I recommend joining my discord as over 70 people already have and I will post updates there regularly and use it in my project going forward: https://discord.gg/PtXzUVr
Any important questions I see I'll add to OP going forward.
Please keep in mind due to the account status, I can only reply so fast.
Name?
To be determined, till then enjoy this very appealing title.
What happened?
Briefly summarizing on the events, I announced my departure from the Pure Vidz project because I had conflicting views with my partner (the person with the original idea of the platform) on what our goals should be going forward and the scope of our project. We have mutually reached an agreement to part ways that we are both happy with and I will be starting on my own project to represent my differing vision while he will be continuing to develop Pure Vidz following his original vision laid out.
The events of my departure are summarized here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.17749745
Confirmation is directly below where my previous partner quoted my post.
What’s problems in terms of the current definitive scope required something as drastic as a separate project?
Central points of failure: Let’s start with human intervention and central points of failure. I’m against the moderator system, users should not be told what can exist on the platform and what can’t but in the vision of PV it’s a crucial part of the platform since content needs to be curated for validity as well as to ensure nothing controversial is posted and indexed. The fact human moderators are required in itself are a point of failure. If for whatever reason a moderator starts rejecting content because they don’t like it, it’s then up to “the organization” to fix, re-evaluate and reprimand said moderator.
Another example of centralization is similar to that of MU and TPB. If a few key individuals are caught, the entire platform goes down. PV’s vision suffers from this as well, where as my end goal results in using a blockchain to act as a distributed database and full nodes to act as gateways to accessing files in a similar sense that IPFS nodes do. The platform should sustain in such a way similar to Bitcoin, even with it's founder Satoshi nowhere to be found the platform continues to run and thrive.
Legal Ambiguity: It’s no doubt PV’s vision always suffered from legal ambiguity. One could argue TPB “isn’t really doing anything wrong” but that doesn’t really stop the law. The strong point here to make is torrents are legal, IPFS is legal, it’s what you seed and how you provide the content that can be illegal. Objectively speaking, I am planning on delivering a platform and how it is used is defined by its users not by what I enforce.
IPFS sets a good precedent for this where their public gateway ipfs.gateway.io opts into a DMCA black list. Nodes that any individual sets up by default has to opt into this black list. There’s a few reason for this one of which is if it was mandated IPFS itself could be seen as the entity to attack for taking ownership of curating the content on the network. In other words, the gateway or entry point to the content should decide what’s allowed and what’s not, not the users using it. In the case of IPFS if you disagree with a node's blacklist policies nothing is preventing you from using a different gateway that doesn’t opt into the blacklist or setting up your own node.
My vision going forward has full legal compliance and doesn’t require ambiguity.
The other issue with legal ambiguities is forming partnerships with other organizations going forward. It’s not hard to see why most organizations will tread very carefully and/or want noting to do with you.
Transparency and Open Source: Transparency in terms of identity is a problem due to the legal ambiguity of the platform. Going forward with assurance of legal compliance with my vision of the project I’ll be comfortable reveal who I am and openly/publicly speaking.
For obvious reasons Pure Vidz as defined by PV’s vision needs to remain closed source. In my vision going forward everything will eventually be open sourced. Even during the process of where the project early on won’t be fully decentralized and rely on our central server as a database back-end, I intend for the front-end client to be entirely open source. The client will be developed in such a way that when we hit the point of decentralization, all that needs to be done is changing the base api endpoint to a different public gateway or a localhost gateway node.
I am a holder of VIDZ, how am I affected by this?
On my project going forward, part of the coins created in the initial supply will be dedicated towards a VIDZ swap. This swap will be done via a proof of burn.
It was part of the mutual agreement that I would offer this as means of continuing to support his vision of Pure Vidz. If you choose to support my project by burning coins, those who still stick with the his vision of the project will benefit from the decreased supply in available coins. The burn process will not require you to send me your coins. You will be burning them entirely yourself and this process will be detailed later on.
Who advocated for IPFS? (this seemed to get asked a lot in Discord)
I strongly advocated to speed up integration and even elect it as our primary content system. It solved a lot of our problems early on specifically lack of seeders using the WebTorrent client which resulted in poor content reliability. There was a drastic improvement in content reliability and people using the platform in a positive matter when we made this integration which initially started out very controversial.
As we further began to use IPFS, I quickly began noticing the heights this project could reach and how it’s current scope was greatly limiting it, see the development update I made,
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.17627951
Will you have a crowdfund?
Once I can finalize a draft for the scope of the project and the process of how I plan to go about things, yes we will begin a crowdfund. What has not been determined yet is what percentage of the coin supply will be dedicated towards crowdfund participants and what percentage will go towards those doing the VIDZ proof of burn swap.
As for when, I currently can’t put dates to things. First I need to finish the document detailing how I wish to proceed going forward and then a timeline can be put together.
OMG SCAM!!!!
I’ve said this in the Discord several times during the first few hours of after I posted the update, both of us plan on continuing to develop the project but the directions we’re taking it are drastically different and that’s why this split is happening.
I still hold VIDZ and it will be burned going forward during the swap process. Realistically speaking, if I had malicious intentions the optimal strategy would’ve been to dump it at peak prices and not offer any VIDZ swap whatsoever. The VIDZ swap/burn does absolutely nothing for my project, but allows me to directly support those who choose to hold VIDZ committing to PV's vision.
I can only speak for myself, but I am committed to the development of this project and believe in the success and potential of where my vision of the project is headed. If you want to discuss things in a reasonable matter, join us on Discord.
So what exactly is your vision?
Above, I’ve briefly summarized some of the points I want to tackle but haven’t gone in depth about how I plan on going about this going forward. I will be putting together a document detailing the full scope of the new project, a comprehensive road map break down and expectations going forward. I had already started working on this prior to the update, so please give me a little bit more time to completed it.
Will you be working with other people going forward?
Yes assuming funding allows for it, others will be hired for permanent positions.
There are people who I had reached out to in regards to Pure Vidz not only in the terms of acting as an official team developer, but other positions when we were looking to expand. Many of those contacts when they learned more about the product were cautious. The biggest problem was the legal ambiguity and that we had to be anonymous while operating everything is a huge turn off to most people.
