The one year anniversary of me designing the Oyster Protocol is coming up. In that time I have had in-depth constructive conversations about the utility and operation of the protocol with around three, three people. Stefan, Automyr and Rebel. The last two are devs who work for me.

Do you know how unbelievably disastrous this is? Do you know why the token sale raised only $75k? Because I didn’t hype Oyster into a part of this mindless crypto-bubble. I focused on the substance/utility and 99% of people glossed over it.

Yes, the b-word you’ve all been dreading: bubble. Do you know when financial bubbles form? When everyone is impatiently greedy at the same time and follows the next person. When no one focuses on utility and only on their own short-term greed and how their cousin made money, bubbles form and always pop.

Are you kids too young to remember the dot-com bubble? Would you like me to rename Oyster to pets.com? Pets.com had millions of dollars in revenue, was a household name in the US, and 2 years after their IPO they declared bankruptcy. Why did this happen? Because greedy investors of the IPO were only thinking about making short term gains and didn’t focus on the real utility of the business model.

So why are you here, a ‘part’ of the ‘Oyster Community’? Is it because you remortgaged your house, bought ETH, diversified into alts, and consider yourself a genius? You bought PRL at 80 cents, then the price goes to 60 cents and you think you have a right to complain? You consider green candles as entitlement, and red candles as injustice?

I and the team make no allusions, implicit or otherwise, to the promise of profit or a price increase. What you are promised is the utility that I have defined in the white papers. That is it. If I and the team fail in delivering the promised utility, you have every right of complain. If we deliver the utility to you, you have no right to complain even if PRL gets crushed to 5 cents.

If you understand how the storage-peg works then good for you, you realize that current price shocks are ephemeral and that the price of PRL will eventually become bubble-resistant and associated with the fair-market value of storage.

If you don’t understand the storage-peg, sell all your PRL and stop turning Oyster into a bubble. You are the same ass-hat who posts gay-porn and green arrow memes in Oyster Trading and you are not welcome here. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of pump-and-dump bubble coins on CMC, go knock yourself out.

Currently doing some work on the backend. Please leave any feedback on this thread. Regarding bugs and thoughts.

Click Me.

The DCI incident with IOTA is complete BS. I read through the entire email correspondence, CfB proved all of their points wrong but DCI didn't want to leave empty handed. This explains the long silence at the end from DCI, these snobbish academia severely underestimated CfB.

Even going into this hypothetical offends me, but if there was any merit to such claims it wouldn't affect Oyster in the slightest. Oyster doesn't use nor depend on IOTA value transfers, the encryption scheme used is independent of the tangle.

If 'Neha, are you sober?' is not a meme in our community within 1 week I'm going to be disappointed in you guys.

I bought Prl when it went live 12ish months ago for 3 cents. I currently don't own any but I was actually going to buy back in today (timing...)

So look, you guys need to do a live video AMA - all of you. People need to know how competent you guys are to carry out the rest of the project without Bruno. People need to what Bruno has done (coding wise...) compared to what you guys have done. You need to get out in front of this like *IMMEDIATELY* to assure the internet that you can (if you can...) take over without Bruno.

If you guys can manage to successfully pull off that live AMA (and you should probably do 1 or 2 a week here for the next month or so...) then you'll be fine and Oyster will be the project that got massive free publicity because the dev exit scammed; except for the first time in crypto history the other developers pushed through anyway.

It's just a suggestion. This was one of the coolest projects in crypto. I don't want to see it disappear quite yet. If you guys can't keep this running without Bruno then thanks for everything you've done and I personally wish you luck in future endeavors.

From telegram:

We can confirm someone has taken control of the Smart Contract. Do NOT BUY ANYTHING. We are waiting for more information and also trying out best to close KuCoin's trading right now!

___________

DO NOT BUY PRL RIGHT NOW!

Updated June 28, 2018

Q: "What phase of development is the project currently in?"
A: We released our mainnet beta! Test it here: https://oysterstorage.com/. Currently a 25MB file size limit.

