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Community Meeting (Transcript) - April 28th, 2017

Link to the community meeting video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGZqoAiVLWQ

Joel introduced community with 2 new developers: Vit Stanislav - front end developer working on Lisk Nano and Ali - working on Lisk Nano and Explorer.

Now, questions begin:

Question: "Will Lisk Nano be able to turn into an app for iOS or Android? If not, is mobile wallet app planned?"
Lisk(Ali): Yes, we are actually looking forward to move the coinbase to direction that we can use a React and React native and build both desktop applications and mobile applications for iOS and Android.
Lisk(Max): And maybe to add to that, thanks to Tobias great work on Lisk JS it will be easier to work on mobile plan and desktop plan because this library had a lot of cryptography stuff inside that mean that front-end work itself as cleaner and easier to work thanks to the library."

Question: "Do you make progress on the concept realisation of SDK?" and second one: "The rebranding and more information about it?".
Lisk(Max): "Let me start with rebranding. Some of you might have seen it, it started or kick started with strategy session. Currently there is a live community with members from all over the world happening which are brainstorming different topics and third party research agency is analysing all off this and this will flow into the rebranding, and this will also lead into the strategy sessions in regards in to rebranding. Followed by that the actual re-branding, corporate design, website, client and so on...So we are in first stage and it's live now so progress is being made.
In regard to the SDK, brainstorming, conceptualization, it's happening, we're making a great progress, I don't want to say anything in that regard to not spoil possible announcements."

Question: "Max are you going to be presenting on Consensus 2017?"
Lisk(Max): "So first of all, to Consensus will go Oliver, Thomas, our new marketing guy who is not here present currently and myself. We will not have an official presentation on a conference. We wanted to use the opportunity to go now with full team to the conference and to have the marketing, networking, pitching of the product because we believe Lisk is now in stage in which it can be pitched quite well as a promising project and that's our goal for Consensus in NY city."

Question: "For new member of a team, what convinced you to work on a Lisk? Why did you join Lisk and not another crypto projects? How were the first weeks?"
Lisk(Vit): "What convinced me, well, it's like for me it was not really like choosing between different crypto projects but choosing between different frontend roles in different projects so it was really the crypto project which convinced me. First weeks months here were a lot about learning about blockchain technology. Cool people in the team are really helpful so I'm glad to be here".
Lisk(Ali): "I'm coming from a background for working for different companies in different fields like from design agencies to game developer companies and what's important for me in all of those companies that I've worked for is the code quality and the team spirit. Here Oliver perfectly takes care of the code quality. I have a chance to work on cutting edge technology and do my best to supply my end users with the product that has the quality that I enjoy. Because it's open source I'm sure that my code is going to be reviewed by many others who actually use that product, understand the UX, or at least feel the UX when they are using it and they will give me the feedback which I'll use to develop more interesting and better product. It's a kind of recursive improvement in the project and also because of this spirit in the group. In many companies when you work they just try to push a new feature that they can announce what they have done but here in Lisk we actually just provide the product that we're sure it's going to work."

Question: Will the roadmap have more specific timeframes?"
Lisk(Max): "I think similar question was asked in the last meeting. We gonna change the roadmap, probably completely. What we gonna do is we will have several different branches for the different products we have like Lisk Explorer, Lisk Core, Lisk JS and so on. Each of this products will have their own roadmap which is again divided in short term, medium term and long term. So there you will have more specific time frame or a timeline for the every product we have. In term of planning, we have it planned out for this quarter and we have a lot of ideas and some sketches and brainstorms for the future. I'm not sure when are we going to do it because we're moving quite fast and it's a lot of work to to let everyone group into the team. We have probably hundreds of construction sites we currently work on. One will be published soon. So, no specific timeframe on when the new roadmap is going to be released but I would say it's not far away, it's coming."

