Hi Winding Tree team

I've read through the whitepaper (like the MVM approach btw!) and have a few questions:

1. Given the fact distribution in the travel industry is controlled by a handful of huge, entrenched players; how do you envisage bootstrapping your marketplace? As I see it, you have a classic chicken and egg problem (suppliers will only invest in getting their inventory into Winding Tree if there are consumers; consumer will only use Winding Tree backed B2C agents/sites if there is a comparable level of inventory choice available through it compared to existing channels). To complicate it further, due to the existing power dynamics in the industry, small and medium sized players will find it very hard to embrace WT (technically, and relationship/business contract wise) without risking being blacklisted by the industry gatekeepers.

2. For WT to work, travel suppliers (hotels, airlines) are going to need to make large investments in their IT platforms and back-office processes to integrate with WT. Travel buyers (agents, B2C sites etc.) are also going to need to invest in working with your blockchain (versus consuming a simple REST/SOAP API from aggregators/GDS providers as they do today). That's a lot of upfront dev (and legal/compliance) work and the travel industry is not known for its IT competency. In fact, most suppliers, aggregators and travel retailers today actually rely on tech provided from the very companies Winding Tree is trying to disrupt (Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport, Navitaire etc.). Where are all these participants going to find the talent and vision they need to build in-house integrations to the WT blockchain? I feel like all they will end up doing is moving the cost of distribution to the cost of integration (i.e. having to pay high priced consultants to create back-end software for them).

3. Your whitepaper mentions the need for massive improvements in the volume of transactions that can be processed (either on or off chain) in order to support the scale needed by the travel industry. With things like LN and plasma still years away, how comfortable are you that the necessary t/x volume support will come to WT in good enough time so as not to harm your scale up?

4. It seems to me that the main problem WT proposes to solve (removing the concentration of distribution from the hands of a few big gatekeepers) could be solved with industry adoption of standardized and open intercom protocols. The airline industry is already seeing this with NDC, for example. This way, the marketplace gets the same benefit of WT (i.e. lower barrier to entry for new startups; reduced overhead, complexity and waste through open standardization; easier/more affordable for less technically savvy suppliers to participate, reduced or eliminated need to consume inventory through platform intermediaries etc.) but without the need to completely re-invent distribution from the ground up and move everything in to a blockchain. Or put another way, why do you so hastily dismiss NDC as being a viable blueprint for the rest of the travel sector to learn from?

Apologies if these are hard questions but I am deeply interested in anything that removes the bondage of distribution as it is today from travel suppliers and yields a cheaper, faster, better experience for consumers. I'm just not 100% sold on the idea that simply moving distribution to a blockchain is the most expedient or realistic approach to ushering in such a revolution.