Timur Karimbaev at the ICO Battle in Moscow

Read the full version of Timur’s speech presenting Human Discovery Platform! The Battle was held at Cyberussia, the Annual National Award in the sphere of digital economy and Blockchain on November 1st.

First, who are we?

We are cofounders of Getcourse.ru. We have been working on the project since 2013. Now we have about 60 employees. Last year, our revenue was about $5 mln, this year it will be more than $6 mln.

GetCourse is a platform for trainers and coaches, which help people promoting their online courses.

There are 1100 authors of courses on GetCourse. Their total revenue is $50 bln in the current period of 2017. By the end of the year, I think it will reach $70 bln,, because the last months of the year are usually the most active.

We have 6 schools, among them: “Veronika Kalacheva’s painting school”. It is the largest online painting school in Russia. We also work with Russian celebrities: Paul Wolya and Lyaisan Utiasheva. Our collaboration project is called “The Power of Will” and offers fitness and stand-up courses.

Every year we monitor trends to earn more and launch new projects. This year we see an active trend — growing number of projects related to self-improvement, a kind of courses for personal development, personal growth. They have been around for ages, but we are seeing an active growth right now. I mean various psychological and astrological projects for people who have already met their basic needs and are trying to figure out, how to improve their lives.

To test the future idea, we developed one project on the basis of one specific methodic — Human Design, which provides a person with recommendations on the basis of the date, location and time of birth. We developed HD.Dating project of the basis of this methodic, which shows the people’s compatibility .

It sounds funny, but it works. We see how people come and register. For the first month we had 15,000 registrations. For example, with cold traffic there was a conversion around 18%. This conversion is higher than in our other projects.

We see these methodics used in various spheres. People are trying to typologize others and themselves, arrange psychological tests for employees. For example, there are tests with 200 questions to identify a person’s type. One of the them is the MBTI test. For example, in the United States, 88% of companies from the Fortune 500 list are using the MBTI test.

Why do you need Blockchain?

We need Blockchain to build the world’s largest storage for data on human habits to provide recommendations for various areas of human life on the basis of input data.

We want to make a Blockchain system: each author of the methodic will create his own block, upload it into the Blockchain system, and accumulate all the data that goes through in the block.

It must be an open system. We believe that in case of full openness, more people will join the project. Researchers and programmers will trust it more.

The execution of the methodic will lead to the transfer of tokens to its author. A client pays with token for getting its result, and the author gets his deduction. Moreover, not only he receives it, but also the authors whose methods can be used complementary. For example, it can be the translation methodic, which can be used compementary to the main methodic, and its author will receive additional tokens. Tech-entrepreneur, in turn, will be able to create a product based on these methodics with an open API — application, site or social network.

HD-token will provide calculations between authors and tech-entrepreneurs. They will be issued in limited quantities. With the growing number of services and the number of people who use them, the price of a token should grow. The author, before embarking on the development of the methodic, can state: I am developing a methodic and I need some number of tokens to do this in order to collect the data. Baker can support the project, and then he will receive a percentage of each execution of the author’s method-block code. The block code is very similar to a smart contract. We will have only two types of smart contracts: the block with a methodic and the block of the baker.

Which markets should it affect?

First of all, the self-improvement market. Then, the corporate training US market, HR market, Dating market. And we’re not going to conquer the whole, we’re going to take little pieces in all these spheres. We will test, move in different directions, and look, how it turns out. We will get authors and entrepreneurs involved — do the same things as we do with GetCourse, but on a larger scale and on the open platform.

The main problem of the methodics is the insufficient evidence. For example, astrologers’ predictions works, but not so many people believe in it. Even the creators of the MBTI tests have stats problems.

How will token sale take place?

Tokens sale will start on November 22. Minimal capitalization will be $500,000. The maximal will be $30,000,000. Within the sale we will distribute 80% of the tokens, and will not mine them anymore. This will be something going around the ecosystem from block to block — from end users to authors and bakers.