Question: "Any news to DPOS change?"
Lisk(Isabella): "No, nothing concrete. As with all of the changes we make to the core and other things we have long discussions, we have meeting about them to make sure that the change is right and that there is no flaws or if there are flaws that they are at bare minimum because no matter with what system we come up with or what changes it's always going to be a drawback. PoW has a drawback of a lot of electricity use and proof of stake has a drawback of that you have to have a ton of coins to get anywhere and we don't want to negatively impact our delegates who work very hard to maintain their positions and their nodes for the past year. In about 30 days it's an anniversary of main net launch."

Question: "Are there any planned bounties yet?"
Lisk(Joel): "I can say that currently we don't have any bounties for the community. What we have planned is for the developers, bug bounty program which is in the works and once a developers have a little bit more free time we can start working on the front end and build the actual site."
Lisk(Max): "We're currently working on some bounties. We will definitely have some, it's just all taking so long because there is so much to do. I mentioned Thomas already, he's a great guy, a marketing guy, he puts a lot of non-development work so we can actually progress faster on non-development work as well as we're accelerating on the development work. It's coming, I can just say it's coming."
Lisk(Joel): "Yeah we're soon going to roll out some bounties and it's going to be pretty good!"

Question: How to make Lisk token value in coming sidechain SDK?
Lisk(Max): "I think the question is about what gives Lisk token value if we will have sidechain and SDK. Or what's contributing to the value of Lisk token. Same as Ethereum has smart contracts and there is always a need of having them and this gives them value at the end. At least I hope this is what you means. I can give some input on that. Let's say you have one sidechain with one app, this one blockchain gives Lisk a lot of publicity, a lot of recognition which means by itself more users flow to the Lisk platform who might buy Lisk tokens so there is one value appreciation of the Lisk token because of the increasing popularity. Another one would be, maybe a sidechain uses a token which you can only get in the exchange of Lisk which means that people would have to buy Lisk first to go to a sidechain to get this token. They might implement some automatic exchange, I don't know yet how people might realise their projects but that could also drive demand for the Lisk token. Another one is as you know a sidechain is a native blockchain or independent blockchain which means you also need nodes to secure it. A token which might be given out to node operators in order to secure the sidechain could be the Lisk token. That means now a blockchain app developers or operators or owners would have to buy Lisk or the community or users of app in order to reward delegate or nodes, or whatever system sidechains will be using in order to reward this people. I guess there are many many more, some might be more passive like in a sense we get more apps, more users, more investors as well, a platform has more promise for the future and I think that all drives the price and probably more factors. We want to make Lisk great so we're also working on some systems which would make a Lisk ecosystem more useful. Which couples the sidechain more to Lisk itself so that it becomes enclosed ecosystem. Just one example which is not something that I announce or that it might go to a platform later on but it could be for example the secure sidechain against the main chain, for that for example you would have to have Lisk as well. And such features are all in discussion, nothing defined yet, but this features could also drive demand. And as we're a startup we also want to see Lisk blooming and this is why i think this is quite important to think about.

Question: Why would the developer or business chose Lisk over other platforms?"
Lisk(Max): "If someone wants to build a decentralized application he has option to use some blockchain technology maybe to decentralize or maybe some more conventional systems like bittorrent uses like some direct peer to peer system - I don't know much about that. If he decides to build something decentralized on the blockchain than he doesn't have so much options and I think if he would be for example a Javascript developer his number 1 choice would be Lisk but if he knows many different languages and it's definitely dependent on what he wants to build, does he want to build a smart contract, definitely use Ethereum but if he want to have his own blockchain, wants to customize it, wants to have some unique features which are not possible with Ethereum or with any other platform on the market than of course he goes to Lisk. If he is a C sharp developer he might just go to another platform which is probably in development. I think it's comes to developers flavor."
Lisk(Tobias): "It's also a learning curve which is very important. When i look into developing something new and need a certain library for it I will compare different libraries and then see what i can do with it so I would try on all of them mostly. Also important is how quick do I manage to develop what I want to develop and how secure it is, how immutable it is so the learning curve is the really important aspect."

