By: Geeq  on Aug 5, 2020

Geeq’s Head of Crypto Hans Sundby and Founder and CDO Stephanie So visited the Telegram community of Mandy B for Geeq’s first AMA after the weekend’s announcement that JUN Capital was joining the Geeq family as Strategic Advisors and last night’s surprise announcement that BitMax was having an exclusive primary listing of GEEQ, beginning tomorrow August 6.

The AMA had been planned for terrific exposure to coincide with this week’s Token Generation Event. Many thanks to @mandyb675 for hosting Hans and Stephanie for such a well-planned, well-paced, and positive AMA, which was the perfect place to spend an hour in this busy week. We are very grateful to the community for wanting to learn more about Geeq!

Together, Stephanie and Hans answered 11 questions submitted ahead of time, and then each was able to choose an extra question that was submitted from the chatroom.

? Here’s the recap! ?
The transcript has been lightly edited to correct for typos and verb tenses and to insert a few links.

Moderator: Mandy B
Guests: Stephanie So and Hans Sundby

Mandy B:
Hey everyone I am pleased to have with us @StephanieS & @hansdallass from the Geeq Team today. As we all know Geeq concluded a private sale recently and will be listing on BitMax.

Hans:
Pleased to be here mate.
Stephanie:
My big thanks!

Mandy B:
So let’s begin the AMA with a few pre-asked questions.

Q1. With regard to the Proof of Honesty protocol, what inspired you to create it and what exactly do you want to achieve with it?

Stephanie:
Thank you for this question! Geeq is very much a group effort where we are united in a vision of enabling decentralized solutions.

The fact that other protocols are vulnerable to being taken over was a security flaw that potentially could keep blockchain (and cryptocurrency) from ever being fully accepted or adopted. That seemed like a huge problem for the Geeq Team, who believe a practical solution could open entirely new market opportunities.

Co-Founder John Conley thought he could figure out a solution, which became Proof of Honesty. We realized that the final layer of security had to give regular people the power to detect dishonesty, and more than that, they had to be able to prevent any attempt for a malicious attack to affect them negatively.

One value John and I share in common is that we won’t allow ourselves to be bullied.

Aside from creating a blockchain protocol that was useful and could be adopted to make incredible inroads for technology and economics, we wanted to provide a decentralized system where individuals could not be bullied by using a blockchain against them.

So those fundamental values guide everything we’d like to achieve with this new technology.

Q2 . Regarding your slogan “Everybody wins” and Geeq’s multi-chain platform, what exactly does it mean that you can vote with your feet?

Stephanie:
I am really excited to answer this question, many thanks to whoever asked it. I could really geeq out on this because the Geeq platform is an incredible opportunity to build a digital economy from scratch, and to incorporate features we wish we had in the real economy that don’t work well in the real economy.

The difference is, when building a digital economy on a platform from scratch, we are able to use technology to do things we cannot do in real life; for example, reduce transaction costs so there is not as much friction in exchange as in real life when intermediaries are so important.

1) “Everybody wins” means there is a way to enable massively new voluntary trades and economic activity.

2) Geeq’s multi-chain platform provides, among other features, a way for different developers or businesses to introduce applications with different features (as well as an upgrade path).

3) “Vote with your feet” is an expression in economics and political science that means if you are dissatisfied, the ultimate resort is to take your business elsewhere or literally pick up and move from one city to another if you don’t like what you see. Of course, in the real world, that’s costly. However, on Geeq, we make sure you can – and you know you can – move your $GEEQs anywhere in the ecosystem to another blockchain service at any time.

“Voting with your feet”, to me, is about being able to empower people to have the ultimate freedom to reward what you like and take your ball and go home if you don’t.

Q3. In PoW and PoS blockchains big stakeholders manipulate the voting or governance in their favor, how is PoH different to solve this problem?

Stephanie:
As a very simple example, one threat to PoW and PoS blockchains is the possibility of collusion, meaning a group of people (or one person controlling Sybils) could use voting or governance to change the rules of a blockchain, on the rest of the users who had an interest in it.

For example, there are some delegated Proof of Stake blockchains that allow you to delegate your stake. You may think you have increased your power to counteract a powerful interest, but generically that is not enough to protect your interests because you are counting on the others in your group to care about the same things you do.

PoH prevents manipulation. You, as an individual, enter a voluntary trade on the platform and no one can change the terms on how your transactions are validated.

There’s NO governance at the validation level, so the blockchains for your $GEEQ tokens cannot be hard forked because that’s not what you sign up for when you come to the Geeq platform.

We think we’ll attract people who would like some of that certainty in their lives. Governance can live at the application level at Geeq, but we don’t allow it in the validation protocols of PoH.

Q4. Incentives wise how do we earn if say most transactions end up being micro payments, will it be worth it to run a node?

