In light with the preparation for the open Mainnet, the Pi moderators recently conducted an AMA [Ask Me Anything] and here are some of the notable questions chosen and answered directly by the founders themselves Dr. Nicolas Kokkalis and Dr. Chengdiao Fan.
Question: Will there be a place in the app to see how much of the total supply is still available for mining?
Nicolas:
Yes, of course. There will be on Pi block explorer initially and maybe in the app later. Actually, there is already a place in Pi block explorer called the "Circulating Supply" and from that you can deduct everything else based on the updated whitepaper.Question: Will the locked up Pi be included in the circulating supply or not?
Nicolas:
Yes. Based on our research so far, it seems that in other blockchains, any locked-up balance is included in the circulating supply.Question: Will the lockups have a countdown timer that Pioneers can refer to in order to see how much time the lock-up will be in effect for?
Nicolas:
Yes. Short answer is yes. there will be a list of prior lockups and when they expire and in that list you will be able to also see how they affect the calculation of the total lockup booster.Question: Supposed I am KYC'ed and created a wallet 3 days back but I forgot the private key and can't create a new wallet due to the 1-week limit. What if my pi balance is transferred to that recently created wallet where I don't remember the private key?
Nicolas:
Because we'll have this confirmation so the person will just simply wait rather than if they really lost the key they have to wait for a week before they push the button to say, I want to transfer to Mainnet now. I want to start being start transferring to Mainnet now. If they lose the key to their wallet after they pressed the button, well that's similar to losing it anytime in Mainnet. Yeah, there will be a process for changing wallet for future for transfers...Fan:
...and I want to make it clear I mean that's the nature of blockchain. Every good things comes with its own negatives. The fact that you have full control non-custodial is that there is no other way, you know, for like in the case of lots of keys and what we can do of course is trying to design systems that uh try to prevent that. but the fact that it's a blockchain, it just it comes with those uh its benefits and uh its disadvantages. A lot of people lost their bitcoin because they lost their private keys. What can they do, they can't do anything .Question: Will there be a notification that will let us know in advance about the upcoming balance transfer, so that Pioneers can alter lock-up settings before the transfer is initiated and finalized in the Mainnet wallet?
Nicolas:
Yeah, we're thinking that there will be a button to initiate the migration as we mentioned earlier so after this button is pressed, then there will be continuous transfers that will be happening automatically based on the current lock-up settings. So the lockup setting can be changed as many times as you want before you push that button. And once you push that button, the first transfer will be happening whenever they're happening but then if you're changing the lockup settings the new transfers will be getting whatever the current lockup setting is. So there will be no surprise in that respect.
In terms of notifications you receive, probably there will be notifications when you receive, probably there will be notifications. There's currently notifications to people on the Pi browser when you receive Pi, so in the same way you will receive Pi you will receive a notification that says X amount of Pi arrived in your wallet, go check it out and uh there will be a notification at the moment of transfer.
Question: Is the system geared up to only have one wallet per Pioneer, or will we be able to define and use multiple wallets inside the app?
Nicolas:
The initial preference we have is to just have one for simplicity but in the future we can have a multiple if we want. In fact, the design, I don't know if you remember historically we had a different layout for passphrases and keys, one of the the reason we changed to this new system that uses passphrases is because with the same passphrase, you can have multiple wallets and you don't need to have multiple private keys.
You can have multiple Pi wallets, you can even have Bitcoin wallets if you want so essentially you can have whatever address you want with the same passphrase and that's why we find this new system that we created a lot more powerful.
Technically it is possible, product-wise, let's get everyone to understand the system with just one wallet for now and I'm sure in the years to come, there will be reasons for extending it and expanding it and all sorts of connectivities and you know for security and for privacy, for whatever reasons people will be able to potentially create more but I don't want to promise that right now it will all be part of a product design.
Question: Will there be a place in the app to see how many KYC users we have in the community?
Nicolas:
The wallets actually are publicly viewable on the blockchain anyways so at least the strict subset of people who KYC'ed and already migrated to Mainnet will be publicly accessible on the blockchain so you can just count how many wallets they're there.
But we may come-up with an even nicer UI, maybe somewhere in the app or on the main page that just displays the count.
Maybe we'll have a page that displays the account of KYC'ed Pioneers, the count of nodes, the count of people in different things, the amount of Pi locked, like different stuff. But worst-case scenario, just look at the blockchain and it's there.
Question: When and how will the KYC validator receive Pi rewards?
Nicolas:
The short answer is when we know how much these rewards need to be but let me explain and clarify. So, at the moment, we are asking Pioneers to pay 1𝝅 as the cost to their KYC process.
Now, Pi needs to cover several validation steps that were taken by multiple people; so it's not enough that one validator says "yes, this is correct", it has to be at least several.
There is an algorithm that decides based on how much they agree with each other and who says who agrees and the previous history of its validator, it depends, it will have either few or more consensus votes essentially necessary. So the steps may include things [like verify] that these IDs are valid IDs of that specific country or verify that this picture matches the picture on the ID.
If our AI algorithm was not able to extract automatically the data from the ID, then we need to verify that this data actually matches the ... a human validator will have to basically do that extraction.
We also may have to involve those validators with the potential name appeals that are happening that Pioneers have applied for so that we can have a human, like basically review every appeal.
Now we need to let this process run and find what is the average amount of work that happens for every one person who KYC's so we have to let at least a few several thousand people finish KYC in first to get an accurate estimate of that number so that then we can assign a value to how much Pi each one of these steps will be attributing to the validator.
So, for the time being, all the Pi that is accumulated goes into a pool and once we have the accurate estimate of the amount of Pi that needs to go and into each piece of work, we will start distributing it out.
Fan:
And the format, I mean first of all to split the pieces of validation is that the design is probably previously communicated is to have this design protecting the privacy of peoplebecause it's splitting the work not just one validator validate the whole sets of data of one Pioneer who wants to go with KYC.
Splitting into pieces limits the exposure to a specific validator, the subset of one Pioneer's information; for example, the person who is validating image inside the document versus the selfie will only see the image and will not see even the framework or the documents looks;
But for people who are seeing the document looks we're trying to cover all the private information and also the image
So that the different validators are exposed to only subset of one Pioneer's information to some extent protect the privacy of the Pioneer.
In addition to why do we have a pool and then distribute, why can't we design like "My Pi just goes to the people validate mine" the reason is because all Pioneers going through KYC that require work from the validators not necessarily being successfully passed the KYC which means that if they don't pass the KYC, they will never have the Pi in the first place to pay for the validation work done by the crowd workers.
However, the work done by the validators even on the people who failed the KYC that is still worked down and still worth compensating. So in that case, that's why the pool will be contributed by anyone who successfully passed KYC being able to have the Pi they actually have and them being able to pay for the service; and this pool is distributing to work by all validators whether or not the KYC case goes through or not because this work is the same whether the result of the specific Pioneers KYC'ed shouldn't affect whether the validators' work should be compensated or not. So that's why this is the design of the pool, the fundamental reason.
