The story about the blockchain and a little bit about bitcoins

In 2011, after I sold a fairly large amount of cues for $ 2, I started writing my cryptocurrency. Not exactly how I sold it right away, but when I saw a couple of months later, the rate rose 25 times to $ 50.



As a result, after 3.5 years, broke out and posted an article on Habr . There were hopes that after that publication the project would immediately take off, people would start using it and marketing problems would disappear. But it was not there, only a few people came. After a couple of days I decided to make a lower entry threshold and after some time I posted a new article , and then another and another . The result is about the same. It was not clear how to unwind, there was no money to hire professionals. In general, a dead end.



At one point, I decided to rewrite more than 70k lines of php-code on Go, it was really cool, probably the most exciting period of my life. On the day it reached 1000 lines. This resulted in a series of articles: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

About investment

Most likely, the participants of these stories perceived everything happening from a different angle, I just set out my vision of the events taking place.

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Meet the investor

Father's colleague calls, asks for advice on one IT project. Consultancy has become a cost estimate for development. On December 31, 2015, I met on Skype with the project investor. There was nothing interesting in that project, but for the sake of a chance to work with an intelligent and successful person who has a lot to learn, I agreed, and my savings were already running out. This was my first experience in life as an investor. After 2 weeks, he became interested in Dcoin (my cryptocurrency was called so) and decided to invest. We registered in the contract $ 250k, which I was given in installments on a monthly basis. I neatly delegated the creation of his website so as not to be distracted from the refinement and advancement of my brainchild.



There were no problems with the revision, but with the advancement there was a trouble. How exactly to promote, what to focus on, I could not understand. Consulted with marketers, but it was not that. Although, if I had spent the ICO, I would most likely have collected $ 5-10 million, but I didn’t need this money, as there was no product promotion strategy. I was sure that he had to move himself without any participation, all he had to do was push him a little and then leave to develop on his own.



It was necessary to do something. In mid-2016, I decided to make a new product based on the source code of Dcoin, which was very similar to Ethereum, but with a different concept and with a much lower threshold of entry. Due to the fact that gentee came to our team a few months earlier, having responded to my vacancy in this article , we were able to do the MVP in just a couple of months.

Ico

In the fall of 2016, an investor called me to his hotel to transfer money for my team’s salary. He began to demand explanations as to why the funds are spent on the 2nd project, how long it will continue and what he will get from this. It became clear that he did not want to give more money. I offered to invest another $ 30k in return for a percentage of the tokens that will go to ICO. He agreed. As a result, for all the time I received from him $ 106k. On advertising, ICO spent just about $ 5-7k, the rest went to the team’s salaries.



As a rule, the ICO on the crypt is going to a purse from which the organizers can not take money until the end of the process. To do this, use a multi-signature with escrow (some independent party). To withdraw money, we need two signatures of 3.



On ICO day, it turned out that I can only have one signature out of 3. The other two should be at the escrow. I tried to find someone who wants to be third, did not find it, I had to give two signatures to one escrow. It turned out that he had complete control over the wallet, where the bitcoins were sent. All I could do in time was to ask him for a passport scan and look at it via Skype. He turned out to be a bad German speaking English. Later I was told that it was about $ 1000 to fake such a passport.



During the ICO, the money ran out, and it was impossible to spend the money collected before the end of the process, according to the terms of the escrow. Said the team that the salary will be delayed for 2 weeks.



As a result, they collected only about $ 70k (82btc). Suddenly, the German says that it is necessary to return money to investors. I'm shocked - "Why?". He says that with this money the product is not developed and it is necessary to make a return. I explain that the product is already ready, you can download, test, here are the sources, here are the binaries. He apologized for not studying the project well and listed all bitcoins, except for his commission. I immediately felt relief, now we had another six months to come up with something.



Spring 2017 He warned the investor that in a month the team will have nothing to pay, since the money collected at the ICO is running out. Offer to invest did not receive. As it turned out, I had to make an application for money, since we had a contract in force, according to which he had to invest $ 250k. My joint, it was necessary to carefully read the paper.

