polish colleague who is famous on Bitcoin Talk because he was active in many projects. He is a very nice guy, and it is a pleasure to work with him. He understands crypto; it is more or less a hobby for him. He is very deep into this and he really enjoys what he is doing.
Carlos Parada is our designer. He is Spanish but he doesnt live in Spain. He lives in Bali He is a great web designer, and a great graphical designer. What you can see in our lite client and web site is his work.
Yuri Petrov is the guy who was Yuri Gagarin at our initial site. He wanted to stay anonymous, just for fun, so he wanted to be Gagarinbut now he is Yuri Petrov (and shows his face) he is working mainly on the backend at the moment. He is creating a multi-gateway, if you know multi-gateway from NXT. Its a set up that lets you have Bitcoin within your blockchain.
Alexey Kiselev is our back-end developer; one of our Scala developers. He is currently working on assets and the deeper layer of Waves Platform including database storage.
The next guy is Alexander Bezkrovny. He is our communications manager. He is a very experienced social media promoter who is very good with Twitter and Facebook. He is a great guy who really knows how crypto works, and how to promote crypto projects.
The next guy is Sergey Ishchenko. He is our front-end developer, and he is currently working on the lite-client. He is moving the lite-client to a new code base so it can be easily integrated with the mobile application from Toms Apps. He is almost finished with this.
So, that is our team. There are some other people, and there are going to be more. Last week we hired a new Scala coder who will be working on the matcher for our platform. As you know we are going to have a centralized matcher that you can install and have your own exchange. Youll be able to provide this matching service for Waves tokens. The tokens will be on the blockchain so you wont have them. The matcher doesnt have access to real money; it just matches orders. It can still receive fees for order matching. So, we need a module for this, and this new guy, his name is Alexey, is going to be working on this. He started already. We had a test for new coders. They had to create a matcher in their language of course. He coded one in Java; it was good, so we hired him. We have some other people. A new communication manager will be the first woman on our team here in Moscow. She will work on communications and public relations. We need to hire at least two Scala coders. Im talking to new coders very often, like every day. We will have our couple of people within a month.

Q: Are they working for Waves part time?
A: No. All coders who work here in our Moscow headquarters are full time coders. Some people work for us part time, freelancers, because not all the people that you see on our website are in our office, obviously.

Q: ETA for the full node?
A: As I told you guys, next week we will decide whether we will launch our test net code the way it is (With this) you would have the full nodes with basic functionality. We also understand that we (may or may not) move fast enough to also include assets. So, if we decide that we need 2 or 3 weeks for the assets, we would just launch the full nodes with the current code base. It is quite stable as you can see by our test net, but there is not much functionality there. It is okay though, because it is quite an achievement to have a stable blockchain even without much functionality. Blockchains are quite difficult. There are so many unexpected problems you can encounter when creating a blockchain system. It wouldnt be so little if we could launch the current code base and have it be stable.

Q: You have mentioned that there are approximately 20 people working on Waves Platform. Can you identify these people?
A: So I kind of did it just now. There are coders in our office. Currently there are six coders here, and also a promoter, Sasha Alexander. He is our social media guy. We will have a communication manager here in our office starting from the next week. We have people who work for us, not here, such as freelancers and community managers. It comes down to approximately 20 people, more or less, if you count all of them. Our core team in Moscow has around 10 people at the moment.

Q: At many tens of thousands of dollars per month in salaries, what course of action do you have in place to ensure that your developers arent just milking their way to a nice pay-day?
A: Its not like that. We are using modern technologies in software development. There is scrum, milestones, and things everything to ensure we are moving as fast as possible. However, there is always a trade off. You dont want to move too fast with this. This is a very new system with an absolutely new code base. Ok, we used Scorex, but it had to be recoded in many places from scratch. It takes time, and we cant release a buggy product. I wont do that, sorry. We use modern software development techniques to make sure that we are efficient. No one is milking anything here, thats for sure. All people are working with pleasure; they like what they are doing. I wouldnt hire people who are not interested in what they are doing. Everyone is interested in what they are doing.

Q: If possible could we please interview 2 or 3 of the Waves developers?
A: Sure we can do that. That will be a part of our weekly crypto show.