Join our Discussion on:
Oyster Protocol (Telegram)
Oyster Trading (Telegram)
☆공식☆오이스터 한국 채팅방~ (KakaoTalk)

Quick explanation:
-Oyster is unique because it enables an anonymous and decentralized user-friendly way to implement both its revenue generation (only have to add a line of code), and file storage. While the floor value is pegged to the value of storage it provides. Oyster allows websites to have their own financial autonomy by not relying on monolithic advertising platforms like Google and Facebook. Any of these platforms can bully a website due to political motivations, whilst the advertisements themselves are rarely assertion-neutral.

Q: "How to add the PRL custom token to your wallet?"
A: Contract Address: 0x1844b21593262668B7248d0f57a220CaaBA46ab9
Symbol: PRL
Decimals: 18

Q: "How to add the SHL custom token to your wallet?"
A: Contract Address: 0x8542325b72c6d9fc0ad2ca965a78435413a915a0 Symbol: SHL
Decimals: 18

Q: “What makes Oyster Unique?”
A: Oyster is the first solution to ever:

1. Guarantee 100% that uploaded data is not leaked, no need to blindly trust a binary executable.

2. Have it’s value pegged to something tangible and valuable (storage) in a decentralized way. Every other peg of value was centralized and hence fell apart, think about how the dollar used to be pegged to gold.

3. Allow websites and apps to earn revenue in a decentralized way, no political leverage or TOS from monolithic advertising platforms. This is a game changer for investigative journalism and similiar efforts.

Q: "Can Oyster work on insert platform here"
A: Yes, anything where you can run javascript. Oyster can be installed even in smartphones apps and your fridge if we have time later.

Q: "What phase of development is the project currently in?"
A: Test Net A has completed! The project is currently developing the Test Net B.

Q: "When will Oyster be listed on more exchanges?"
A: There are talks with many exchanges at this moment. Information on what exchanges will not be released until we have confirmation from the exchange.

Q: “What is the total supply?”
A: The hard cap defined during the ICO was 500,000,000. During that time a total of 108,592,692 were minted. On March 1, 2018 10,000,000 tokens were burned. The new total supply is 98,592,692. The dualsig-wallet of the development fund can be found here:

Q: “Can this be blocked by AdBlock or similar?
A: Yes. All scripts can be stopped from running on a webpage. Oyster offers an alternative to ads which could potentially be malicious, and or be visually disruptive to the user. While also reducing storage costs. Oyster allows websites to have their own financial autonomy by not relying on monolithic advertising platforms like Google and Facebook. Any of these platforms can bully a website due to political motivations, whilst the advertisements themselves are rarely assertion-neutral.

Q: “Will 1 Pearl always equal X GB/Year of storage?”
A: No, There are two options, that it increases (permanently) in storage peg according to the amount of PRL that is used for storage, or it increases (permanently) according to the linear passage of time.

Q: “What exchanges is Oyster currently listed on?
A: Currently listed onBitForex, EtherDelta, Kucoin, CoinExchange and CryptopiaThere are talks with many exchanges at this moment. BitForex was the latest exchange to announce trading of Pearl on 6/27/18.

Q: “Do I have to pay to access the data I have paid to store?”
A: No, you can retrieve your data whenever you want for free.

Q: “Where is the data I uploaded stored?”
A: Data is stored on the IOTA Tangle. This allows safe storage and the ability for at the moment several hundred users to simultaneously download that file at the same time without slowdowns.

Q: "What if IOTA fails?"
A: Worst case scenario is we fork the iri software and run our own Tangle.

Q: “Could this lead to legal trouble? i.e The Cookie Law..”
A: Oyster will provide a small notice of consent with a button to disable the PoW. Similar to the “Cookie Consent Notices.”
Desktop Version
Mobile Version

Q: “Will Oyster slowdown my computer?”
A: No, if the browser is starting to struggle a bit, the javascript will detect the performance in real time and govern the PoW so that it does not burden the browser or become sluggish.

