Roundtable22: Is Pi a Ponzi? Huobi VS Pi

Participants

Host

NEST Protocol

Whale Coin Talk

Cohost

Huobi Research

Guest

Noah, Whale Coin Talk representative

Johnny, Huobi researcher

Kozii, from Pi community

Vindicated Chidi, from Pi community

Benjami, from Pi community

Conference recording

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1kvJpmVzlYMxE

Content

Woody: According to the Ponzi scheme, the early participants can gain more pi tokens compared to the newcomers. So, if it uses pi as currency, do you think it would become a Ponzi scheme?

Vindicated Chidi: The question of whether pi is a Ponzi actually did not go down well with the community in the sense that we all know that a Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that pays existing investors with funds collected from new investors. Actually, a Ponzi requires a constant flow of new money to survive, so when it becomes hard to recruit new investors or when large number of existing investors cash out, this game tend to collapse. So, we can just say that a Ponzi scheme can just be called as a fraudulent investment program. Pi is not fraudulent; pi is not a Ponzi scheme; pi is not a scam.

Then I want to say, Pi is a cryptocurrency. Because of the nature and the uniqueness of pi network, 95% of the community members are new into the cryptocurrency space. That’s why we keep educating. The real meaning of cryptocurrency is a form of digital money. If cryptocurrencies become the mainstream, you may be able to use them to pay for stuffs just like traditional currencies. They are same to money. There are some issues with traditional currencies, And the creator of bitcoin stated in no way in the white paper that a cryptocurrency must be on an exchange. What do cryptocurrencies do become a pomp and dump that every project dreams of going to the exchange to gain value, what we call gambling. Pi came in to teach people the real objective of a cryptocurrency.

Kozii: It is very hard to deny the fact that for nearly four years ever since pi network has been launched, there was no way for investors to invest a single cent into this project, therefore it automatically invalidates the who idea of Ponzi scheme. If there are no investors putting money, how can it be a Ponzi? And pi is not like bitcoin mining or gold mining. The individuals or nodes contribute to the pi consensus algorithm in which then in return receive rewards.

Woody: Lots of people do not trust pi network because they think you are not transparent.

Benjami: One of the biggest disabled that the entire of the crypto community have done to the pi project was to rate it even before maturity. How can you come to a perfect understanding if you don’t give it the time that the development deserves or requires. Pi network in a technical sense is doing better compared to bitcoin in the global adoption. Pi network is dedicated into building what we call utilities and also building what we call a cryptographic version of mass adoption through a streamline KYC process. So, KYC and utilities are something that need to be protected towards the firewall is erected. This is a smart contract thing; it is not a centralized control thing; it is a collection of computers who have full copies of the pi blockchain that have agreed to protect the community, so that the utilities can be fully built.

Whale Coin Talk: You have mentioned the utilities a few times, can you name some of the utilities?

Benjami: One of the utilities that has huge potential being spirited by the pi network is the identity management service. We are in a phase where we have no idea the government that we employ a cryptographic option to identity management assistance. Now the capitalization of identity management I over 10 billion and has the potential to scale to over 30 billion in about 2 or 3 years. Logistics is something that has been generic. We have received verifiable data from business world that blockchain technology is the best option for cleaner transaction.

Whale Coin Talk: Bitcoin was designed to be a decentralized peer-to-peer monetary system that is not controlled by any entity, so I’m do not understand how pi ecosystem and tokenomics work and I don’t understand any of the utilities.

Benjami: It is not as loud that you want to make it comparable to the other use cases and auto cryptocurrency projects like Huobi for example, an exchange. It needs time. Pi was less than six months and have transacted here to peer level transaction between goods and pi as a means of payment. Pi workforce pool is freelance in service where you can get services been done and the means of payment is pi.

Whale Coin Talk: Why we need pi? Merchants like Amazon, Alibaba can choose to integrate cryptocurrency payments and acceptance and they do not need pi network to do this.