Question: "You guys are developers, you have learned quite a few languages but how difficult or easy is to learn another language?"
Lisk(Ali): "Well I would say when you try to learn a new language the first one is usually the hardest one because you try to get to the mindset of learning that programming language, but after that the second one is easier usually because you start learning this differences, relations and you get to the point when it becomes really easy for you to relate those aspects of languages to each other and place them besides each other. Than you have the vision to compare them and chose which language is the best suite for which project. I would say the more languages you learn the easier it becomes to learn the next one."

Question: Can you recommend stake pools or how to get started in finding delegate stake pools?"
Lisk(Isabella): "There are quite a few delegates who do offer rewards for voting for them. That's essentially how stake pools work within Lisk. So you're trusting that delegate to pay you for your vote. So one example would be a Robin Hood delegate which pays out 99% or something like that of their forged funds to all their voters. There is a couple of other ones. There is a one large group and they all work together, in pool they funds together and as long as you vote for all of them they will pay you once a week a pretty significant amount depending on how much you got them voted with.
As far as staking with your coins in cold storage, in order to stake you have to place votes so you could send all your coins to an account create the vote transactions online, put your secret information onto a paper wallet, play those transactions onto a different machine after you made them locally and keep them in cold storage that way. But the only way to get your coins with a secret, called a brain wallet so your coins are stored on a blockchain and not in a file which is pretty important distinction. So in order to stake you must vote which means it's not technically a true cold wallet, it's got a transaction on the chain and a public key and all that stuff assigned to. The safest way is to generating only transactions offline with JS and taking them to another machine and plugging back because the signatures are only valid for this transactions and your secret is not going to be leaked that way."
Lisk(Max): "So yeah there are some stake pools out there, we don't recommend any one of them, we just say there are some."

Question: "Is the SDK being released with version 1.0.0. or are those 2 separated?"
Lisk(Isabella): "They are definitely going to be separate, Lisk version 1.0 is laying the groundwork to a provide a lot of the refactored API, the changes in the peers communication layers and all sorts of other very important things that we need to have the foundations for the SDK. SDK is gonna draw upon a lot of new core features especially to facilitate decentralized nodes so you don't have to run a main chain on the same box where you're running your sidechain. You will be able to hook them up with web sockets it will be much nicer that way."

Question: "How badass are Lisk developers?"
Lisk(Tobias): "Very."

Question: "Is Lisk inferior to Ethereum in any way? Can Lisk become larger than Ethereum?"
Lisk(Max): "Ethereum is a smart contract platform, Lisk is a blockchain application platform which are built on their own blockchains so in essence they are completely different platforms, different use cases. I don't if Lisk will become larger than Ethereum, it doesn't even matter, I think they are both great projects which can live one next to the other. I think in the future they can even complement to each other, so no need to become bigger or better or whatever it's just a matter of becoming excellent and I think we're on the right way to that."

Question: "When will the developers be able to develop on Lisk? Timeframe?"
Lisk(Isabella): "What do you mean develop on Lisk? You can definitely right now check out core and pickup an issue and say I would like to work on this issue, and then you can start working. But I'm sure they are asking when will the SDK be ready and we can't provide a hard date for that."

LIsk(Max): "Maybe to add to that. With later update we're going to add some arbitrary messages field so you could build a second layer solution as well. I think that's not what you're asking for but that would be possible."

Lisk(Isabella): "One more thing, there is nothing stopping somebody from building a mainchain application right now. If you want to make main chain application, you can do it you know just import Lisk JS to your project and you can send and receive transactions using the mainchain so try it out, you can do it!"

Question: "How many employees working on Lisk besides developers?"
Lisk(Max): "Three, me, Joel and Thomas."

