We have incorporated in Gibraltar. We are not engaging in any activities that require a currency exchange license, so we have not pursued gaining one. If we decided to pursue any business activities that needed a license we would do what was required for those activities.

The Synapse platform will have full Turing-complete smart contract capabilities. This means that really anything a computer program can do will be possible using Phore smart contracts. Underlying the Phore Synapse architecture it will be using WASM (web assembly language), which will be used for execution of both shard code and smart contracts that run on shards.

There are many privacy-related features that can be built with this, either as a special-purpose shard type for private transactions, or using smart contracts that support private transactions. We have not decided which specific privacy features will be built or in what order, but part of the design goal of the architecture will give the Phore community a voice in that. We are working to allow new shard types to be built and voted on by the community, and this will allow a new shard type to be enabled without requiring a hard fork upgrade.

Using this architecture, a new shard type could be built that supports CoinJoin transactions, RingCT transactions, zk-SNARKs, or even combinations of multiple privacy technologies. People who wanted to use those features can do transactions on those shards, and people who don't want to can still do transparent / public transactions on other shard types. If there was a security vulnerability discovered for a particular privacy technology, that shard type could be disabled until it was addressed, which would shield the effect of that from the rest of the shards on the Phore platform.

The Phore team believes there are important reasons that people would want to do both transparent and private transactions. For example, if you are being paid a salary in PHR, you might not want the amount or timing or other details of that to be publicly viewable, so a private transaction might make a lot more sense for running payroll. On a personal level, perhaps you want to buy a gift for your spouse and not want the purchase to immediately show up with all the associated details for your spouse to see. On the other hand, when you are paying your taxes or utility bill using PHR, or for many other types of purchases, you might want that transaction to be transparent so that it is easy for you to point to it on the blockchain as proof that your bill was paid. If there are similar types of payments that have a requirement to be public, such as contributions to a political campaign, perhaps those would also need to be transparent. There may also be regulatory considerations in different geographies that require transparent blockchain transactions. We are building the Phore platform to be usable in all of these scenarios.

If you want to stop by our Discord it's easier to help you troubleshoot. I can make some guesses here, but I'd probably need to ask you some questions to narrow down the reason.

Since you asked about the daemon not starting--did you confirm that the daemon is not running on the VPS side? If you're not sure, check with something like:

ps -ef | grep phored

If it is not running, the only result will be the command above, but if it is running then it would also list a line for the running daemon along with whatever parameters it was run with.

If the daemon won't run, that is the issue and we need to solve the underlying reason. Again I can't be sure without more information. How did you install the masternode? Using the VPS script, or some other method? I'd suggest looking in the debug.log file and seeing what error messages that may contain. Check the .conf file to make sure it has all the proper values including a valid masternode private key.

If the daemon is running on the VPS, then probably the next thing to check is that all the values match between the masternode.conf file in the wallet and the VPS--correct IP address and port, matching MN private key, and the correct, unique masternode collateral TX ID and index.

You can DM me here if you'd like, or find me on Discord or Telegram and I'm happy to help further.

Bastion exchange has announced that Phore will be listed and available for trading when they launch. Glad to welcome another exchange option for Phore!

Thanks for supporting Phore!

Version 1.5.1 has been posted to the Phore.io website and GitHub. It should fit better now on smaller screen resolutions, please try it and let me know if it works better for you.

Hi, thanks for the feedback. We should be able to make some changes to allow the wallet to shrink to a smaller size. Are you seeing this problem just with the width (horizontal) size?

Thanks,
Michael

We took a run at it doing everything Ledger asked us to do at the time, but things were implemented when we expected, due to changes within Ledger. it would have been easy if they had simply modified the back end they had set up for PIVX, and we had made all the necessary changes on the front end app, but it seems it was just not meant to be.

We'll take another look at it, I think the new process requires more work on our part to build both the front and back ends completely, but it should be something we can work into the roadmap.

We're working on the next Phore wallet release, which will include a new set of features to add, edit, and delete masternodes without any manual editing of the masternode.conf file.

It can autofill the masternode private key and pull in the masternode outputs information for you without running any debug console commands anymore--everything can be done right from the GUI.

I'm hoping you'll like our latest feature to make Phore easier to use! Here's a screenshot from testnet. The IP address below is an IPv6 address, but it also works fine with regular IPv4 addresses:

Thanks for the feedback. What would you like to see for sale in the Phore Marketplace, and what customer populations do you think should be targeted?

