At 4:30 PM, May 18, 2018 (GMT+8), DATA launched the second AMA on one of the most popular Chinese crypto forum, 8btc. Within two hours, we had received dozens of questions concerning the technical developments, exchanges, applications, and other aspects of the project. Our co-founder, Victor Ye, had keenly answered all of them. Here, we have selected the most relevant Q&As to share with our DATA community.
Technical and Development:
Q: What exactly does DATA do? What is the difference between it and the other user-data-related projects in the market?
A: DATA is a blockchain based digital data authentication protocol powered by AI & P2P mobile storage infrastructure, enabling a decentralized and trusted ecosystem. There are a couple important concepts — first, we will have a mainnet; second, our application is aimed to be used the digital ecosystem. To make the best use of blockchain technology in this scenario, we have introduced the P2P storage system and AI technology.
There are some similar projects in the market, including the attention-based projects (BAT, Steemit, etc.), the mainnet projects that aim to improve efficiency (EOS, Zilliqa, etc.), and the storage system projects (IPFS). But we are the only integrated solution for a digital ecosystem. At the same time, because of our collaboration with established companies (Yomob, BlueFocus, Kochava, etc.), our solution is highly applicable (in fact, we have already started testing).
Q: How does DATA protect user data security?
A: This is a good question. There are three members with master/doctoral degrees in cryptography on our tech team. Meanwhile, we have cryptography professors from Stanford and Tsinghua to provide us with technical guidance.
In simple terms, this issue is solved in two steps — we use the decentralized hash tables (DHT) and Erasure Coding technologies to ensure the privacy and security of data storage, and the encryption algorithms and control protocols make sure that only the users can govern their own data.
Q: I read an explanation in an article about DATA: “… to ensure that every participant in the ecosystem has a “good” motivation…” what exactly does “good” mean?
A: “Good” is reflected in the contribution to the ecosystem. We have a couple major contributors, including blockchain nodes, software developers and end users. Each contributor will get the corresponding “mining” rewards, if they contribute. We have detailed explanation on this topic in our white paper.
Q: How’s the progress on GitHub?
A: We have four sub-teams in tech, corresponding to the blockchain, storage, SDK and AI technologies used in DATA project. They are all under intense development. Soon, when we are ready, we will upload the more developed code all at once.
Q: If DTA is going to have its own mainnet, non-ERC20 tokens, and reach 10000TPS (as stated in the white paper) I think there are quite a few challenges in breaking the technical bottleneck of the current public chain. In this regard, how do you think you are going to achieve your goals?
A: Actually, in our technical testing, we have already exceeded this TPS number. However, pursuing high TPS is not our goal, because it is easy to increase TPS (like EOS), if you sacrifice decentralization. We are aiming for an effective TPS when used in the digital ecosystem.
Q: Can this coin be mined?
A: After we launch the mainnet, yes. But please note that it is not “PoW mining” but “PoA mining”
Q: What is the use of DTA tokens?
A: DTA tokens are mainly used for attention rewards in the ecosystem, and more and more developers in this ecosystem will also choose DTA as a payment tool. At the same time, in the anti-fraud scenario, the DTA is used as a fee for inquiring user credits.
Q: If the user only sees the advertisements to get points or tokens, there are already many similar applications that offer users cash as ad-viewing rewards. In this case, what are the advantages of blockchain technology? To ensure the authenticity of the user? Prevent cheating and false data? If so, how does it judge the authenticity of the user?
A: Attention reward and anti-fraud are integrated. If fraudulent users want to get more attention rewards, it is easy for them to fall into our anti-fraud model and get caught.
Prices and Exchanges:
Q: The price of DTA has been always fluctuating neat the private sell price. What plans do you have? In addition, I noticed that DTA has not been on any new exchange for 4 months. Does the team have the will and action for getting listed on new exchanges?
A: Actually, the price of our token price in ETH has always been more than 2.5 times the private sell price. The dollar price of the currency is also above the private sell price. This shows that in a bear market, we have helped investors to maintain and even increase their investment value. As for the exchanges, we certainly have the will and action to get listed. We have only just begun. The goal is to the moon.
Q: Will DTA get on OKex?
A: At this stage, some of their policies on OKex is making it hard for us. We are waiting for some policy adjustments, but yes, we will eventually.
Q: What will the price be at the end of the year?
A: I really can’t answer this. However, we are sure that we are one the leading teams in the entire blockchain industry. We hope to achieve the top 5% performance in the entire cryptocurrency/blockchain domain.
Partnerships and Applications:
Q: What are some examples of the online and offline application of DATA?
A: The two most prominent ones are the monetization of user attention and developer traffic and data anti-fraud.
Data anti-fraud has a significant place in advertising and finance industries. For example, many cash loan companies are very interested in working with us because they need us to provide “credit scores” for end users to help them conduct anti-cheating modeling.
Speaking of the “offline” scenario, if other blockchain payment technologies land, one day you may be able to buy coffee directly using DTA, yet this is not our prime focus but that of the other crypto payment projects. There is a project called Litex, similar to OMG. You can look into that.
Miscellaneous:
Q: There are currently two projects with the same name as DATA. It causes lots of troubles for the investors (such as buyers buying the wrong coin). Is there a plan to solve this problem? For example, change the named and so on.
A: Our project is called DATA, but for the token name “DATA” had already been taken. We could only call it “DTA”. We know that it causes some complications. We are troubleshooting this issue, but I cannot say more before the plan is finalized.
Q: At the moment, it seems like everyone in the crypto market is an opportunist. There are very few people who really understand blockchain technology or applications. Is there any book on this topic that you would recommend?
A: I think the white papers of Bitcoin, Ethereum are the best introduction documents of blockchain technology.
