The new incubator project — my answer to getting wrecked by XIO.

Personal note: I really wanted to make this a YouTube video, but my wife has warned me not to do it having a plenty of experience with the kind of things people say and do (… on the makeup channels …) when there are no special lights, cameras, editing, microphones, when people have an accent, grammar errors etc. Please be warned, although I wish I could write with an accent, a text below has some grammar errors, since my first language is Serbo-Croatian.

My previous post on the Medium has pointed to some direct evidence how the XIO project got manipulated at the early stages of a development, by not distributing the tokens properly. As mentioned, I was an early investor, in the TOP-20 rank. The estimated damage is from $30K to $500K. Furthermore, I am truly unhappy with the way things have been combined and put together in the name of the community. There is aggressive behaviour (laughing at someone’s face and passive aggression) as well as paid trolling (indicated by providing the ID at the end of each post)… I can’t say that I was perfectly gentle toward them either, but I did not represent the community nor the project. The point is, XIO is a platform that allows the manipulation at the great extent, and it has already demonstrated the manipulative behaviour. However, I can do better than getting directly involved with these kinds of things. Instead, I will start another project, while using the XIO as an example of how the things can be done but also the way the things should not be done. To quote: “The future [truly] is at stake”, but let it be said that it is not my future or the future of anyone I know and stand for.

At the first glance

There is nothing in the XIO’s main contract that tells us how it is different from a simple and a plain token. XIO is not the first project to do this, while investing in such projects means investing into promises and a hype, rather than an actual product. Unfortunately, today, making a truly decentralized project is possible but not economically feasible. This is simply because the computations on Ethereum cost a lot of money. There are other technologies that allow cheaper and better solutions, however, they are not perfect in a design. For example, EOS, although fast and flexible (for developers), the cost of operations is buffered by RAM and it is not truly decentralized. It is a highly-optimized network. Furthermore, just like XIO, it relies on community’s voting system and has proven that this kind of an approach can be manipulated (since the power to vote is implied by the amount of the investment). The best way to deal with this issue is to rely on Ethereum solving the cost problem (which is currently in progress) and develop a decentralized product. Furthermore, Solidity (programming language for developing on Ethereum) is used by multiple block-chains and it can be easily understood translated to other languages - by hand.

Therefore, to make a list, these are the things that MUST be solved:

1. At any moment, under any circumstances, there must be NO GATE-KEEPING. Anyone, at any stage of development, must be accepted to incubate their ideas, without sharing or exposing them (unless they want to). Token must have the core functions of the incubator hard-coded to make it a decentralized project and avoid the manipulation.
2. The project (if published on Ethereum) must take a risk and assume that the prices to run the project will become lower in the future. Coding in Solidity is O.K., although I am not sure I like the language, it is currently one of the best approaches.
3. The project must not rely on the community, voting, trolling, group-think and the herd-mentality in order to function. However, it does need the community, and it may be a contradiction I will talk about in the later posts.
4. The token and rewards need to be distributed to the community and people who are making the use of the project, but it has to be independent of the external behaviours, in order to avoid the toxic behaviours (I have a solution, but will talk about it much later as I develop the project).

Deadlocks and what can be done to avoid them

Mainly, the deadlock situation of the XIO (and any other project which is just a token) is Ethereum’s immutability. Immutability means that once the things are coded, they cannot be changed. This is an issue because it does not allow the projects to evolve. There are several solutions to this issue, while some are extremely risky and complicated to deal with. The only way XIO can solve their deadlock situation by making it a simple token is by doing any of the following:

1. Make their own block-chain in the future, perhaps with more wrecking and manipulation. In my opinion, this is not necessary since everything can be done on the existing block-chain technologies.
2. Have an external call to a contract, for example, using the web3 connector or another contract. However, this is an insecure approach (the private keys must be exposed to make the internal functions work). Unless all of the tokens were minted and/or the minting function (which is internal) is called by the centralized agent, the token cannot be mined. This simply means that choosing how the rewards are distributed is regulated by the centralized authority (gate-keeping).
3. Make another contract, which implies a lot of delays while re-listing the token to media (exchanges, etc). This can be done, but the trust-rating will be lowered.

Therefore, to add to a list:

5. Token development must start from a scratch, which means, a framework for developing a token, as a token (currently, a work in progress). This needs to be as simple as possible, yet powerful enough for the project to exist and evolve for a very long time.

6. Token distribution must be independent of any authority and TOKEN HAS TO BE MINED!

So what do I mean by 5. and 6. ? Simply, while developing a token, immutability can be indirectly solved by applying the programming design patterns. Nevertheless, this can become very complicated and a big security risk. Instead of finding a general solution, the simple pattern can be developed to accommodate all the needs that one project incubator may have. In that sense, the token becomes a framework, while any potential investors would invest in the token’s ability to attach to different contracts at different times, while relying on a developer never to lose or expose the private key to a contract (nothing new). Since Ethereum is already doing the mining, there is no reason why anyone should apply the same mining ideology on the Ethereum network. This means that all the cell-phone mining and all the electricity wasting is completely useless. Instead, we can develop a way to mine the token without using ANY ELECTRICITY OR HARDWARE (except the internet connection) and we DO NOT NEED ANY POOLS. Last year, someone said on a public forum that I am faking it, while I kept the source-code a secret, shared with only one other developer. Since I did not have time to work on it, I will expose the secret right now, and right here:

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE CODE

You may use this source-code and make your own token. Please let me know if you do, I would like to be the early miner :) Similar logic will be applied, however, it will be simpler and powerful.

There is one more thing I will add to a list of things that have to be done, while it is not the top priority:

7. Incubator, in order to hold a value, needs to have a treasury which can be easily accessed by anyone and be at anyone’s disposal.

I will talk about this much later, but now, I have a lot of work to do.

This is all I will say for now, I got some work to do and make this incubator thing a reality, while surpassing XIO while continuing to expose them for crossing me, and making their own future at stake.