We are very much a decentralized and community driven project, and feedback from the community is very valuable to us. We want the Marketplace to be an application you want to use, and you want to tell all your friends about.

Yes you can stake masternode rewards, but since each reward is 4.2 PHR it would take a while to get a staking reward if you don't have much more than just that staking. As a general rule of thumb, many people have said you might expect about 1 staking reward per day if you are staking about 3,000 PHR. So if you had 10 masternode rewards (42 PHR) staking, that might be about 1 staking reward every 71 days. 100 masternode rewards (420 PHR), maybe about 1 staking reward per week on average.

It is also possible to get both the masternode reward and the staking reward for the same address, and when that happens the wallet will display it like it is one 6.999xxx PHR transaction.

Also, if you are staking with the Phore-Qt wallet, I'd recommend you upgrade to v1.4.5 if you are still running v1.3.3.1--there was a bug fix in v1.4.4 that helps staking stay active over long periods of time.

Why do you think Bitker would soon be a big player?

I'd be happy to help you troubleshoot in real time if you find me online in our Discord (Moonshot | phore.io, with the blue text ONLY and do not trust someone who DMs you claiming to be me or someone else on the Phore team) or on Telegram (@tohnsoom).

For the staking issue I'd first ask what the detailed lines say for getstakingstatus, since the one that is false above will help narrow down the cause. I can troubleshoot further once I know that.

For the 1000 coin problem, I think we may have introduced a bug related to hiding the SwiftX checkbox that for some users may have left it selected instead of unselected. I will try to get an update out today to put that back and I think it should resolve it. I don't know why it would crash, but if there is any error reported when it crashes or anything in the debug.log when that occurs, please share that with me and we'll figure out what's going on.

What do you mean by protected? I don't follow.

We do understand the market dynamics affect how many new people are entering and staying in the crypto market, but we are continuing to build Phore no matter what direction the market is moving.

The Phore Synapse architecture is a massive effort and a completely new architecture, it will truly be a next generation blockchain platform. It will take a lot of work for us to fully implement and migrate to that architecture, and Julian is working on it constantly, with more developers ramping up to accelerate that implementation.

We are making significant functionality improvements as well as underlying infrastructure improvements to the Phore Marketplace so that it will be able to scale effectively and offer a great user experience as we ramp up the user base and gain traction and transaction volumes increase. Mateusz is taking the lead on that work, and since both the Phore Marketplace and the Phore Synapse architecture are written in the same language (Go), our developers will be able to easily shift between working on both products.

In the meantime, we are continuing to enhance and release upgrades to the current Phore wallet. The new user interface will be the first of many releases to come in the next few months, in parallel with the Phore Synapse implementation.

We do have many important technical and strategic decisions to make as we go through this process, and we will be engaging the Phore community for feedback as we reach those points to get input, feedback, and ultimately community governance decisions. We are also planning to produce an updated whitepaper and probably a series of articles to better explain and articulate our future direction. In the meantime, though please ask any questions you have and I'll do my best to answer them.

We are doing a ton of work every day. The development team has expanded--we've added two new developers this month. We are working on improvements to the core wallet, the new Synapse architecture, and the Phore Marketplace, among other things. I expect to have the new core wallet UI release out to you this week, possibly tomorrow if the final round of testing goes smoothly. It's looking great, I hope you all will like the new look.

Also look for updates to start showing up on Blockfolio Signals and Delta Direct if you track Phore on either of those apps.

A few points here:

1. One of the primary functions of masternodes for Phore, and I think for most masternode coins at this point, is community governance. The 10,000 PHR collateral, similar to the concept of proof of stake in general, is to make sure that the decisions masternode owners make are in the best interest of developing Phore. If we had a very low collateral, it might be very inexpensive for someone to be malicious about things, buying masternodes and for example casting no votes to the core team budget to prevent it from passing, just as at attack on the network. This is not feasible with the cost of the masternode being high, since you have such a large investment and would end up taking a large loss yourself by doing that.

You could very much consider a masternode owner as a decentralized member of the Phore board of directors, with one vote per masternode owned. I think there is an argument to be made that it should be expensive to have that voting power, and as the market cap of Phore increases, so should the collateral that goes with the responsibility of making those decisions.

In summary, higher collateral protects the Phore network.

2. At the outset of Phore, the price of Phore was miniscule compared to what it is now. When I first purchased Phore I think I paid in the neighborhood of 3000 satoshis, and a masternode cost about $3,000. Now it is many times that. Could we consider lowering the collateral amount? Certainly. We are a community governed project and the community could vote at any time to do this if we thought it best.

