Quest to reclaim our privacy
Aligning Interests
Very few people worry about your privacy, that’s because in traditional business world — there’s just not enough money to be made while solving this issue. It’s like working towards preserving the nature or ensuring social equality — not much money to be made in either of those “industries”. I guess we can’t even call them industries.
But the world is changing. The advent of blockchain — changes the whole game. It allows us to build protocols, which have incentivization built into them from the very start. What if these incentives were centered around a common goal? What if protocol measured size of your contribution towards this goal and rewarded you accordingly.
That is exactly what’s happening. Once such protocol is in place — you just have to either contribute or get out of the way. Because this incentivization entangled with a common goal — will call out for creativity from all over the world and real problems will start to get solved. Technical problems, business problems, legal problems — all kinds of problems will be solved. All thanks to blockchain and aligned incentivization.
At Mysterium — we are building a protocol with the goal to align all participant incentives into building a solution — providing a private connection to the Internet for all citizens of this planet.
And if you haven’t followed the news on this topic — there is lots of ‘under-the-hood’ kind of activity happening on the internet, with the goal of peeking into your private life. It’s so easy these days, sometimes it appears as if everyone is trying to do it: from something as trivial as placing cookies into your browser to doing something as sophisticated as hacking your smart TV. Your private data is just so valuable to those who are skilled enough to use it for their advantage and in most cases, it’s done without your consent or clear awareness.
There are many examples:
Recently ISP hands have been untied in US, as they are free to track and store your private and browsing data and sell it wherever they see fit, without your permission.
How CIA hacks your Samsung Smart TVs.
At Mysterium — we are on a mission to help restoring the privacy of an internet connection. Join us if you feel like this might be something worth your time and effort.
Also let me share some of the progress that’s been made by the team.
Progress Update
I. COMMUNITY
First and foremost I want to thank all of the people who support this project. Community has been growing and getting more active over at Slack, Telegram, Twitter, Medium, …
When we started communicating about our plans to do a Token Contribution this spring (scheduled for May 30'th) — there were about 100 people in our Slack chatting from time to time. Now this number is closer to a 1000 in Slack alone, with discussions happening across different channels to a point where we as a team are not even able to follow all of them anymore.
Thank you all for your support, insights and feedback on our whitepaper, MVP and website.
II. WHITEPAPER
I’st we released a draft of Mysterium whitepaper — asking community to point out places which need to be improved. This turned out to be a huge success — without suspecting we received hundreds of suggestions for improvements. That alone required a dedicated person to oversee all of the new input, but the quality improvement was invaluable.
And finally last week we responded to your feedback and released a first “stable” release of Mysterium whitepaper, detailing technical aspects of the protocol, token usage mechanisms, token sale dynamics and various other topics.
Please see Mysterium whitepaper here.
III. MVP (Early prototype) — 600 nodes in 2 under weeks
We have been working hard on providing you with the early prototype of Mysterium product, with the goal to showcase: that the concept is a viable one. And it is live — check here.
If you are a Linux user — you can join other people and start your node right away, or you can use a client software to connect to other already existing nodes.
We released MVP last week and now a week later Mysterium is already joining a league of larger VPN providers with more than 600 VPN nodes available.
Which just proves the point — that change happens fast, once you have incentives of all participants aligned.
IV. BOUNTY PROGRAM
We have released a bounty program, for people who want to participate in various ways. There are distinct 4 programs:
- Bitcoin talk Signature Campaign
- Translation and Moderation
- Publish articles in news medias about Mysterium
- Running Mysterium Node for testing purposes
We invite you to participate in one of these or all of them.
V. PRE-SALE & PARTNERSHIPS
We have made some amazing partnerships in preparation for the future development and a coming token sale.
Let’s name them:
BitcoinSuisse
this is a very well known company in a crypto world and they are helping us with the presale and collecting of funds for the token sale with contributions mainly coming mostly in FIAT currencies.
If you want to have a piece of mind and don’t want to take an active role during the token sale — you can participate through BitcoinSuisse as they will do the heavy work for you, by converting your contribution from whatever currency into ETH and then participating in the Mysterium token sale on your behalf. Off course this comes at a price of performing a KYC and some fees paid to BitcoinSuisse (see their terms), so if this is not your thing — then the other option is to wait for the actual token sale.
Legal advise from a proven Swiss legal advisory
Their help enables us to move forward with a needed peace of mind. Crypto world is in a perpetual experimentation, testing the borders on all fronts: social, technological, legal... Their company is the place to go if you want a piece of mind on legal front and we are grateful to tap into their experience.
Token Market
They are experts when it comes to handling an execution of a token sale, writing up smart contracts, handling community development etc. Their help and advice is invaluable to our team.
Open Zeppelin
There probably is no better destination when it comes to expertise in writing and auditing smart contract code.
VI. TEAM
We have one additional team member: Vitas Civilis. He joined us very recently, but has been an incredible addition to the team. He is focused, very experienced — just sold a company, self propelled, dedicated and very agile. Just what we needed, with the only regret — that he didn’t join us any earlier.
VII. TOKEN CREATION and SALE
On May 30'th we are opening up a Token Creation and welcoming your contributions.
Contributions will take place mostly in ETH.
Token sale dynamics is explained in the Whitepaper, but just let me reiterate the most notable aspects here:
- Token Sale is based on 2 caps: SoftCap set at 6MM CHF and a HardCap — will be set in following days (somewhere around 10MM);
- The token Sale is pegged to CHF and we will set the ETH/CHF rate just before the token creation starts;
- Before the SoftCap is reached — there will be a 20% bonus on the price, where 1 CHF will buy you 1.2 MYST tokens. After the SoftCap is reached: 1CHF will buy 1MYST token;
- Tokens will be sent right away, but will be locked for about 3 week period until we check and doublecheck everything, then they will be unlocked;
- Once Hard Cap is reached — the sale will stop.
Final words
Creating business is tough. Creating a protocol with built in incentivization designed to align people into building a system able to provide private access to the Internet for all of it’s users — sounds like a chapter taken out of a of science fiction novel.
It can be a bumpy ride sometimes and we appreciate your patience and support, along the way. One thing is for sure — we have a team that believes in Mysterium mission and is ready to build it into a reality.
And once Token sale is over — we will be growing Mysterium team, gearing up for long marathon, so if this sounds like something you could do — give us a call.
Thank you for taking the time and effort.