Hans:
That’s an excellent question, and the answer is, it will depend on volume and the type of work your node does, balanced against the Good Behavior Bond (GBB) that you have to put in escrow, which is untouched as long as you’re honest.

We are working on all the variables involved to make it worthwhile to run a node. A working example is in the Business Model section of the White Paper. I think we assume a one-time GBB of $200, for an IoT chain, which is one of our target markets. In that example, the work it does is running as a background process 24/7 for a pretty inactive chain (20 tps). I think the annual profit for letting your node run honestly is something like $850? So, I think that’s a conservative model.

Q5. What types of dapps are supported by blockchain Geeq?

Stephanie:
We’re very ambitious. In the long run, all of them. I can say that because Geeq is DApp agnostic.

Geeq’s patent-pending technology is about validating blockchains securely and inexpensively and providing a platform that can be fully permissionless and decentralized. We are not about trying to build every DApp in the world ourselves – that would be silly. What we want is to provide the foundation and tools for others to do so. Having said that, it will take time to provide the APIs and to support the various kinds of DApps that currently are being built. We’ve partnered with Morpheus Labs to help shorten the time it will take for enterprises to onboard with us.

Q6. Geeq transaction costs are very low, right? What are the difficulties when Geeq serves such a high TPS at such a low cost?

Stephanie:
This is a fun question, because I think Geeq is completely unique in being able to offer these services for security, which any IoT manufacturer will tell you that cybersecurity is a tremendous headache and a barrier to adoption.

Transactions per second on the scale that Geeq is thinking about – the millions or billions of commits required for a smart city, for example, could never be feasible if transaction costs were even a penny. Right?

One million commits at a penny would be $10,000 and it would be hard to convince an office building or factory to spend an extra $10,000 to hash telemetry even if it were quite valuable to do so. But smart cities, and autonomous cars, need to be able to rely on the same sets of decentralized data. So it’s coming. Now, at Geeq’s transaction costs, we estimate one million commits might cost $100.

Now, the thought processes about the value of blockchain can begin. We’ve made some very different choices about the Geeq platform, for example, no gossip networks and no main chain, that reduce the costs and bottlenecks that other blockchain platforms run into, so we don’t anticipate those kinds of difficulties with high TPS.

Ultimately, the constraints will probably be bandwidth and that will probably change a lot in the coming decade.

Q7. Why are you developing Decentralized Finance ( DEFI)? Do you feel great about that?

Hans:
Geeq is not a Defi project, but we offer a great scalable, low cost, flexible and secure platform for Decentralized Finance to build on. We’ve written two explainers on how DeFi can benefit from building on Geeq.

Geeq™ Value Proposition – DeFi

Geeq™ Value Proposition – DeFi 2

They give you a great oversight on how Geeq can help the DeFi industy grow and in a more secure way.

We are working on several initiatives regarding DeFi and one of them is soon to be announced. I’ll also share a photo we created regarding this:

Q8. Partnership and community are the key to the success of projects, can you tell me how Geeq will expand the partnership and which markets will Geeq focus on?

Hans:
So first of all, when you are going into a mutual partnership agreement with another company, it’s important that there is actually value being created.

Geeq focuses on real partners that can give real value in what Geeqs are building and help us achieve mass adoption in short period of time.

We have awesome advisors helping us out with different connections within IoT (our CEO Ric have 30 years from IoT), and other industries.

We can mention two of them here:

We have teamed up with Morpheus Labs. This is a mutually beneficial partnership that reinforces both of our positions within the industry as well as allowing both parties to collaborate on some interesting projects together in the future. Morpheus Labs & we at Geeq share the same vision of opening up the realm of blockchain for mass adoption.

We have also recently teamed up with JUN Capital in a strategic partnership. JUN will join Geeq as Strategic Advisors and help accelerating awareness and adoption of Geeq in Asia across several important dimensions offering advice on subjects such as follow-on exchanges, key opinion leaders and crypto communities in specific Asian regions.

Stephanie:
@Mandyb may I add to Hans’ last reply about partnerships, because he does not tend to say nice things about himself – Hans is the MAN for partnerships for Geeq. He is @hansdallass on Twitter as well as on Telegram.

Q9. What is the most ambitious goal of the project? I would appreciate it if you could share with us any upcoming updates? What should the community look for?

Stephanie:
The most ambitious goal of the project. That’s a tough question. It’s hard to narrow down because I think the most ambitious thing we might think of now might look small in a few years, if we do our jobs right. And it might not even come from the Geeq Team that exists now. The most ambitious goals might be achieved by someone listening right now.

I would like to emphasize that building Geeq is only the beginning. It is very important to me that Geeq is a welcoming public platform that provides the fundamental basis for the blockchain of the future, that it has very low barriers to adoption, technical and physical and educational, so that anyone can implement their ideas on it. We do not pretend to be the smartest in the world – of course we’re not. We have a fantastic and well thought out plan for the structure and lots of ideas for what we would like to build ourselves, but the ultimate goal for a permissionless system is that many people will be able to invent and do what they find valuable.

