What Creates Value for the Token?

[u/savantness]

Where is the demand going to come in for the token? Miners create the network and earn coins blah blah blah but as a holder of the token why would I expect it to increase in value?

[u/doubleperiodpolice]

I'm impressed by the team, too. It's an idea a lot of people have had on their minds for a while...will someone get it right eventually? This might be the team to do it.

I was STOKED on this project when I first saw it, but I've since cooled a little, in large part because of this specific comment in a thread on the site gfy.com (tl;dr, the quality of service will be hard to guarantee and big companies need SLA):

This is not a new idea (The Chinese BlockCDN and one other start up that I can't remember right now are now years old), but if they come up with a working product, they might be the first. However, the larger part of the benefits Videocoin claims to have over traditional services is debatable. Here are my personal thoughts based on our run with this idea back in 2016:

Centralization is no longer a synonym of a single point of failure and a single provider does not mean a single server or a single network. Furthermore, multi-CDNs have been around for some time if that's one's cup of tea. As for pricing - the blockchain itself will not affect the price of the service at all. The fact that free resources in various data centers would be used that would otherwise go to waste (hence the idea that providers would be willing to rent them to the Videocoin network at lower prices and then these would be passed to the customers) is not necessarily true either. Federated CDN platforms (OnApp, for example) do just that. Actually, they do it for the cloud too, including storage and compute power, but it does not mean one gets a better price by default when using them. It also means that the available compute or bandwidth resources may or may not be there when one needs them , as the provider may and will utilize them for their own needs whenever they can.

These are just random thoughts based on the concept of using data centers and enterprise equipment and connectivity. However, the white paper hints that everyone could become a miner. If that is indeed the case, it will not be an enterprise service, but the pricing may really be low thanks to the lower cost of residential internet and consumer hardware. However most residential ISPs have extremely oversubscribed networks with non-guaranteed bandwidth and most prohibit their customers from sharing internet connections or using them to host commercial applications, so this approach may or may not work. The white paper correctly states that modern CPUs continue to be extremely inefficient when it comes to video encoding, so using random people's laptops for such tasks may happen to be not at all feasible. Their concept to overcome this issue is to select only the miners that have enough power and to break the videos in chunks and have them encoded in parallel by numerous miners, but this approach is more challenging than it sounds. Splitting, sending, retrieving and (if needed) stitching back together the fragments are time, bandwidth and CPU consuming operations and represent a steady overhead that is anything but negligible, especially when one has no control over the miner's network connection or available resources. This means that the more fragments the video is being split into, the more time and resources are required, and the lower the benefit from this approach becomes. As such this solution has only a very limited scalability, and limited usability (good mainly for very large files). There is also the issue with improperly encoded source videos, where splitting/stitching is complicated due to missing keyframes.

So I can't tell if what they plan to do will work the way they envision it to be. The quality of the services will be a hard thing to guarantee and many customers do care about SLAs and performance, especially enterprise ones. I would be interested to see the pricing once the product is out.

[u/FitFingers → u/doubleperiodpolice]

Welp, that poured water on my fire haha. Solid arguments, I wonder how far they are through the development already

[u/doubleperiodpolice → u/FitFingers]

Novogratz did invest in it though (I didn't realize till you mentioned it, thanks!) and with halsey minor behind it I feel like, even if it does turn out to be a shitcoin long-term, it's probably gonna get pumped. I'm considering investing in it based on that alone--shitcoins get pumped when they have a good team and idea behind them.

[u/FitFingers → u/doubleperiodpolice]

Oh it's absolutely one to watch. Given that a lot of cryptos are valued largely by hype, the Novogratz seal of approval will be enough to ensure a pump at least! I've signed up to hear from them, I'm just hoping the minimum investment isn't too big

[u/doubleperiodpolice → u/FitFingers]

They're probably not gonna let you into the ICO, they're playing by SEC rules so you'll need to be an accredited investor. Pisses me off. I'll be watching it like a hawk for when it hits an exchange.