Q: Coinomat is now going to be integrated into the Waves Platform as opposed to being sold. Can we please get clarification on what is transpiring and how this is to be implemented?
A: Coinomat will be one of the gateways for Waves. It will have Euros and Dollars there. As you know, there was CoinoUSD there that needs to be supported further. It will be supported as a USD token on Waves platform. It wont be sold; it doesnt make much sense at this stage. I had this idea, but I decided against it. Theres going to be some nice functionality, maybe, with Mycelium. They are going to be launching a new version of the mobile wallet that will have Bitcoin and Ethereum within it. Also Dash, and maybe some other coins too. Coinomat will provide the instant exchange within the Mycelium wallet. There are also some other developments with payment cards that can be integrated somehow into the Waves platform. Currently, Coinomat has working payment cards, so we just cant just transfer them to Waves So, there are several directions that we would like to pursue with Coinomat now.

Q: Waves has raised in excess of 16 million USD. To assume that you are the only marketing face of Waves is a little short sighted and you should definitely have a professional team that can convey the greatness that Waves is bringing to the world, not just crypto.
A: Absolutely guys. We need to have a product. As soon as we have it, theres going to be like, I dont know, top models, promoting our beautiful Waves. Dont worry about that. If you dont have a product that you really want to share with the world, then you have nothing to promote. Have a little patience. We are going to have top marketers, rock stars, beautiful women, and everyone else promoting Waves.

Q: Are you open to the idea and are understanding that you require help to make this the great success that we all envision?
A: Absolutely. I am always ready to work with anybody that wants to help us. I want to interact with anyone who wants to interact with us. People who know me know that I am like this, If you want to work with me, I will work with you. If you have some valid suggestions about how we can promote Waves better, please come forward. I will be happy to discuss.

Q: As an investor I think the presence of Waves tokens on different exchanges is vital. I would like to know what went wrong with Poloniex. Was there a conflict? Are there any plans to resolve this problem?
A: Ive responded to this question plenty times, but I should probably just give the timeline of events. So, I think the Poloniex guys are very busy. Ive contacted them, and have had regular communication with them for several years. When we started Waves, I started writing them. I used the contacts I had, so several emails that I had from them. I asked if they were going to list it. There was no response to this. Something strange was going on. I wasnt pushy. I thought, if there was some reason they did not want it, then that reason is unknown to me, because no one told me anything. I dont want to guess. Other exchanges came, for example Bittrex. They said, We are interested so we will list Waves. We said ok because they couldnt do it on their own. As you know we dont have an open network yet, so we had to prepare a node. So we did it for them. Then, Poloniex changed their mind and came to us the day Bittrex was launching Waves. Ok, no problem, we were providing everything to them. We gave them everything, and they stopped communication. I dont know why, and guys, I dont really want to guess. I dont care about that so much. Im sorry, but its true. When they decide it will be useful for them, or that they can profit, they will list Waves I dont know; ask them. After that, I decided it doesnt make sense. I wrote them and they didnt reply. They must have some other ideas I dont have anything against Poloniex, although they are doing some strange things that I cant really support, like with Ethereum Classic; I dont like that at all. But ok, its up to them. What I really think is that exchanges have too much value within the crypto-community. There needs to be a decentralized approach that would reduce risks. Everyone knows what happens to exchanges, to Bittrex, and to almost all exchanges. I dont remember an exchange that didnt have issues. There has to be a way to decouple the crypto-community from exchanges. As part of the Waves Platform, we will have an approach that combines the benefits of centralized exchanges with the benefits of blockchain technology. It will be trustless. It allows you to not have to send your money to anybody. You will have access to your funds while at the same time trading them. This approach, an instant exchange I think is important. We want to have centralized matching with decentralized order settlement that will be a kind of competition to existing exchanges. I dont have anything against exchanges; they can integrate this technology too, when its ready. There has to be an alternative at this stage. Its become quite ridiculous; they can do whatever they want; be hacked. Were working on it. If Poloniex decides finally to list us, I will be happy. I dont have anything against them. I dont hold any grudge against Poloniex. Ill be happy much more happy than you actually.

Q: Can you elaborate on the proposed user experience of creating an asset on the platform? Can you advise whether there are plans in place to cater to users who wish to comply with their local regulations with a few simple tools?
A: At the moment no, it will be more like NXT. Youd choose the amount of tokens you want to issue along with some other parameters. Maybe you want to issue some later, or not. Then, youd hit the button and the assets are issued. We wont have that at this stage, but it is interesting actually. So, I have to check with BitShares to see what they have. Some kind of terms and conditions I think I need to check this. I dont want to say anything stupid because I havent seen what it actually is.

