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Keystone Assets - Smart Property Solutions

The IPO has been delayed. Further information will be provided soon

What is it?

Keystones is a multilayer project aiming to connect a cryptocurrency with hard physical property, creating a unit of wealth with true inner value while providing a convenient security system for electronic devices. The project is currently leaving the concept stage and entering the prototype stage of development. Every major technical question has been answered.

Technology

Keystone will use cellular network technology as basis of its operation, utilizing existing infrastructure in a genuine new way.
Encoded in the Bitcoin blockchain is the ownership of a lock through a so called UIDS, a unique data structures stored in a ROM inside the keystone-lock and its digital representation in the blockchain itself. These UIDS are associated with a transaction and thus a public key in the blockchain and can be traded freely. The blockchain ensures a UIDS is unique and the association definitely with a public key.
The analogy of the public key in a classical lock is the keyhole. The lock communicates with the network on a regular basis to request the public key its UIDS is pointed to, changing its keyhole when a trade involving the lock has occurred. To ensure the information transferred to the lock is up to date, the request process will be repeated selecting random nodes of the network until the received answer can be overwhelmingly seen as correct. The only way to cheat the involved process is if over half the network is involved in a coordinated attack. And even then all an attacker can do, is to temporarily stall ownership update, but never fake ownership them.
The lock uses two channels to communicate with other entities. The Network will be contacted over cellular network, the key over short range Bluetooth.
The blockchain services required to run keystones come in the form of a protocol on top of bitcoin, using multisig transactions to store required information. The keystone clients interpret these transactions different than the standard bitcoin client and thus offer the functionality needed to support the physical locks. A secondary Ledger will be used to find consensus of system wide overhead.
We decided a top level protocol will have the best long term viability, as bitcoin as well as keystones will mutually benefit from each other. Keystone receives the security of the bitcoin blockchain as well as easy access to existing infrastructure. Bitcoin on the other hand will profit from additional functionality without the risk to break something in the base protocol.

Additional information will be provided in the whitepaper.

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Use Cases

Especially smartphones are a natural use case for this technology. Smartphone thefts are a worldwide epidemic and a gigantic market, screaming for a disruption of another kind. Keystone will ultimately make smartphone thefts futile. Take a phone away from an owner and it will simply stop working. The same goes for any other object secured by Keystones. Take it away and it stops functioning.
This technology allows to make a wide variety of possessions virtually theft proof in the sense of increasing the cost and effort to steal an object prohibitively high. At the same time the cost of finished lock will be in the one digit realm.
Besides smartphones, tablets, laptops, gaming consoles and any other electronic device of significant value are natural users of this smart property solution. Virtually anything that requires electrical power can be secured by the lock.
In addition, even non electric possessions can be secured by a modified version of the lock, by controlling an actual physical lock with the Keystone-lock. Thus even purely mechanical objects like doors, locks, and bikes are able to be secured by the Keystone-lock.
Lastly, a very specific use of keystones are cars. The technology will be utterly disruptive to the car sharing industry.

Advantages compared to software solutions

Well, this one is pretty easy. To crack software security, you need malware or simply reset the phone to its shipping state. Malware can be installed the moment you take away a phone from its owner, nullifying any security build into the software. So, software security is pretty unsafe and the effort to nullify it, is not especially high.
Even in case a very restrictive software killswitch is installed, the necessary infrastructure is centralized, requires large amounts of trust, is inefficient and prone to a malicious attack.
Keystone powered security on the other hand is virtually theft proof. As a hardware based security system, the only way to crack it, is to break or remove it. The targeted level of integration will make sure that breaking or removing the lock will break the device it is attached to at the same time.
Also, irreversible trading of ownership is nothing a pure software solution can accomplish.

Network economics

The network economy will be based on fees and what we call Proof Of Service. Every transaction within the network will use up an amount of the primary currency, which will be sent to the current leader in serving locks. The second use of the primary currency is creating new UIDS, which will be accepted by the network. These will also go to the current serving leader. The third use of the currency is participation as a serving node in the first place. Besides being used for network functionality, the currency will be tradable and divisible like bitcoins.

The required fees of the network will depend on its usage. This will not commence for a significant time after the protocol launch though. The system will have all required hooks, but as long as the currency is thinly traded and used, which it will most likely be for a long period, this feature will not be activated.

The Proof Of Service will be discussed further in the protocol whitepaper, as will an additional Initial Adopter feature

Seed investment [IPO]

The currency will be distributed based on ownership of counterparty KEYSEED tokens. There will be a total of 10000 divisible KEYSEED Tokens. We will use following distribution percentages:

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-The fee booster will be used to inject additional fees during early network stages
-Development reserve will be used for the first set of locks which will be created, serving as a second kickstart for the project

The Email giveaway has not commenced, instructions will follow in time

Translations
Chinese - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=789841
German - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=792803.0

Current short term roadmap

- Release of top protocol whitepaper V 1
Week 40 (09.29 10.05)

- Opening of Keystone-Wiki
Week 40 (09.29 10.05)

Achieved Progress

- 09.17 Release of lock and key whitepaper V 1

- 09.18 First Bounty offerings / update on distribution / small update on economic model

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The self moderated thread is used to remove pure spam and giant red letters. Please feel free to ask questions and offer critique.

Original announcement: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=699113.0