A Veritaseum Smart Contract form.
A YouTube commenter asked a very good question that we will like to take some time to answer. The question was, verbatim:
I've watched your video and gone through the slides. The exchange I "get". I think it has great potential. However, I don't understand the case for Veritas at all and I think many others will feel the same. You state that Veritas can be used to buy consulting and advisory services. OK, but what is the cost in Veritas? Will that change or will it be fixed? What is the advantage of using Veritas over cash to buy this information?
The cost will be our stated rates, and will fluctuate with the VeUSD exchange rate. The advantage of using Ve over cash is that our consulting and advisory services are a very scarce commodity (like most labor), although the research is much less so (as it can scale via platform). Thus, Veritas holders get priority. I want to make it perfectly clear that Veritas ICO is much, much more than mere research and advisory. Consider that the icing on the cake. The ability to redeem your Ve against us gives instant value. In addition, we have a working, beta product already developed (not quite production ready for the masses, but it has been running in the public doman for serveral years now). In addition, we also own our IP. Where some coin offerings only offer the promise of future development (as do we, to be sure), we also have something to offer in the here and now.
You also state that Veritas will be needed to gain access to various digital platforms. That sure sounds like a "fee" to me unless Veritas is free which is obviously not the case. So the whole innovation is free contracts that are not really free?
You are confusing ongoing management and administration fees (among other constant fees as well as sales fees) with needing the Ve token for access to the P2P Capital Markets. The digital asset pools will exist autonomously on the blockchain without a centralized manager to charge any fees for profit or rent seeking gain. Think of using ether to gain access to the Ethereum blockchain, or bitcoin to gain access to the Bitcoin blockchain. One could pose the argument that entering a smart contract on Ethereum or Bitcoin isn't free due to the cost of ether or BTC, but in all practicality those tokens are the denominating asset for their respective blockchains an contracts. The same will hold true for Veritaseum contracts although we will strive to be token agnostic. You will be able to gain liquidity (to some extent) to exchange tokens, and use various assets in our asset pools as long as you have Ve (Veritas) as the key to entrance.
More importantly, the fees that truly matter, that enable the multitude of multimillion dollar Wall Street bonuses and that eat up the vast majority of investor's capital, are ongoing management and administration fees. Reference this screen shot from slide 10 of the Veritas presentation.
As stated above, think of Veritas as Ethereum for finance, investment and interactive value exchange. The difference is that we will have rapid development templates for certain (and hopefully many) contracts that allow the lay person to quickly create, implement and execute their own smart contracts without the need for, or assistance of a developer, finance whiz or lawyer (although that does not mean that it wouldn't be a good idea to have specialized expertise on hand when dealing with certain transactions, hence Ve for advisory). In order for you to access the smart contract templates (or access the P2P Capital Markets with contracts you develop on your own), you will need Ve. This rapid contracting system exists already in the Veritaseum platform. See this contract that allows the purchase of Qualcomm equity exposure through the sale of Intel equity exposure, created by the filling in of a simple form.
With the assistance of the ICO, we can create more sophisticated forms with more flexibility, direct exposure to APIs, and pre-fabricated software pools of exposures to those seeking such through smart contract forms such as these. Also of importance, we can decentralize (or potentially fully distribute) the server, making the entire system more robust, and near anti-fragile.
Also, no disrespect intended, but what happens to Veritaseum and Veritas if you were (to be blunt), drop dead tomorrow? If any of bitcoins developers died, it would have zero effect on the price or utility of bitcoin. Veritas might as well be called Reggie Coin and it's pretty obvious what would happen to Reggie Coin in that scenario.
Veritaseum is not Reggie Middleton. It's my brainchild and I'm the (current, until we can get a better) spokesperson, but the skillset to develop such a platform has been over my head nearly since inception. Just measuring what we have now: patents pending, software engineering, financial engineering and analysis, and significant software development - takes a diverse team. We do need to build our team out significantly, which is one of the primary purposes for the ICO. Part and parcel to that buildout will be the hiring of deep and experienced management that will form a healthy chain of succession should anything happen to any one of us - or even several of us.
In addition, we will open source the token-based asset pools and oversee its development with the community. We have no desire to control this. As you may recall from the introductory video, our goal is to significantly and dramatically democratize the finance and investment space. That means access for everyone and anyone, anywhere. Think of how dramatic the change in the media business was with the introduction of the Internet and blogs. Now, everyone and anyone could potentially create content that could nearly instantaneously reach an audience of millions around the world, in a matter of minutes. Did this destroy the media business? No! It expanded it and forced it into the next century, the next paradigm. We're looking to do the exact same thing to Wall Street!
I hope you'll post some material explaining the use case and the value proposition of Veritas. Thanks.
See the graphic below to see the doors that Verias (Ve) is to serve as the key to open.
The Veritas deal sheet is now available for download, which packs all the information about Veirtas in a signle page. A step by step guide to purchasing Veritas can be downloaded here.