Question: "Why can you do only 33 votes at once? Is it possible to increase it to 101 votes per transaction?"
Lisk(Isabella): "Original implementation of 33 votes at once came from Crypti. The original reasoning for it was to prevent the block from growing to large. I've calculated it out if you have a 25 transaction block which each transaction containing 33 votes its only about 58 kb. So we can definitely increase the votes per transaction but there is a balancing act where we don't want to go too big on the block where somebody could maliciously send 25 transactions with a hundred votes up and down, up and down and clock up the blocks and make them huge and blow up the database. I think maybe in the future we can think about it once we have web sockets done and have a better way of streaming block than using http requests to do so, that would be a good time to take a look at it. So not immediately but definitely in the future. We would definitely want to have a scalable fee system to go with it so maybe if you vote one person it cost significantly less than if voting 101 people."

Question: "Are any big name companies working with Lisk?"
Lisk(Max): "Yeah together with foundation we're working with big companies like the design agency "Taikonauten" which is doing a great job on rebranding, than the research agency I won't say the name just yet before announcing it officially. We have a Excellent PR which is doing an amazing job on our relations based in NY city. We have our legal firm which keeps our assets safe. We also have some parties which are looking into Lisk which I cannot talk about at the moment. Of course of this price rise in the last month many eyes are on Lisk and we will receive many emails everyday from parties, people, entities and so on."

Question: "Any news on how you will use ByteBalls?"
Lisk(Max): "We will wait for distribution to be completed and then we will announce something. Distribution will probably we over in a year."

Question: "Are you confident that you can make the SDK work and run securely?"
Lisk(Isabella): "Yes. We'll definitely do our absolute best to the initial implementation to do so and we'll have security audits to run against it for sure. Independent security audits, probably 2 or 3 of them to be sure nothing is missed because we definitely dont want to release something that's insecure and vulnerable. I can think of a couple of incidents in crypto where that happened because people were over eager for something to happen.

Question: "Have you hired any cryptographers into the team?"
Lisk(Max): "I would say we already have some good ones who understand cryptography."
Lisk(Tobias): "I can add to that, it's not a good idea to invent your own cryptography for anything because most of the cryptography that we need are already invented and we're going to use already proven cryptography. All we need is already out there."
Lisk(Max): "As you already know our team is a badass so we'll have a good use of already proven cryptography."

Question: "Now Elite group is more than 51 percent. Are you worried about 51 percent attack to the Lisk blockchain?"
Lisk(Isabella): "Previously we had GDT having like 75 members or something like that. They didn't do anything and i don't think Elite won't either. They all have significant amounts of Lisk so I don't think they would do anything to jeopardise it and i don't think they could really pull one off in the way that people would think of it because the rest of the network would reject that. Also the exchanges they wouldn't accept the block that doesn't match their own memory tables for consensus and things like that. So even if they try something the chain would split. They would be forging on their own chain and probably nobody would use it. We would end up with another chain, maybe a little shorter but people would be able to recognize that their chain have been affected with something they cannot synchronize."
Lisk(Max): "I think in DPOS, economic majority is so much more important than the consensus within the delegates so that's why they couldn't pull of 51% attack. As far as i believe."
Lisk(Isabella): "It would require a severe amount of coordination. They would have to have somebody very well in the code to make modifications to the client and deploy it to all the nodes in the same time."
Lisk(Max): "Yeah but even if they do it technically, it would just resolve into 2 chains one Lisk Elite and one Lisk and i think people would just continue to use Lisk, the unchanged version."
Lisk(Isabella): "Yeah because nobody is going to keep up Lisk elite chain up to date unless the new dev team pops out, but I don't see that happening."

Question: "BAPPS or DAPPS, when?"
Lisk(Isabella): "When it's ready, when we're done with SDK."
Lisk(Max): "And it is blockchain apps or just apps."

Question: "Will it be possible to build private, untraceable coin on Lisk?"
Lisk(Tobias): "It depends on how SDK will look like, what will allow. It's hard to estimate right now if he could have total untraceability."
Lisk(Isabella): "There is always going to be flows as long as there are things to put in there and get something out there is always a way to track it eventually with enough of mathematical computations and things like that. So, potentially yes, in the shortterm no."