New investor

In June 2017, a lawyer who designed a deal with an investor introduced me to a new investor, who offered to invest in marketing and development for a share of the money collected at the 2nd round of ICO. In this case, all the marketing he took over. Perfect for me option. Besides, there was almost no money left. I agreed.

Old investor

He invited me to his office and said that either in a week I was describing the ICO scheme in white for him, or I should pay him $ 2.5m. I could not offer a white ICO scheme (in the end, it took us almost one year to figure out how to do everything in white and get approval from the European regulator). He gave a strange paper for signature. I did not sign anything.



As it turned out later, if I had signed, the new investor could stop financing, since his interests were affected there. The next day, the old investor called, threatened, I still did not sign anything.



He offered him to invest $ 144k so that the conditions of the previous agreement could be applied. Although if he reminded me how the $ 250k figure came out, I probably would not dwell on those $ 144k and would agree to its terms.

How did $ 250k

A year and a half before. I sit in the kitchen, have breakfast with fried eggs. The investor calls.



He: Let's discuss the numbers. How much do you need?

Me: $ 50k should be enough for my calculations.

He: I can give $ 250k, 50k is hardly enough for you.

I: Ok, super.



He refused to invest $ 144k and tried to kill the project during the next week. With that, he had a stake in the future ICO, plus I planned to give him some of the company's shares. He is a good man, but apparently he was afraid that he would be thrown. Strange was the situation. As a result, consensus was found and everyone was satisfied.

Chinese investors

In September, the Chinese came to me, who wanted to copy the source code of our product and replace the copyrights there in order to present it as their Chinese project. They wanted to get our help, since it is difficult for them to figure it out themselves, because there are no qualified programmers. Instead, they offered some kind of muddy scheme with equity participation in their company.



I flew to Moscow for talks. On the first day, it turned out that the Chinese had already collected several million dollars by stupidly copying our site and replacing the texts with Chinese, but having done good marketing. And what to do next, they do not know. It was funny to observe how they tried with all their might to transfer the topic from the money raised at the ICO to share in some company.



They brought Chinese vodka, I stacked a whole stack under the gaze of one of the Chinese all evening, as it turned out later that he was their local KGB officer or something like that.

The next day I went home to Peter.



With the Chinese left a couple of our people. They were given my proposal - $ x (I can not write the exact amount due to legal subtleties) for 1.8 million tokens. They immediately went into denial, as they flew from China to buy not tokens to us, but to receive our support and participation in their troubled company for free.



I sent in their Skype document, according to which they give money, receive tokens and support from us.



A few days later, the Chinese arrive in St. Petersburg. Call me. The document was never signed. I do not pick up the phone. At night, a person known in the crypto community contacts me and asks me to meet with the Chinese. I refuse. A couple of days, he talked with them in St. Petersburg, asked me to come, I did not agree, because I wanted to first get consent to my conditions. The Chinese began to bargain and bring down the price. In the end, on the phone, I told them to fly back to China and think about my proposal. They flew away.



Their investments were not critical, but would allow me to more freely dispose of funds for expanding the team and developing the product. I was sure 70% percent that they would return.



A week later, the Chinese signed my document and transferred the $ x bit over 1.8 million tokens from the evaluation of all tokens to $ y million (I can’t write the exact amount due to legal subtleties). If you subtract what you need to give to the first 2 investors, then the remaining money will be enough for about a year. Formally, I then became a rather rich man, since I had some share of tokens, though I couldn’t do anything with them, because our tokens were not yet on the stock exchanges.

Crypto Investment Issues

According to European legislation, everyone who bought tokens at our 1st ICO will have to go through KYC, that is, take off their photos and write their full name. And those who do not want to go through KYC will be able to take their bitcoins back. Therefore, after ICO, we will need to have in reserve 82 btc in case everyone wants to go to the cue ball. But on the other hand, we will not have problems with the SEC and so on. Regulators as everything is done in a white way.

