Convergent - Achill Rudolph, Logan Saether (Hacked Personal Attention Token) - GoerliCon 0|16

okay thanks everyone there's just a really short flash talk about a project that I worked on at the East Berlin hackathon this was six months ago almost five months ago and we've been working on this project ever since and it has come along quite a bit but still it hasn't really breaking through and this is kind of a moment where I want to take a step back and say maybe it's just a stupid idea maybe I shouldn't do it so this is a talk about why personal tokens is a bad idea and I hope maybe together we can actually rescue it so the way I got this idea was that there are more and more people out there who are actually launching their own tokens and the first guy to maybe to do this like pretty successfully was a Polish youtuber and he launched his own token with a classical ICO during the hype and he raised two million dollars without telling anyone what he was going to actually do in exchange for that token he just launched it told people that they can buy it and he had enough followers to actually raise in a substantial amount of money so there's another artist that did something similar but at least she told people what you can do with the token that she launched she said if someone gives me that token which I called Bitcoin you can get a piece of my art in the future in exchange for that so she launched that token a lot of people bought it and in the end she basically pre-sold a lot of her not yet created art and it seemed like a really successful way to fund artists but there's also freelancers and experts especially in the crypto scene who are doing this more and more so just recently there's a guy called matt vernon from the australia he calls himself dead boy on social media and he said one token of deaf boy tokens is worth one hour of my time so you can always redeem that token by sending it to me and then I will do one hour of consulting work on your project so all in all it seemed like a few people who are doing this but still we're not sure if this is a good idea and if everyone should be doing this but it there is a pattern here there are a lot of creators and artists who say I have a service that I offer to the markets and I'm going to launch a token and link that token with the service and then people can invest in my future creations so the project that I was working on was basically trying to make this possible and easy for everyone because those people that are now launching their own tokens they have to have a lot of knowledge they are already experts and need to know how to write a solidity contract otherwise or maybe they're using extender to the contracts but still it's pretty hard for a designer or an artist who has not been in touch with the technology side of blockchain to launch their own token so we got a lot of support but also a lot of backslash for this idea and I want to just go through three of the big critiques that we got and most people start off saying hey this is really stupid idea why not just have someone pay me and regular currency I I don't want to have like millions of currencies in the world to pay for each and every service that's why we have money but the cool thing with the token and that's the reply here is that with the token the service that you're offering it doesn't have to be a real service right now it can be an imagined a future service it can be a service that doesn't exist yet so if you just use normal money you can always pay for all kinds of services you can buy an art piece from an artist but that art piece kind of has to exist already and with the token the artist can say I make this token represent a future not yet created painting of mine and the artists can sell that and if people believe that at some point the artist will actually create that painting that is backing the token then the artist can raise money based on their future expected creations this is a superpower kind of that individuals usually don't have usually people individuals sell services that they just created that they actually have in their hands and you sell your time if you are in unemployment you sell your time to your employer right now companies on the other hand can actually sell future services they have this ability to issue stock and thereby say I'm going to do something in the future guys and give me money now and I will do that and then you get a part in it now this is something with the token an artist can do or anyone actually could do the other really big outcry that comes when we talk about this idea is this is slavery this is like selling your self to capitalist investors and they're gonna exploit you and so there are people who are really giving us strong reactions crypto bro crowd is busy reinventing indentured servitude welcome to the future of human race it's amazing how we can always make our actual universe worse than the worst dystopia we can think of so little heck why are you your hating so strong on it and I think a lot about it is it slavery when you pre sell your future services again when you sell your time to your employer you also don't sell just one hour you sell like one year of your life or you contract you to sign a contract for three months is that slavery when you pre commit to providing a certain service for a certain payment I don't think so but what I get is that there is a situation where someone could buy up all the tokens of a person and let's say I'm selling my time and I say one token is worth one hour of my time and it's super cheap in the beginning so a lot of people buy my token and suddenly someone owns all of my time that's a problem like but in on the other hand I have willingly chosen to offer my time and I've set the price of the token so if you want to avoid the fact that someone buys up all your time and then tells you what to do with it well you can just make that token really expensive or you can make it become more expensive as more people buy the token so that's something that we are actually building into our solution we are using a bonding curve instead of a classical ERC 20 token so whenever someone buys your personal token that token price goes up and in the end it will be very expensive to buy all of your time so another last a possible attack vector that always gets pointed out is there's no way to actually hold you accountable to your promise you just say I'm offering a token and that's worth one hour of my time but what if you just say no someone actually buys your token they give it to you and you say no I'm not working anymore sorry that token is worthless yeah that can happen and I think one thread on reddit described pretty well what would happen like someone would just not get their service and then they would resell the token they would sell the token because it's not worth anything and people would agree that it's not worth much so it would just kind of collapse but then the big very justified critique is but the person who has launched the token has already raised money with it they have already collected the ico funds if they've done the ico with it and then it's too late right because you already got scammed that's very true so that's also why we use bonding curse in a bonding curve system you don't get the money for a sole token but rather the money stays in a smart contract and it stays in a reserve and in this way you only get a tiny little fee whenever someone buys a token you don't get the full price for the token but that's something that's something I don't want to put into this short 10-minute presentation what I do want to say is that we have actually taken all these critiques and responded to them and are building a life beta version that's coming out in two weeks from now so I'd love to hear from you guys if you're interested to launch your own token on that beta version and if yes please get in touch too real collect some emails on the end of this thank you people have tried doing similar kinds of things with like four university students where where companies can like invest in basically debt instruments that that kind of take like a portion of someone's future income for a pay it and stuff these things always end up getting you know regulated as securities or you know have you talked to like a securities lawyer is a personal token of security in the case of student depth usually it is a regulated with contract so there it is really important for the student to actually pay the investor once he starts earning money in our case there are no contracts there is no legal system binding people to actually provide the service here and so I think that makes a big difference because now this is just a way to say I trust that you will actually give me a painting later on there's no contract signed and there's no notary that was involved so it's it's very much in the gray zone but I think it's harder to classify it as a security than in the case of student depth yeah I would think that by saying that 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