Q: What are the main bugs still present in the test version presenting the release of the main net?
A: Currently the test net is stable. We had some issues with the network level. It is quite tricky because it is a new code base more or less; its untested. Its not exactly new because its the Scorex platform, but its untested in any kind of production environment. Its absolutely not production ready. Youve seen the code. Perhaps I was a little wrong because I gave a timeline that wasnt exactly held. I could have been wrong with this, but if you check the code, its logical, it should work, but then a problem comes up. Its a matter of being production ready. Its another matter all together. You can have some logical code that just wont work in any production environment. It takes time, and its an experience for me. I will use this experience to work better, and to enhance my vision of software development. How it works in peer-to-peer systems it is very complicated with p2p. It is totally different world. You cant use the normal tests that we are used to in a centralized/ normal environment. You cant provide them on one server; some strange things come up. We are moving forward. Our current test net is stable. What can I say? There were several layers of problems and the network layer was untested. Currently we are recoding storage, better, and we will have another approach to this later. The general theme not much peer-to-peer software was coded in Scala. They have a very nice approach to multi threading and Akka framework, but it wasnt really used for p2p networks. Its kind of fitting for them, but it wasnt really tested. It should work, and it works, but you need some time to weed out the bugs.

Q: How much percent of needed Scorex have you already rewritten?
A: 70%. The network layer is fine, and we will enhance it later. Maybe we will recode it from scratch. If we do it, we will do it for the beauty of the code, because functionally it will work.

Q: What percent of assets (coding) is finished?
A: 50%, I think, or 60% maybe. The transaction layer is 80% or 90% finished, but we need to redo the storage.

Q: Will assets be added and tested before the hackathon?
A: Probably not. We would rather break our current set up first, then we will have another one.

Q: How long will the hackathon last?
A: I think it should last for about a week. Starting from the middle of next week. If we launch it; we have to think about it.

Q: Is Wells Fargo the banking partner you spoke of?
A: No not Wells Fargo. They are too big for us at the moment (laughs) but it can change.

Q: Some of the team members are spread among multiple projects. Waves, Komodo, Incent, Core, and Chronobank This brings advantages and disadvantages. Can you identify the number of 100% fully dedicated time based team members versus contractor/freelance arrangements? Is this arrangement working well or does it need amendments?
A: All of our core developers are working for us full time and are not working on any other projects. Promoters can work on other projects because there are, what, 3 people? We can just divide our team into parts; the guys who work full time in our office work exclusively on Waves. There can be some freelancers who just interact with us. Its crypto; its open source community based projects. You cant really limit people. If they want to work with you, you work with them if they work efficiently. I dont have anything against the team members who with Komodo or any other projects. Komodo stems from NXT and SuperNet and we know those people. Incent Core is an independent entity; they existed before Waves. They are a promoting entity that can work with anybody they want to. Chronobank and Incent we know those projects, and they will be launching on Waves when we have tokens, so we support them. We interact with Incent and Chronobank. I know the people there and Im sure that they can deliver.

Q: As of September 9, how much of the proceeds of the ICO are still on hand? What is the breakdown of how its held?
A: It didnt actually change. We sold 5000 BTC and the rest is held in BTC. Our burn rate is between $60,000 and $70,000 per month. So we can calculate how much money we have. We dont spend much now. We dont really need to spend much at this stage. We will have to spend more when we promote our product.

Q: Would we consider investing in assets on Waves Platform if they have great potential?
A: Absolutely. As a private person I can invest in whatever I want. If they can be endorsed by Waves, that is another matter. We probably wont have that. There can be some separate entity from Waves, maybe a venture fund. At this stage, I can only invest my own money.

Q: What percentage of Waves tokens are held by or on behalf of Waves Platform company?
A: About 6% at this moment, but I have to calculate.

Q: How many distinct organizations are currently collaborating with Waves to develop gateways for the platform?
A: Several payment aggregators and payment systems are interested. We might also consider creating our own payment company in the U.K. Its a tricky matter because the gateways have to be independent. They dont have to have a direct relation to Waves. The interest is strong because the idea of transferring fiat value on blockchain is very interesting for many payment systems. Very many permissioned platforms are working on this. The future lies in this area, where you can transfer fiat on the blockchain. There will be Bitcoin, but fiat wont go away. It will use the blockchain layer as the transactional layer for transfers. It wont go away in the near future; it will be combined with the blockchain.
andboxed smart contracts that can be coded in any language - not in a special language. Its closer to a usual distributed computing approach where you can code in whatever language you want and run it on different nodes. Its not like Ethereum, I think. We have this vision, and Im looking for the coders now, but its not a priority. Priorities are tokens and a stable network.