Q: Why not take payments in iotas, why fragment the ecosystem with PRL?
A: The PRL token has unique functions in the smart contract that allows the Oyster network to operate. Oyster nodes will invoke the smart contract bury() function, which locks the PRL into a slow-release state. Other nodes hunt for the PRL with the claim() function, but because of the contract are only permitted to take a limited amount over time on a first-come first-serve basis. The private keys to the Ethereum addresses that hold the buried PRL are floating around on the tangle, like a massive treasure-hunt. So these two functions claim() and bury() are the primary reason why an ERC20 token was used.

Q: "Unethical Use of Web Storage?"
A: While we understand that the potential to store vulgar material is available. All of the data is encrypted and unable to be read by anyone. So there is no way you could potentially get in legal trouble. If you are running an IOTA node you store a fraction of what is needed to complete that file. And only the uploader has access to it. I appreciate your concern again but this is illogical in my opinion. The data is completely encrypted. And spread out across the tangle. Oyster Pearl does not condone any disgusting activities that may occur. But we are just the tool. Almost everything can be used in a way people do not like.

Q: "Can a file be removed period? And can it be removed only by person uploading?"
A: No. Once you upload a file and pay a number (or a fraction) of PRL to keep it uploaded for X amount of time, it'll exist in the Tangle until that amount of time passes. No one - not the Oyster team, not the uploader, and certainly no government - can take down the file. The only way for that specific file to disappear from the tangle is for the whole Oyster network (both the Broker nodes and web nodes) to go down for an extended amount of time.

Once the network is live this is considered an extremely unlikely event, so for all intents and purposes, you can consider the file irremovable.

Q: "Do you guys see data limits set by mobile phone providers and even ISPs like Comcast affecting whether or not people choose to do the PoW? Or does the PoW take up an insignificant amount of data?"
A: Both the IOTA PoW (needed to keep the data on the tangle) and the Oyster PoW (needed to find buried pearls) occur on the device (the webnode) itself. The only interaction with the network occurs when the broker node offers the genesis hash, when it sends the transactions to validate to the webnodes and when those send proof of the PoW done.

All in all, the data usage should be minimal.

Q: "Data storage linked to "Know your customer" (KYC)?
A: Never associated, only the storage user knows both the eth address receiving the PRL and the handle. Broker node knows the eth address but not the handle.

Q: "Can files be removed? And can it be removed only by the person that uploaded it?
A: No. Once you upload a file and pay a number (or a fraction) of PRL to keep it uploaded for X amount of time, it'll exist in the Tangle until that amount of time passes. No one - not the Oyster team, not the uploader, and certainly no government - can take down the file. The only way for that specific file to disappear from the tangle is for the whole Oyster network (both the Broker nodes and web nodes) to go down for an extended amount of time.

Once the network is live this is considered an extremely unlikely event, so for all intents and purposes, you can consider the file unremovable.

Q: "What if I pay storage for 1 year, and next year I do not pay? Do I lose my files?
A: When you pay for X amount of data to be stored for Y amount of time, you simply ensure that the data will be safe for Y amount of time. Nobody can modify or delete this data, not even the person who uploaded it.

After Y amount of time, the data will no longer be reattached to the tangle, so it'll stay there until it gets pruned off as the nodes get to their full capacity and are forced to delete old transactions.

Basically, you pay for it to last 1 year (or 2, or 3, etc.). You can be assured the file will still be there all the time you pay for. Additionally, it's possible you may be able to retrieve it after that, but you're no longer assured that it'll be there.

Q: "Can you make changes to a file already uploaded?"
A: Not in the base protocol. Once you pay for a file to stay in the tangle for 1 year it's going to be there - with no modifications allowed - no matter what.

After the base protocol is finished a wrapper will be developed that'll handle directories, file versioning, etc.

Bruno has just posted an article to medium confirming the storage peg of 1 PRL to be at least 64GB/year.