3. I am a bit puzzled at your argument that more masternodes bring more security than more decentralized proof of stake. Do you understand what masternodes actually do? In some cases they handle things like SwiftTX for "instant" transactions, and for that I might agree with you that more decentralized masternodes provide greater security for those types of transactions. However apart from SwitfTX, technically speaking, masternodes for the majority of projects validate transactions and blocks like any node, but they do NOT stake and therefore do not decide what the next best block should be, other than rejecting invalid transactions or blocks as any node would, and in this sense they do less than staking nodes since they do not stake themselves and therefore are not in competition for deciding what the next block looks like. From a network security standpoint, we would be much more secure by doubling the staking nodes and coins being staked than we would by doubling the masternode count.

4. Phore is developing Synapse Masternodes which will dramatically change the function of masternodes in the Phore network in a completely different way than any other masternode project, helping to secure our smart contracts sidechain. We are still designing aspects of this including the crypto economics of it, and I think it is quite possible that we could be changing the collateral structure or even adding a separate tier of masternodes for Synapse Masternodes. I am not prepared to release a lot of details publicly about Synapse masternodes yet, but given their role with smart contracts, I would at least be able to say that we will need a certain level of processor / storage / bandwidth / memory capacity as smart contracts scale for Phore, and we will be designing the structure to account for these needs.

More active masternodes does mean less rewards for each one--each masternode, that is. Each block has both a staking and a masternode reward--currently 2.8 PHR for staking and 4.2 PHR for masternodes. That makes each reward pool separate and distinct, so when a masternode is added, each existing masternode will be rewarded slightly less frequently. However it also means that 10,000 more PHR have been locked as masternode collateral, which means that amount is no longer available to be staked, so staking ROI will tend to go up as the masternode population goes up.

This is intentionally designed to have a self-balancing effect, because we need a good number of nodes staking and running masternodes for the Phore network to be decentralized and healthy. If hypothetically the Phore masternode population was ever cut in half, the ROI for the remaining masternodes would double, and the higher ROI would attract more people to set up masternodes for that higher ROI. The same dynamic is true for staking--if for example we had 1,000 Phore Masternodes, the staking ROI would be much larger than the masternode ROI, and some people would likely stop their masternode and stake their PHR instead. Masternodes also have the benefit of voting rights over the Phore community governance process, and also allows you to keep your Phore in a cold wallet. Each person would have to decide how much value to place on those things. This mix of rewards and benefits gives the Phore network resilience by providing natural incentives for people to run both staking wallets and masternodes.

I think it works the opposite of what you're thinking. The more masternodes there are on the Phore network, the larger staking ROI becomes, because every masternode takes 10,000 PHR away from the potential staking pool. They each have a fixed, separate pool of rewards, so if half of Phore is locked in masternodes as collateral, that means at most only half of the remaining supply of Phore could be staked, and that's before taking out any Phore in exchange wallets or other cold wallets that are not being staked.

Observationally, given the way the Phore masternode population has been growing, I think the Phore staking ROI has increased and is approaching masternode ROI.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to our Exchange Crowdfunding effort so far. We just passed the halfway mark with over 25,000 PHR raised!

If anyone else would like to contribute, here are the addresses for gathering and tracking our progress:

The PHR donation address: PNvGNe9b8FCyt5aVnB12Z6AjaKNXvU77Ca
The BTC donation address: 1NNi5472hqAhPc8vtr3TrbQwtV66P5XWFU

You can track the contribution balance here : https://chainz.cryptoid.info/phr/address.dws?PNvGNe9b8FCyt5aVnB12Z6AjaKNXvU77Ca.htm

Moonshot
Phore CTO

I can't speak for other coins but Phore staking works just fine for many people from a CPU perspective on a Raspberry Pi. If you were going to do a lot of zerocoin minting (which has nothing to do with staking), I'd suggest something with a little more processing power like an Odroid.

Swap space can take care of the limited RAM to an extent, at the sacrifice of some performance, but again with staking it may or may not be an issue.

Of course you are correct that staking multiple coins will multiply the CPU operations as well as the RAM requirements, and depending on the size of the blockchains and the number of staking inputs for each, it could cause performance issues, one of which might be trouble keeping up with syncing all the blockchains which is critical for successfully staking.

I would also echo that if you could find an old cheap desktop or laptop for ~$100 and let's say 8GB of RAM and install Linux on it, you'd have a pretty solid solution for staking a bunch of coins, with one downside being somewhat higher electricity costs vs. a Raspberry Pi.