Q10. Geeq is opening up the door to micropayments and microcommerce, is that also not opening up a door to attacks where hackers would try clog the system with transactions 1/100th of a penny. Similar to how DoS attacks are done on the normal internet?

Stephanie:
DoS attacks make life difficult for everyone, no one can deny that. On the other hand, the security of Geeq ledgers is not harmed although it is possible for areas of the network that are taken down to be stalled. Geeq’s security approach is not based on trying to raise the cost of trying to hack the chain.

I’m trying to think about the question otherwise – it’s not clear to me why hackers would find it worthwhile to try to clog the system for such tiny transactions, when the multi-chain structure means there would be little associated with that particular chain. But, if you have more concerns or thoughts about this, I’d love to think this through at a later time.

Q11 What is the main purpose of the token? Why do you think Geeq’s platform does work especially well for Geeq token use cases?

Stephanie:
$GEEQ is a utility token used to pay nodes for the validation and virtual machine services they provide to Geeq’s multi-chain ecosystem. Geeq’s approach to automating payment to nodes for honest work that they provide (payments greater than the nodes’ costs) is a key innovation for the Geeq platform.

Making work worth payment is consistent with Geeq’s vision of a decentralized marketplace for services based on blockchain. $GEEQ is also used as a staking token for the good behavior bonds that help ensure honest behavior by the validation network.

We think the security of the $GEEQ ledgers and its ability to flow around the ecosystem will make it especially useful for blockchain applications that build in interoperable micropayment applications where all they really need is utility token in an environment with very little friction.

Mandy B
We will open the chat room for final 2 questions soon.
@hansdallass @StephanieS last 2 questions which you wish to answer

You organized the AMA session very useful and got a lot of questions related to utilities and technologies, vision of the future,
So now I want to ask, what do you expect from the community?

Hans:
Alright! This question was interesting to me.

“What do you expect from the community?”

So, I’ve been in the space for a while, working on different market strategies and trading, investments and other exciting stuff like most of you guys that are in here.

What’s interesting about crypto is that; each project builds its own global community world wide. There is nothing similar as this anywhere in other industries. This is a new era.

So what’s important here; I’m hoping we are able to build a community that are after more than just a quick flip or some trading. We want community members, who can educate, learn, give advice and spread overall adoption to Geeq.

Community is important, but it is also important to build a community you want to be involved in, everyday, day in and year out. That is something we have been working on, and going to work hard for today, tomorrow and next year.

The issue that is currently on everyone’s lips is that of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has affected the world economy, this was reflected even in the sharp drop in BTC. How has this situation affected the GEEQ project? Have they had to cancel face-to-face events and paralyze their schedule? What plans do you have to overcome or recover what is lost once we manage to get out of this pandemic?

Stephanie:
The pandemic has made me think very hard about the problems that are facing the world, not only the health implications and the supply chain implications for both health care supply and food and the speed with which we need to track and satisfy demands while so many people are locked down and working from home.

The only silver lining (although the losses have been tragic, but I will answer as a technologist), is that the world is recognizing that the world must be reorganized so it can work in a much more decentralized way than before. That means that I have been thinking about how urgently I want to develop particular applications on Geeq to address some of these. In the US, we also have tremendous distrust about the way government programs and officials are handling the budgets and pandemic issues.

Well, distrust between disparate actors is exactly one of the criterion to think about applying appropriate blockchain solutions.

The bottom line is that, while the pandemic affected our plans for the token schedule, our token team has adapted brilliantly. We have not postponed any meetings for work going in the background – the headquarters in Canada has switched to Zoom without any problem, and our team is already global, so we were working remotely anyway and continue to do so.

I’ve also met some very important people during the pandemic as our values have been more on display in the blockchain and crypto world and I think we are bringing groups together.

So, the pandemic has worked to hasten the speed and increase our motivation to deliver on Geeq and I feel that very keenly.

Mandy B:
Let me thank @StephanieS & @hansdallass for joining our chat group today ? and wish them great success for the future. Thank you everyone for participating in this exciting AMA…too many questions, however time is always a limitation. With this we close our AMA…for more queries please feel free to join ? @GeeqOfficial.

Hans:
Thanks alot for hosting us today Mandy.. As all ways; we love your support and outreach. Looking forward to next time.
Thanks all and free to jump into the AMAs we are having with Bitmax later today as well.

Stephanie:
Thank you so very much, @Mandyb for hosting us, and thanks to everyone for such interesting and on-point questions. I appreciate the opportunity to answer questions like this on behalf of Geeq.

Mandy B:
@StephanieS @hansdallass thank you for your time. The chat room is opened for everyone!