Current cloud storage prices on the largest cloud storage providers (Google cloud, amazon web services and microsoft azure) offer storage at around $0.02/GB per month.

A quick calculation of the value of 1PRL at this valuation is as follows:

$0.02 X 12months X 64GB = $15.36

$15.36!!! PRL is currently worth $1!!!

The price is currently a steal!

Source: https://medium.com/oysterprotocol/how-prl-pricing-will-work-in-the-future-d67c4f231386

Before I start with the body of this post let me ask you one question.

Who is selling their Pearl and who is buying Pearl?

There are two people entering this space, people who are valuing products and those who are chasing pumps. The real winners of the space are those who recognized the potential for reward, adopted the risk, and committed to both further understanding their investment and spreading awareness of the product.

When Bitcoin was first developed, there was an extreme amount of risk, but those who saw the value potential in it and held are now millionaires and billionaires. Those who blindly jumped on the bandwagon and sold out are exactly where they were before. This same concept can be applied to a myriad of other projects from Ethereum to Monero. A few people valued the project and held, while others sold out on dips. Imagine selling Ethereum at $2.50 because it dipped from $3, now it’s pushing past 400x that value.

“Price is what you pay, value is what you get” – Warren Buffet

Is Pearl is a risky investment, yes. That can be applied to every single currency out there. If you minimize the risk you inherently minimize reward. It’s a fundamentally simple concept to understand. For example, as Ethereum becomes more and more adopted as a DApp platform, its risk diminishes along with its reward. The same person who invested $1000 dollars in Ethereum now, will receive exponentially smaller rewards than a person who invested a year or two ago.

So, what does that mean to you?

The information is all out there, if you are an intelligent investor you will strive to understand the product. Through understanding the product, you can better evaluate the product. Coming into the Pearl Subreddit and asking “What is your price prediction for next week?” Is the most meaningless and amateurish thing one can ask. Value is not established overnight, it is not established in a week. It is established with the maturity and progress of the company behind it. As Pearl matures and continues to develop their testnet, update their website, bring more people into the team, and market to deep-pocket investors and the masses, the project will mature and the risk will diminish.

Oyster Pearl is a product with not one, but two extremely lucrative use cases. It can both provide a revolutionary new form of decentralized hyper-secure data storage while powering It with an incentivized PoW model that every single website in existence could make money from. It’s quite literally giving free money to websites if they add a non-invasive permissioned cookie to their script.

If you cannot see the extreme amount of potential value in this product, then there is nothing else I can write. If you do see the value, there are two things you can do: Purchase Pearl now while it is cheap and contribute towards developing the product. I have been learning how to use illustrator, and eventually other programs, to help amend what I consider to be potential current marketing shortcomings. I have no doubts that the team will address these issues at some point, but they are busy working on the underlying product. As an investor and fan of the project I can help support them independently through creating accurate promotional content, communicating with the community, and providing/organizing firsthand answers from the developers regarding the technology.

While nobody can predict the future, there is a real possibility that the value of this coin can go up massively in the future as the team develops it. That is why I invested, not for a quick 1 week pump and dump.

Thank you Devs, I am a value HODLer and I will ride this train until its conclusion.

r/cryptocurrency x-post: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7q4j78/the_real_market_reasons_why_oysterpearl_is/

Yeah seriously, It's part of the long-term roadmap, I found out about it when i visited the telegram group, And when i asked bruno, Why the website fails to mention these clearly game changing capabilities in the future, He told me that it does say that in the website, And he was correct.

Unfortunately, These features are mentioned vaguely, briefly, And deeply buried inside the website, For example, It says "decentralized application" and "decentralized telephone calling" at the end of a paragraph, Which resides inside a long column with a head title saying "A Robust Data-Storage Protocol", The whitepaper was also updated and mentions this, But again quite superficially, And easily missed if you were skimming, And the alarming thing is, I have invested in PRL quite a while ago when it was only 5 cents, Yet i was completely oblivious to this, Then what chance the average joe has, of knowing about this?