Question: "Do you have any agreement with the Elite Group?"
Lisk Team: "No"

Question: "Why did you decide to go with 101 delegate. Is 101 an arbitrary number or is it more significant from a technical standpoint?"
Lisk(Isabella): "101 delegate was inherited from Crypti, a lot of consensus things also were. 101 is the prime number so that makes it impossible to have a tie so you would never have a 50:50 situation. You can obviously scale it to the next prime number and to the next one after that but there is no reason to do so, system works as intendant right now."

Question: "Why do some of ETH community bash Lisk?
Lisk(Joel): We're in the crypto community guys, everyone bashes everyone."
Lisk(Isabella): "Yeah, everyone has a horse that they like more. Somebody want to bet on Ethereum, some people want to bet on Lisk, some people want to bet on Bitcoin."
Lisk(Joel): "Whatever community you enter there will always be compassion towards other crypto projects as well. It's like it is, it's what blockchain communities are alike."
Lisk(Isabella): "It's very comparable with Mac vs Windows, you know. There are band boys out there who like their toy and hate yours."
Lisk(Max): "Everyone has this financial initiative to bash other coins so that everyone flocks to their own coin. It's a hot game out there."

Question: "Will the funds run out until the Lisk is successful? What would need to happen to the Lisk to be a success in your eyes?"
Lisk(Max): "You saw the financial report? We have like 20 million Euros, it's crazy. The funds will definitely not run off before we deliver a good and working product. As a matter of being successful it can be about number of users, a number of apps, working product, 100% test coverage, i don't know but i think we all believe in it, I believe in it and I think it's going to be great and the funds will last for long long time.
In my eyes for Lisk to be success we need to attract 3 user groups. 1st are investors which are not like general users from the street but real venture capitalists which have not taken an eye on crypto currencies yet and I think there are many many out there. If we could get them to get into the space and start investing into the crypto that would mean the place is gonna explode. 2nd group are developers, we need a lot of javascript developers which will build great apps, great sidechain apps which dont pleasure only the nerd scene but also normal average person from the streets, moms for example. 3rd group would be moms, or general users, mainstream user who are going to use this apps. So in my eyes Lisk to be successful is to be made so accessible, so simple to use that average mainstream users can use it. For me that would be like a dream come-trough."

Question: "Will the core team of Lisk build some cool games like Travian? If not that kind, can you tell us some future apps that are planned for the core team?"
Lisk(Max): "I know that we have some fans of gaming here so maybe we will support such project in the future which is doing a browser game with real life financial eco system inside the game backed with crypto currency. But for now, currently it's all about Lisk, core, Nano, SDK. We're building a platform, we're building a foundation, on which we might build an app later but currently the focus is only about the platform."
Lisk(Tobias): "There are some cool ideas for the sidechains out there. I think also we from the team are looking forward to develop some applications there."
Lisk(Max): "Long time ago I've published a blog post called I think something with core apps and in it I talk about blockchain applications which are enhancing the platform functionality. One of them could be an identity app on which users can register a user name and also associate a real name, photo, maybe some credit card info, address or whatever, all encrypted of course and than we can allow this info to be sent into the real life names which would add a lot of usability to the client I think. So this is planned, but as i said the focus is not on it currently."

Question: "The next question is where is Oliver is he alive?
Lisk(Joel): Yeah he's alive, working actually right here in the back but he's working."

Question: "What has PR agency done in past 2 months?"
Lisk(Max): "We had several recurring meetings with Joel, Oliver and me, lately Thomas as well in which we discussed general public matters. Then we did several demo interviews in which we train ourselves in order to get better with media. In that relation we also did some general training in which they showed us presentation in which we had some different scenarios play trough. They are regularly pitching Lisk to the media. All those press releases that you see from the minor releases about our products they are working on that, pushing our press releases. They are giving us critical advices in terms if there is some PR problem on the horizon so we get advice from them how to solve the problem or how to react and so on. They are also working on news articles, interviews, podcasts, video interviews. So there is a lot going on out there, they are helping on all fronts for us to get more visibility."
Lisk(Joel): "They are also finding us great opportunities in big podcasts for example. They are doing quite a bit."
Lisk(Max): "They are also checking the conferences where we could go, speaking to the organizers to get speaking spots and so on."

