Trinity Community AMA with David Li: Part 3 (Thoughts on White Paper and Introduction to Nodes) 14/06/18

Alistair: The ecosystem itself needs to be matured, needs to have been adopted almost for it to actually have relevance, so I appreciate that you’ve gone at length to discuss that. I think we’ve got a couple more here, I know that there’s some other things we want to discuss but one of the other ones we talked earlier about, or touched on, and I know that it’s important because everyone wants to know. You mentioned early on that you didn’t rely too heavily on a White Paper ,which is a little bit of a…I think it’s a Western construct for some crypto assets base, because in a lot of regards it revealed a lot of your strategy and your planning.

We talked that in previous responses that the basic construct for Trinity is far more than just payments and far more than supporting one chain. The market is depressed, not too many people listening, not too many people buying, is there anything you want to sort of give us a heads up on about, where you’re focusing your business development activities now or is it mainly just focused solely on the technology, like 95% in to the technology and leaving the other stuff?

David: Yeah, this is something I want to talk about. So I have to say the reason why we don’t so heavily rely on a white paper is because, let’s be honest, many things will change with your development, you will discover new ideas and you will want to implement them. That will cause you to change the original white paper, which is already circulating in the market and everybody will see that original version as the like ‘Holy Bible’, if you allow me to say this, because I had this experience with Neo in the past…like everyone was reading the original white paper of AntShares, so they don’t get it, they don’t understand what’s Neo is trying to do. So that basically forced the team to do the rebranding and give new white papers; so the reality is that we have discovered many new ideas and along the course of developments, if you can, if you know, seriously just picture what you are going to do in the white paper and you know, go along with it like a few months or even one year of development…what will you be presenting by the time it’s like released it’s the time it’s already falling behind others, so that’s one thing.

The second thing with the market…so I don’t know how to put this, but I mean, we have basically no control over the price and all of our team members actually, are just bleeding like everyone else, but there is something that maybe the community should pay attention to. So by the time we release Trinity Network for Neo at the end of this month, we will give a documentation on Github on how you can deploy your nodes and join this network, which is very important. By joining this network there are tangible economic benefits.

So the thresholds to join this network and set up your own nodes, there is a economic threshold that is $800 worth of TNC. Okay, so this is the number we’re looking at right now. So the minimum requirement for a node is you stake $800 worth of TNC, at that market price, at that time and this is the minimum because it could go higher, could go limitless. If you only stake $800 worth you can only process transactions under this number, so if the transaction goes beyond this number we don’t have enough funds, we have insufficient funds to stake and transfer this transaction.

So the more you stake, the more transactions you will be able to process, especially if it’s a transaction of funds. Okay so this is something people in the community want to set up their own nodes and the economic incentive for one transfer of this transaction is 0.01 TNC and so I mean there could be millions of transactions, that I don’t know the number but, you know you can do the math, so if you set up a node then you can collect this as your income.

David: I mean we just had this conversation internally but the the thing is okay, again, we’re not doing a very big PR around it so people who are hearing this, who are watching this and those who have been a long-standing community participant, you know this already. it’s very early days and later on when the market recovers, maybe we we’ll do something where we will speak a lot about this okay.

So yeah that’s the case, I know that we had a locking up program that not many people had a chance to join and so basically that guarantees that you have a return. If I remember it was 10%, 7.5% or 5% annually for nine months but I mean that’s like it, that’s like fixed and it’s for sure, certain, but with the economic incentive for operating a node you don’t know, you can go higher than that because I mean, you will be the one processing these transactions, especially and most importantly if there is going to be a huge amount of transactions going on in the networks and you basically stake a lot of TNC you’ll be able to process most of them and collect a fee from all of these transactions.

We have some time and we will release this documentation so people will have time to read them through and get this up okay because I have to say, okay, you have to lower your expectations in a time like this. Think about it, this is just Trinity for Neo and at the time like this I suspect there’s not huge demands of high transaction process, high-volume transaction processing on Neo Network, okay maybe at a later time, so you shouldn’t be expecting to receive a lot of, let’s see, collect a lot of funds at the very beginning as it has it has to wait. This module will be working similar, I mean the idea will be similar, but we’ve probably different parameters on the Ethereum version later on, that’s just something I think I should let the community know, there’s a lot of people who were asking about how you can become a node and how much I can collect, all those sort of questions.

Alistair: David, I think nodes is the next question which I know you wanted to get into even more detail about, I know you mentioned that you want to do a separate, a whole separate interview on. That in itself I think, is one of the good, one of the interesting things about what you just entertained then is that you have to start at some point, people have to start seeing and touching Trinity. Once you start seeing it and moving around it becomes a very different proposition altogether and especially for other DApps and future DApps that are out there, they see it, they know it’s real, they know it works which is which is pretty critical in itself.

Are you sticking geographically anywhere when you’re doing any of the marketing, or is it, I think we had spoken once before, it seems almost that like your customers I guess is best way to describe it, your customers are actually the DApp developers themselves, them wanting to incorporate you, so is there much dialogue? Like where’s the information flow coming is that you going to them, is it them coming to you, or is it like a bit of both?

David: Of course with both yeah and we have people communicating online, on meet-ups or conferences or introductions or people just coming to us. I mean I can tell you the feeling right now okay, so basically the biggest problem for them is not us. The biggest problem is the bottom layer platform. You have to carefully pick which platform you later choose and after that, they have to figure out how to incorporate their business with it. I mean they don’t know how to do a DApp most of them I can tell you, because the DApp is supposed to be a blockchain application you have to do it, do everything in a blockchain way instead of you know, just adding a cryptocurrency feature to your original classic app.

That’s one thing and the second thing is we had to figure out which platform is the best, now only after that we come, we sort of serve as a lubricant, and so you have to build a car first and you have to build your road first, yeah so that’s the thing here, I think it will take some time but in the long run I think that I’m bullish on this because there’s many new projects coming out and becoming more mature, although not perfect, I think they will be opening new doors for many new kinds of applications.

Alistair: That’s pretty amazing, one of the biggest things with the nodes, I think you’ve sort of already cut across a lot of it and I don’t know how much more detail we can go into, but the one question that comes up quite a lot is about the functioning parameters, like what are the factors that go into how you will decide the structure of the nodes, how much of it you want, how works, noting that of course geographical distribution is actually pretty important.

David: Oh absolutely, we have our own routing algorithm so we’ll basically automatically choose the optimal route for you, okay, and I don’t know if we wouldn’t allow manual selection but I know it’s just automatic selecting the optimal one and like I said there is another limitation; that is the nodes available should be the nodes that are financially available because some of the nodes even though they’re optimal routes but they don’t, may have insufficient funds to stake so that’s a thing.

So regarding this I think the best strategy for community participants is you need a basic set up for this but the biggest idea is that you should usually have a good uplink, you can have a good bandwidth, but most importantly you have to stake a considerable amount of TNC. But you know, if you just want to participate and just reach the minimum requirements that will just be fine. I think this will be released in the documentation and it will go into details about the routing, about the economics, about the parameters, so people who are interested should wait for that. I think that will be coming out after the 25th of this month (June).