About development

Team

Now we have 3 testers, 7 backenders, 2 front-tenders, 8 smart contract developers, 5 managers, 9 marketing guys, only 34 people. And we are constantly looking for talents, as there are more and more tasks.

Instruments

For text communication, we use Slack, for working with Jira tasks, for discussion - Confluence, stand-ups every day via Skype.

Our mobile app

Sources here . We decided to use React-Native, since we have our own template engine that allows you to create interfaces from an abstract syntax tree right while the application is running. Due to its flexibility and the dynamic nature of JavaScript, the application code base contains almost no fixed pages and works with what the user creates. In conjunction with the desktop and web application, a large level of code unification is obtained, which allows you to port changes between projects without special expenses.

Desktop application

Electron was taken to reduce labor costs for maintaining several client solutions, and to unify the code. Sources

What we develop

Apla

This is such a platform for legal ICO, which is regulated to the ears. Now many ICO organizers have problems with the SEC. They are forced to return the money to investors. Here in Apla everything is done in such a way that such problems do not arise. Apla will have to cut off all the scam ICOs, leaving only those who are still early in the IPO or for some reason do not want to, and you need to attract money for development or development. These are the 1% who are really going to do something after collecting money for an ICO, such as a Telegram.

GenesisKernel

There are source codes on which the Apla and GenesisCommunity backend works.

GenesisCommunity

GenesisCommunity is the opposite of Apla, a platform where there is no regulation and no ICO. 85% of tokens are distributed to the users githab. I thought to keep a small part of the tokens, but our lawyer said that I could not have GEN tokens, because after entering the stock exchange, I may be imputed to the administration of the GenesisCommunity platform. I also do not have the right to extract commercial benefits by selling tokens before entering the stock exchange, I also cannot buy advertising for GenesisCommunity. Here it is the European legislation.

Pro marketing

Political

At the end of 2017 in Luxembourg, he met with Volkov, after that boldachev spoke in his program Cloud. We decided to transfer the activities of the bulk party to the blockchain. Approximately at the time when communication with the Russian opposition began, the Internet and some other acquaintances began to work in a strange way, although it may just be a coincidence.

Conflict with github

To distribute GenesisCommunity tokens, I published the text in the description of the github repository:



A blockchain platform with a simplified programming language. 85% of all tokens will be distributed among GitHub users. Only for those with 1+ year GitHub accounts.



After 2 days, our repo was already in the top of the github, in 2nd place github.com/trending .

Asterisks put a few github workers, everything went well, with such a pace we would have taken 1st place in a day. And most likely would have sat there for more than a month, having collected hundreds of thousands of users. But suddenly, on 1300 stars, our repo was banned.



I am writing in support, they say that you cannot promise tokens for asterisks. He asked whether it is possible to collect asterisks (it is convenient to keep records of users in them) to the secret gist, they said that it was possible, because it will not appear in any ratings.



I had to transfer the distribution to the gist, the github officers continued to put stars. Now more than 4,000 githab users are on the list, among which there are top developers from Google, Facebook, etc.

Keybase

I noticed that there are a lot of users in the hist who posted such files here gist.github.com/c-darwin/34aa19bf2cb1d9dd068370149ec0ba89 . This turned out to be a variation of the githab accounts at one keybase. They have about 100k of such records. Decided to negotiate with their administration, wrote to Chris, who is listed there as a co-creator. I proposed to cooperate, he liked the idea and in the end he tweeted: twitter.com/malgorithms/status/979419441669791745

Now the variation is done through their public chat for teams (this is something like a simplified slack).

AplaBlockchainHack

We have long wanted to spend your hackathon. And then suddenly it turned out so successfully that the old investor came a man who took over this task, and at the same time agreed on a partnership with the Rybakov Fund, Gazpromneft, Rospatnet. Allocated 1.5 million rubles in the prize fund. After 2 days there will be the beginning of the hackathon.

Conclusion

In the coming months, many interesting events are planned, the results of which are very difficult to predict, but I think there will be ups and downs, which I will discuss in the next article.