Timur Karimbaev answered questions from the audience:

- Will users know, what kind of data is collected and processed?

This is a question for the end-user service. We are going to be integrated into different services, such as online Dating sites, Badoo or “Rambler Horoscope”. It will be the responsibility of the service.

- But your service will use all these data.

It will use the Blockchain. In Ethereum smart contract, you can also download anything. E-mail, for example. There’s no guarantee, that the service will use it properly — it is a question to a service. If some service, like Badoo, uses data that way, it will be less trustworthy.

- I do not really understand; why do you make the system decentralized? What is the advantage? It could easily be centralized.

Technologically, it’s even easier. For me, as someone who has been working on the development of centralized systems for 12 years, it would be much easier to make a centralized thing. But even in our Getcourse.ru I see such a thing… I’m not speaking about any distrust of the service. But there are people who say: what will happen when you raise a price next year? I will upload 10,000 users to your service, and you will raise the price? We believe that through decentralization, the trust in the services and methods will be greater, because the data cannot be manipulated. There will be no concerned person, who can say: This test passed well. No, it should be all open.

- Good afternoon, I have the following question. Today there is technology of biological feedback. It works like this: the man attaches a set of sensors during the test, they read his body indicators for each response during the test, and give the answer a certain significance. If some answer was highly doubted, it can be ignored. And if in the other he answered precisely and confidently, it should be taken into account to a greater extent. It allows getting more accurate data in psychological tests. Now they are trying to synthesize this technology with artificial intelligence, to make all these calculations more precise and use large data volumes for analytics. Accordingly, as I understand it, there is no selection, what information goes in service of the Blockchain in your service. Accordingly, the valuable the data can simply be diluted including some non-professional opinions and methods, and the accuracy of the calculations in your service will be simply blurred in low-quality tests. How can you deal with it?

You are absolutely right. You see, we are providing an infrastructure. For example, with Ethereum you can do anything. Good ICO, or bad ICO. We provide the infrastructure, and a person can accumulate data and try to use them. Who will use it, and who will pay for it is the question to the service itself. It can say: I’m a good service and I have proven data. Or not. There should not be a categorization, because it is also a form of centralization. This will be the point, where someone will want to cheat. There’s no objective things at all, in this sense. No one can prove these sensors were really attached to a man for sure.

- What kind of Blockchain?

There are two options: when we will distribute them, there will be ERC20 — the standard Ethereum. But Ethereum is not very good for this Blockchain. It is too expensive for data storage. We will have to write some our own stuff, based on existing OpenSource things. It will be sure Proof of Stake, and it needs to be at Git’a, where methodics are not updated very often, but it handles large transactions.

- Boeing 737 aircraft collects about 500 GB of information for one flight. Did you count, how many information will be stored in your Blockchain? And how much will it cost? $500,000 will not work here. Nor $30,000,000.

It’s a matter of demand. We do not plan to store something not in demand. So, we are not going to upload Boeing’s data. It is possible, but then they will have to pay for the storage on the host nodes. Each time a person uploads data, he pays not only to the authors of the method, but to the nodes, that store the information. The more nodes, the more infrastructure we have, the more opportunities to store data emerge. But it is strongly correlated with demand. In terms of what we do, if we talk about psychological tests and horoscopes, there is not as much data to be stored in Terabytes. We assume, at the initial stage, during the first two years, it would fit roughly into the same database as Ethereum. It will be tens of gigabytes. This doesn’t require a huge number of nodes. This should be a Proof of Stake, with not very large number of quite powerful nodes.

What is your team?

I do technology and lead the project in general. Sergey Mikhailov is engaged in operational management. Marat Nigametzyanov is a business developer. He represents the project and get in touch with Methodologists. There is a team of 10 programmers. Five of them in the office, five works remotely. There are 30 people in tech support with Sergey at GetCourse.

- Why should I buy your token?

First of all, we believe that you will definitely need our services. We also believe that with the increasing number of end-user services the cost of the token will increase. This is a utility token.