Q-Does the fact that the full node has been delayed cause the other things on the roadmap, for example smart contracts, to be delayed too.
A- It may be a delay of a month. We are not working on smart contracts yet

Q: Please address the problems you have with the Scorex code and the new Scorex 2.0 release.
A: The Scorex code is a great platform for testing crypto-currencies. You can launch your own currency very fast and test features, but it is not a production system. We have to make it a production system. It is hard to explain in a concise way what the problems are. There are many problems because it (Scorex) is not a production ready system; it is a test system. The new Scorex 2.0 release I think Alex and the team are experienced about the network layer and some other points, and they want to make it more modular, more compact. It can be a very nice platform, but it wont be production ready because they are not working on production system. They (Scorex 2.0 programmers) are just trying to create proper architecture that serves as inspiration for production systems. Some part of the code can be used. It cant just be transferred to a production environment, launched and deployed; it wont work like that. So its a selection of ideas of the current state of crypto currency technology. Its not a production system.

Q: How many Waves are needed to be in the top 100 rich list?
A: I can check, but it will take me a couple minutes. I would say 200,000 or something like that.

Q: What is the new ETA for the asset exchange and gateways?
A: As I told you, gateways are waiting to be launched. They will be launched as soon as we have tokens. ETA is an estimation so you have to bare that in mind. I would say that within two weeks we will have the test network code transferred to the main network. We will release the full nodes into the wild so people can install them and use them. After that, we will immediately launch the assets. We could also wait until we have the assets (to release the full nodes) but it makes sense to release the current code base later. Its going to be easier to test it (that way).

Q: How is Waves insuring it is regulatory compliant? Do we have any legal team support at the moment?
A: Yes we are talking to several lawyers. Not on a daily basis, but when we have questions, we talk to lawyers. At the moment we dont have any legal issues, I think. We are in the process of forming the foundation companies of Waves that are going to work on maintaining the network. There are not big issues here. With gateways, we kind of outsource those issues to the gateways. They have to decide how they can provide a service legally, and they have their own lawyers. Of course, we are trying to stay compliant, and that is our emphasis. Our platform is open, but at the same time it is compliant.

Q: How long is the schedule for bounty hacking? 1 week?
A: Yes probably about 1 week.
Q: I was looking at the budget in the last Waves newsletter. Do you think marketing expense is too high relative to total costs? Could you do a cost breakdown of the marketing expenses in more detail?
A: In general, we have several community managers and content creators. Our platform is not launched, and we dont really promote it yet, but you have to do some social media promotion still. We dont want people to forget about us. Is it high? I dont really know; I think we have an efficient marketing team as you can see from our successful ICO. I think that the guys really deserve their payment and I dont think its high We probably need to do a better breakdown of the costs next month.

Q: When will the whitepaper be published?
A: As I told you we are working on a scientific white paper that is more about the cryptography approach. We have at least a couple of other white papers about LPOS and we will be working on some kind of 2FA. Every aspect of the Waves Platform will be covered by a separate white paper. The first one will be about the deep level of the Waves blockchain and transaction verifications using authenticated data structures. It will be a development of the Merkle Trees idea.

Q: What do you mean by, When you have tokens,?
A: It means as soon as we have the custom tokens functionality on the network.

Q: If I want to launch a project based on the Waves network would you be available as an escrow for collecting Waves tokens.
A: It depends on the project. I can do it as a private person. If I trust your project and you trust me, probably yes. But I cant do it as an official Waves representative.

Q: When will the whitepaper be published?
A: We are working on the cryptography white paper, and there is a cryptography part there that we are almost finished. We have decided what should be there. We have to add the blockchain part about how we use these things in Waves Platform. We will publish it at the beginning of October we think. Later we will try to publish it in a reference journal, or paper journal, because scientific papers are like that. We may present it at a conference. In cryptography, they dont really publish so often. They just go to conferences and try to present their ideas at the conference. They publish the paper in the proceedings of the conference.
Closing: I hope I replied to most of your questions. As you can see we are working and we have to create a quality platformThis is the most important thing in my life and the biggest project Ive been involved with. Im going to do my best to find the best coders and promoters to move this project further. What can I say, Im doing my best, and we will succeed. Everybody is going to have what they want to have with Waves. If you are a speculator you will probably make money because our token has to grow in value when we launch everything. If youre a long term investor or someone who wants to launch their project with Waves, you will be rewarded too. There will be an ecosystem with many startups and promoters who can help and advise you on different aspects. All people of all walks of crypto currency life are going to find something that rewards them within Waves Platform. Thank you for your time and thank you for your questions. I hope that youll stay with us and youll follow our developments. We are happy to have you guys on board.

Nice that was a good update from sasha. His vision for waves is great.