Keystone Assets - Smart Property Solutions

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 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.

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 cryptocurrency units issued in the genesis transaction of the network will serve several purposes which will ultimately form a cycle of use and reuse. Issuing a new UIDS as well as successful requests to the network will consume units of the native currency. The value of the currency therefor lies in the amount of network usage and connected devices. The amount of units required to perform specific actions will be derived from amount of network usage. The higher the network usage, the lower the fees required by the network. These fees will go to clients which provide the services to the network. The method of fee distribution and associated proof of service will be further discussed in the whitepaper.
Seed investment [IPO] There will be a very limited round of seed investment coming in the next weeks. Additional Information will be provided in time. Coming up Next Lock Whitepaper Currency Whitepaper Seed investment

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