Let’s face it. Everyone and their grandma want to go on-chain. I see so many people with “ideas”, you know grand visions and nice marketing materials, every day. But most of these guys can’t justify going on-chain. They don’t have the demand for their apps. Even if they did, they can’t show me they’re financially viable. Even if there was demand and it made sense to go on-chain financially, I don’t know if they can pull it off. It’s one thing to have an idea, it’s another to actually build the damn thing and run a business.
Views of a seasoned tech investor we approached some time ago on crypto-tokens
Transitioning to blockchain and smart contracts is a significant investment of time and money, so the man did have good points. First off, he wanted to know if there’s demand for positif.ly. After all, who in his right mind invests in a company without customers?
In our case, we’d a simple answer: We’re running a business in black — thanks for asking, but data scientists; computer scientists, economists and psychologists that we’re, we did our homework and realized that we’re leaving exorbitant sums of money on the table, because only on-chain positif.ly can give respondents anonymity and plausible deniability, and ensure reward integrity. In other words, going on-chain expands our market to lucrative corners beyond our current reach.
Let’s go over two examples.
How do I know I’ll be rewarded at all?
positif.ly pulses use peer scoring. This takes care of respondents’ reluctance to voice their opinions. But, how do we convince respondents in, say a public political pulse, that our pulse is not scam, click bait or some such, and that we will certainly pay out rewards, if they give truthful answers? Looking one step ahead, how do we control transfer costs for many small crossborder payments, and avoid collecting unnecessary personal identifiable information?
Smart contracts with an escrow provide iron-clad guarantees to respondents that they surely and transparently receive rewards to their wallets. The mixing of responses offers participants plausible deniability: Even if respondents are known by name, neither answers nor rewards can be tied to answers of a specific respondent.
How do I know I’ll rewarded the right amount?
positif.ly pulses induce self-interested respondents to reveal their true beliefs in a one-shot interaction without the costs of running a prediction market. But how do we convince respondents that the pulser (the company or person running the pulse) can’t manipulate the information? How do we make sure that truthful respondents receive higher rewards? For example, how can we convince a group of FX traders (a competitive bunch those traders) that the more truthful they’re in revealing their private beliefs, the more they’ll be rewarded for it?
Easy: All pulse information is recorded to a blockchain. All respondents are parties to a positif.ly smart contract that encodes reward allocation and stop conditions; makes them transparent and guarantees their impartial execution.
And by the way, the investor did invest in positif.ly.
