Hi tempus,
I apologize for the delay. As Brian noted, we are in Nashville for the Distributed Health conference. I'll try to answer your questions one by one:
Blockchain:
How I understand it so far there won't be inflation of the token, right?
The tokens valuation is based on supply-and-demand as generated on the Platform and exchanges. There will be no artificial inflation of the token itself by BurstIQ.
What will be the incentive to secure the underlying Blockchain/Burstchain?
The incentive for securing the Platform is dictated in the permission blockchain arena by legal and ethical enforcement. If you a a more specific question we will try to answer.
Will it be a truly decentralized system or more like a private Blockchain?
Currently the platform is a permissioned blockchain (private distribution). As the platform evolves and the other encryption techniques are productionalized (see white paper), the plan is to allow for non-permissioned (public distribution) of the Burstchain.
Will the project, at least the Blockchain, be Open Source?
Currently, the source code is not open source. However, we are evaluating some options around open sourcing parts of the Platform.
Business-model:
I understand the basics of the economical system of the platform, and I like it - but what is the business model of the company behind?
Our business model has two primary revenue sources for the company: BurstIQ takes a small percentage on all BiQ transactions on the platform, and we have strategic partnerships (co-development, marketing and/or distribution) with revenue sharing or royalty provisions. In terms of our roadmap, our first priority is to grow the ecosystem bigtime. Weve been heads-down in development mode for the last two years, and during that time, we partnered with a number of large business customers to validate the platform and make sure the core capabilities were sound. Now that the platform is operational, were ready to grow. Our next big development milestone is to add the consumer interface, so that people can start going onto the platform and controlling their own data. That's why we're doing this BiQ token sale. The BiQ token will be the currency for all transactions on the BiQ Ecosystem, from data queries to buying products and services to donating data for research. By offering BiQ tokens now at a discount, we can start building a community of early adopters for when the BiQ Ecosystem launches in early 2018.
Regarding the Token Sale:
Is there any source to keep track of the sale, about how much already was sold etc.?
For the public crowdsale, yes we plan to have a tracking system of tokens sold and goals obtained. We have not released info about our pre sales at this time.
Is there a minimum cap?
We did not set a minimum cap.
What would happen with unsold tokens in case the crowdsale would not be sold out?
The unsold tokens would be placed back into the BurstIQ pool for a possible use at a later date.
Would be great to get answers on my question. I really like the idea and I have not much doubt about the expertise of the team. What I'm a bit critical about is the lack of deeper infos. The legal documents seem to be longer than the whitepaper - obviously you have very good lawyers! ;-)
As for the legal, yes we have retained Cooley for our legal team and I would agree they are very long, but we are following the advice or our legal team.
I hope that helps. If you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to ask.
Many thanks for the reply and no need to apologize. Very understandable that there is a lack of time if you guys are on a conference.
To clarify my question regarding "incentive to secure the blockchain" - it's meant economically. The Bitcoin-protocol pays BTC to the miners. Other blockchains have similar designs. I understand that it will not start as a decentralized system, so it's not a topic for now. But since you say that it's a goal to decentralize the system and that there will be no inflation of that kind, I don't understand how to pay those who would run and secure a decentralized blockchain.
Why I asked those questions in general is because: This project could very well turn out as a pearl between all the crap that is hyped up in this space. It doesn't get much attention until now, what is not a contra for me personally. Usually I try to find projects I believe to see longterm potential in, while being under the radar of a majority.
But, my concern is: You say that there is no minimum-cap, what would mean in worst case that you might get much less than anticipated and needed. Let's say, as extreme scenario: Only $3 millions. That would be a limitation of possibilities. You also say that the crowdfunding won't be a decision about the total supply - all what won't be sold will go back to the company. The total supply multiplied with ICO-price is not cheap. I don't even say it's not justified - hard to ever make such estimations and your project is obviously farer developed than a lot of others that only start as concepts. But it's at least a consideration that you'll need additional crowdfunding rounds or maybe to sell on an exchange once/if your token gets listed. Result would be pressure on the price.
While I like a lot about this project, that is something that makes it a bit unpredictable.
Is there any Plan B in case that you don't reach something like a minimum goal and how to proceed in such a case? I'm sure that you know pretty well what you need for certain scenarios from "at least" to "best case".
Btw, what I said about the legal documents wasn't meant critical. Actually I see that as a sign of professionalism, even if scary ;-)
Thank you for all your questions. As you have said the current implementation is a trusted peer based system. BurstIQ or a provider will be hosting the system just as we are today, due to the fact that patient data (PHI) must be secure and encrypted. All public blockchains are transparent and do not provide the required level of protection. That is where our permissioned blockchain solves out for PHI data. As the platform evolves along the published roadmap, the ability to publicly distribute the nodes securely will mature. At that time we will release the public version. We have also enabled a large-scale analytics functionality on our blockchain that allows queries to scale at nosql speeds. We have obtained our first phase patent on this design.
As for the plan B, you are correct that current ICO/crowdfunding projects projections are hard to exactly plan outcomes. We have put together a high level plan for different funding amounts. Anything in the 2-6 million dollar range puts us in the acceptable range moving forward. Acceleration plans come in the 10M, and 20M range, and the moon shot comes in the 50M range. Our offices are in the health care mecca for IT right now (Denver, Colorado), and have a very good footprint and following with the local community. We plan to use a portion of the proceeds to invest in other healthcare startups and healthcare technologies to expand the number of solutions on our platform into the 100s and eventually, 1000s of applications and services.
We currently have two large universities on the platform, (UCHealth and UTMB) and are actively integrating two other large-scale health systems (hope to be able to announce soon, again legal). We are also working with 3-5 other large-scale hospitals. We will publish a press release in the next few days announcing a partnership with a vendor that would connect us to all the major healthcare insurance providers and would put millions of users on the platform. (Stay tuned for that press release.)
If this crowdsale only hits our minimum, we would just not be able to scale as fast as we would with large raises of tokens. But again, we are already profitable. This token sale is more to accelerate the development and adoption of the consumer version of the platform.