Kozii: Right now, it simply not possible to build things that are truly possible in open mainnet. For example, most of the decentralized services like defi, NFT, metaverse, all kinds of crazy cools stuff are only able to happen because there is a price of the coin. It is very difficult to find developers who can build these. So, we are building internal utilities for pi itself, not for the external motives. It’s more about making this cryptocurrency accessible to a critical mass of the entire population and the allowing them to building anything on it. All the things until there’s price of the coin could be achieved. In any case, we are building this and we have a development toolkit. Greatness takes time.

Hana: I haven’t really understood clearly what are you trying to achieve? It seems like a very illusionary idea about what the decentralized utilities. The idea is where you are heading to?

Vindicated Chidi: Cryptocurrency is money, it is anything that can be generally accepted for payments of goods and services. We are not new into cryptocurrency. This community have over 36 million pioneers who believe pi is money. We do not need your validation, the community is focused, resilient and resolute. Bitcoin was called a scam as well. Pi is an improvement of Bitcoin.

Hana: To be a cryptocurrency, you should have a store of value, and you should have some functions, right? How do you satisfy this? How can I exchange pi for? What can I get?

Vindicated Chidi: Great things need time; we are not in a rush because mostly network is a medium of exchange and it’s a mean of payment. Someone else have been using pi for payment. There are a lot of goods and services that have been rendered. I personally have been collecting pi for my services rendered. This is based on belief and trust. The pi network community is resilient.

Benjami: Every cryptocurrency project fist created the product then sort for the users. Pi on the other side, got users first and the next phase is for building. I also want to talk about the compliance. You see one thing that has done is great disabled is the fact that we assume the emergence of cryptocurrency as a talk of war between us and the generic financial stakeholders, the generic banking, social and stuffs like that. One of the bridges you must cross is regulation. But they have a room for presence. This is where utilities come to be.

Woody: How about Huobi’s opinions?

Johnny: It’s always a good thing to see crypto space having strong community building together. We list pi and I think it’s just a request because too many people wanted to trade pi and therefore, I think it exchanged just made a response to the demand. I want to ask the mining process on the mobile app. Are they verified transaction or are they just getting rewards from the pi network? Are there any real transactions on the blockchain?

Kozii: The mining is a way to distribute rewards, it is counting the work people are doing. There is a mainnet, but there are only 2 million people that was able to migrate some of their funds. The vast majority of the network was still not able to migrate all their balances across to the mainnet, so they are not able to transact. But now pi is not available for purchase, nobody can buy it. What Huobi has done is listed pi. Also, I want to make you aware that there will be a competition from exchanges because there are millions of people who never even had an exchange account. So, you will be competing with other exchanges for these brand-new customers.

Vindicated Chidi: We are not zero economic model. If you pay close attention to the pi economic model, you will see that it is designed with four requirements: simple, fair distribution, a sense of scarcity and mining to reward. Huobi listed pi because they see the potential, the profitability, and they need liquidity. However, pi not tradable on exchanges and I hope the community have been educated. We know that our pi will not be a pump and dump coin. For now, we are focused on the utility building and mass KYC. We want to build utilities for the ecosystem, so we are not in a hurry.

Whale Coin Talk: I appreciate it but the questions that people asked could have been a bit more condensed and want you to focus on responding to the actual questions rather than going on long-winded explanation.

Shield: Right now, pi doesn’t have any bridge to other blockchain like Solana and Binance.

Captain Levi: Do you guys see yourselves as a pi ambassador?

Kozii: Yes, and I openly speak about this but I do not consider myself a stand normal average human being who is a pioneer. I simply do a little bit more. Normally your job is to convince somebody to buy the cryptocurrency.

Captain Levi: Bitcoin allowed itself to get involved in cent5ralized exchanges, but how is pi?

Kozii: Instead of bringing in people from external value for quick gains as Bitcoin, we are building ecosystem. Pi is so simple; it is not too technical and will be mainstream. The ultimate long-term vision of pi is creating the accessible widespread cryptocurrency.

Vindicated Chidi: As long as you invite others to pi community, you are an ambassador, which is the beautiful thing of pi community.