Question: "What are some details on the rebranding that will add value to Lisk? I can say the rebrand is going to be great, but Max will tell you more."
Lisk(Max): "There was always this fight about the logo, 50% this crystal, 50% hated it and I think the value it is going to bring in first of all in terms of strategy is that we're going to have a clear picture of direction we want to go. That we get a very clear picture of how communicate that. And that we get a clear picture for all our users and clients to understand our vision. They gonna bring the value in regard that people will know what is Lisk and it's purpose, I think our current website is horrible in that regard. Another value will be user experience, they gonna add a lot to it because it's important. That's why we also hosted a huge huge agency for the beginning. The whole corporate identity making us more professional, making us more serious. They will also going to define with us how we're going to present ourselves, will it be as techies, fintech, business and so on. I think it's going to be awesome, it's going to be a huge thing in regards of the eco system. Currently it's about the backend coding and the frontend code of the client and after rebranding it will be all about the Lisk, this great project which is working on the blockchain applications."

Question: "ETH has the possibility to add Javascript on their chain. Why would someone use Lisk instead of Ethereum to host his app and what would be the Lisk advantage?"
Lisk(Isabella): "I don't really know a lot about it (JS on ETH) but it sounds like they extracted a lot of RPC calls and are being used with Javascript so it's still running ETH, still doing smart contracts. It's not like SDK what out plans is so it's entirely different direction."
Lisk(Max): "I saw a blog post once but they just mentioned like web3 and some other plans but it was no where near to full SDK javascript which allows you to build apps so I'm not sure what he's referring to. Next time please try to have more sophisticated question, maybe with a link so we can know exactly what you have meant."

Question: "All altcoins, also Lisk depend too much on centralized exchanges, what is your vision about decentralized Lisk, also with decentralized exchange?
Lisk(Joel): If we get some decentralized exchange which is working good people will start using it, but it needs to get some traction because it's needs volume. Without volume who is gonna use it, right?!"
Lisk(Max): "It's all about decentralising all of the things, right and yeah that's also our vision."

Question: "Isabella are you staying long term in Berlin, do you miss the states?"
Lisk(Isabella): "No I don't, I don't like the USA government so I like it here (joking)."

Question: "Are you planning to collaborate with other Lisk related projects like Shift, they are testing their main product?"
Lisk(Max): "What's their main product?"
Lisk(Isabella): "Shift is implementing IPFS as kind of a service using Lisk to sit on top of it and provide funding that that allows you to store items into IPFS. I originally looked into implementing IPFS into Lisk. We abandon that in favour of doing other more important things. It's definitely something I would be interested in collaboration before, especially because they done a lot of hard work and it would be pretty good for sidechains as well, because they need to store files."
Lisk(Max): "When it's a matter of collaboration it's all about how much benefit do we get. Also i think we should give no project some advantage. We're neutral, decentralized platform and project which means we would never implement on purpose some code or some project because they needed. I'm for collaboration if it makes sense for us, we have a very strong vision for Lisk, not getting distracted by all those great opportunities in the space, we think that we should build a great product first.

This concludes the entire Lisk Meeting. I certainly believe that this will help members, users, individuals have a great understanding of Lisk. I also feel as if it will surely make you confident in where Lisk will be in the coming years. This was a very fun meeting and I hope that you are all able to attend the next Live stream!

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I would like to thank to communitypool for a donation for this transcript and also to Isabella who paid for it! I wont ask for any more donations but I will for votes on my 35% share pool - philhellmuth thanks!