BTCST AMA #1 Recap
Tags: Btcst, Bitcoin Mining, Ama, Bitcoin, Btc

Note: This is a 10 minute deep dive that will hopefully answer many of your questions.

Q 1: It seems like the gas fee calculations must be done based on iteration through the entire history of transactions, rather than relying on the snapshot balance in BTCST or unclaimed BTCB.

Does this mean that the fees will increase the more you stake/unstake and claim, and/or increase as the total effective staked BTCST increases from all other staking holders?

A 1: Fees for claiming and unstaking will increase the longer (number of days) you stake, and the more staking holders there are. It has very little to do with how many BTCSTs you have staked. It also has very little to do the total amount of effectively staked BTCSTs, and if you claimed or unstaked, it will count records from your last claimed or unstaked day.

Ady: So, there are many questions about high fees when claiming BTCs / un-staking BTCSTs. We want to add that if you are seeing a strangely high fee, it can be the result of the settings of your own wallet. See if you can “Edit” the fee setting of your wallet. Change the value for “GWEI” to 20. The fees should become more normal then.

Q 2: For the physical machine, it will be broken after time. For example, after 4 years, the Ant Miner 14TH ~ 140 BTCST will need replacement to keep the same hash rate. How do you make sure after a period of time 1 BTCST is still equivalent to 0.1 TH?

A 2: BTCST is standardized in TWO senses. First, 0.1 TH/s. Secondly and more importantly here, the efficiency of each BTCST is standardized to 60 W/TH. If total network difficulty and Bitcoin price change in a way that makes hash rate standardized to 60 W/TH no longer profitable in a few years, we will take the fair market salvage value of the underlying machines and convert that into newer generations of machines. At that time, holders of BTCST will get automatic efficiency upgrade. We will announce details of this change when necessary. In any event, we do not expect this to become relevant until a few years from now.

Q 3: My question is the following: have you already contacted other mining companies, and if so, when do you expect them to join the project and also will each company that joins mean another 1m tokens per partner?

A 3: We are pleased to announce today that 5 miners representing about 12% of the entire BTC global hashrate have started to work with BTCST as tokenization miners. These miners include Atlas Mining, one of the largest single-entity miners in the world; BTC.TOP and Easy2Mine, two of the top 15 mining pools in the world; Genesis Mining, the largest cloud mining company in the world; and Hengjia Group, one of the largest mining conglomerates based in Sichuan, China. These partnerships prove that these miners share our vision. We are excited to work with these new partners to improve our operations and bring new ideas and create new values to our communities.

Q 4: It would be cool to be able to stake your BTCST to mine other coins, should we expect that as a possibility in the future?

A 4: Yes of course, this is a possibility in the pipeline. We actually research on this before our mainnet deployment. You may see these features in a couple of weeks. We will be working with PancakeSwap on this. So stay tuned.

Q 5: The roadmap tells us what you have planned until June 2020, with this being crypto that’s a very short roadmap! What are the plans for the future, and do you hope to do more than just staking with BTCST?

A 5: To be more cautious, we have decided to slow our tokenization steps. Instead of 1000 PH/s, we are now tokenizing only 50 PH/s for the month of February. Any further tokenization will be carefully planned to make sure the ecosystem can remain healthy.

Q 6: What are the benefits of mining Bitcoin through BTCST over regular BTC mining with a miner?

A 6: BTCST is better because of the liquidity — you can enter/exit whenever you want, and because of the boost factor — in most cases you make MORE than direct mining. With direct mining, you cannot enter/stop mining easily. There are a lot of expenses and time commitments. With BTCSTs, you can buy/stake, or sell/unstake at any time. The liquidity is a lot better. Also with our boost factor, your BTC rewards are enhanced because you will earn a part of BTC from BTCST holders who do not stake! Read more about our boost factor here: https://btcst.medium.com/btcst-note-on-mining-rewards-calculation-eb469c8144dd

Q 7: BTCST is currently the first project that provides Bitcoin mining liquidity, but it makes me think that the system is too simple, just stake BTCST and earn BTC daily.

Will there be more ways we can use BTCST? Such as possibly a governance system where the community can vote or propose new ideas with the number of BTCST as voting power? Or would you establish a main governance token in the future?

Perhaps you can include a lot more mining such as ETH, and other tokens that can be mined with GPU’s, then create a main token which can be easily swapped to the variety of mining token selections.

Ex. <Main Governance Token>

- Use: To vote on community or core team proposals.

<Platform>

- Track your holdings of different crypto you are mining.

- Swap Governance Token or other tokens to Hashrate for a specific crypto

Just asking if there are plans for this in the future. Since I feel the plan is way too simple to be the sole plan of BTCST.

A 7: Yes, we have plans for giving BTCST itself governance functions. This is planned for Q2 this year. When we have a more detailed plan, we will let you know.

Ady: I also know that Alex and the team are planning to have BTCST holders vote on how to develop ETHST. BETH (Binance ETH) on BSC is a natural fit for us. But of course, we must consider how the switch to PoS for ETH 2.0 can impact us. So please stay tuned. Very exciting things are coming!

Q 8: Does the Bitcoin Standard Hashrate Token team have a mining farm to back up the large amount of Hash Rate that each token represents? How do you keep BTCST pegged to 0.1 TH/s?

Does Bitcoin Standard Hashrate Token serve as an alternative for users who do not have the ability to purchase mining machines? Would they perform as well when staking BTCST?

A 8: Standard Hashrate Group and its tokenization miners own a network of some of the largest mining facilities in the world. Locations and capacities of these facilities are completely disclosed to Binance Mining Pool as part of due diligence. Binance Mining Pool also audits the hash rate sufficiency from the project. This is NOT something that’s possible to fake.

Q 9: There are many who say that BTCST is quite similar to Grayscale. So what’s the difference between BTCST and Grayscale? Are BTCST and Grayscale a perfect complement to each other?

A 9: BTCST is like the hash rate version of Grayscale. Grayscale uses GBTC to wrap around BTC to give it institutional liquidity. This has generated very strong liquidity premium to the price of GBTC. We now see that BTCST is giving very strong liquidity premium to BTC hash rate. We hope to achieve with BTCST what Grayscale has successfully done for BTC.

Ady: Yes, it is very important to see that BTCST’s vision is to be the mining industry version of Grayscale. We are not “selling cloud mining contracts.”

Q 10: What is the best way to summarize the longevity of the token to keep the interest of people invested? How do you keep stakeholder interest and not get scared away by thinking the tokenized hashing power is over priced compared to real hashing power?

A 10: Our community should understand that BTCST, unlike some competitors, is NOT selling cloud mining contracts. Our model is the Grayscale Trust for mining contracts. With mining machines or cloud mining contracts, you cannot easily exit. But with BTCSTs, you can enter and exit within seconds. So the two are not comparable.

Q 11: How will the release of 10 million tokens next month affect the boost factor and overall rewards?

A 11: Based on feedback from our community members, we have revised our tokenization plan. We are now tokenizing only 50 PH/s for February. Future tokenization is pending. We will update the community when we have more information, but our goal is to tokenize only when we are confident to keep the ecosystem healthy.

Q 12: Why would you call BTCST a leveraged Bitcoin token if BTCST is independent of derivatives?

A 12: The price of BTCST will perform as a leveraged BTC token. This is because the price of hash rate / mining machines performs like so, meaning when Bitcoin rises, the mining rigs’ value also rises. This is a well known fact in the mining machine market, so BTCST is a BTC leveraged token because of the very nature of the assets (mining machines) that back it. Also, because BTCST is independent of derivatives, BTCST does not have liquidation risks. This is a huge value add for investors and traders alike.