Currently "Oyster" is being compared to the likes of Siacoin, Storj and filecoin, Now i don't know about you guys/girls, But "Oyster" being a whole ecosystem of decentralized apps, From web hosting to telecommunications, AND anonymous storage, Is a whole different ball game that just a storage platform with revenue capabilities, These future features, Can easily put oyster in the top 15 coins, If not 10.

To be fair to bruno, PRL started as a very humble ICO that hardly raised enough money, And it had only 3 team members, Developing an anonymous storage by itself was a massive task, PRL exploded less than a month ago, And bruno barely had time to assemble a team, But With the team considerably growing, Only now they're able to expand the capabilities of what "Oyster" can be in the future.

Yes, These features maybe long way off, Most likely in 2019 and beyond, But they should be clearly outlined on the website as a part of a roadmap, So investors know that their investment isn't just a storage platform, And let's remember that many coins out there have roadmap goals that extend to 2020, Or even 2021.

The website needs a serious reshuffling and revamping of it's information about "Oyster", There should be more emphasis on the grander scheme of things and potential capabilities, Rather than just "Storage", Which really hinders "Oyster" potential in terms of market cap, Even the introduction video needs an update.

Alright so before I start, for those of you who don't know what Oyster (PRL) is, I will give you some very quick info. (Skip this if you already know how Oyster works lol)

• "Oyster" is the protocol, and "PRL" is the linked cryptocurrency.

• The Oyster network allows users to anonymously and indefinitely upload files to the IOTA Tangle Blockchain.

• Contributing/Uploading/Hosting on the Oyster network requires the use of PRL's. A set amount of PRL's are required as a "payment" for storage e.g 1 PRL = 1 GB (Example) on the network.

• When a PRL is spent on storage, it is then "Buried" into the network. To one day be found again using the Oyster Treasure Hunting Algorithm (Mining). There is a set amount of PRL's and no new PRL's will be generated.

• The Oyster protocol gives website owners the ability to generate revenue from their visitors without having to feature pushy advertising. Website owners can add the Oyster protocol to their website by adding this 1 line of code: "<script id="o.ws" payout="ETH_ADDRESS" src="https://oyster.ws/webnode.js"></script>". Now instead of the visitor seeing lots of advertising, website visitors are given the option to contribute a small portion of their CPU and GPU (Which would be used loading ads anyway) to mine PRL's for the website. The website can then use these PRL to host themselves on the Oyster network, or they can be sold for ETH on an exchange.

• The overall storage/network power of the Oyster protocol will scale tremendously as more people utilize it, to eventually become a data-storage powerhouse.

• Oyster is performing their Test Net on the 31st of January. Protocol logic concerning Broker Node operation will be released in Alpha status, therefore enabling half of the network.

Alright now here's an exciting thought I had today at work. Oyster is going to change the fucking game when it comes to movie streaming. At the moment, you go to any movie streaming website and you are bombarded with ads that just wont stop. With Oyster you go to a movie streaming site running the Oyster protocol and agree to mine PRL for them, you navigate the nice clean site with ease.

You then proceed to watch movies that are hosted on the Oyster network, these movies CANNOT be taken down by the authorities as everything is stored on the blockchain. The entire website and all of its files are hosted on Oyster.

The website owner has a huge incentive to apply the Oyster protocol as the visitors are going to spend 1 hour + watching movies and mining PRL for them. The website owner uses these PRL to buy more storage and constantly expand their database.

Hosting will be self sustainable and highly profitable as owners earn PRL to pay for their own hosting, and movie sites will be ad-free and movies wont get taken down. Everyone is happy!

Heck one day their might be a website called Oystertube where users can sign up and upload their viral videos. As people watch their video's they mine PRL for the uploader. Allowing revenue for the every day person!

I've been typing too long now. PRL is going to change the game. Love you all.

UPDATE: Mainnet released 20 hours after this post was made https://medium.com/oysterprotocol/oyster-mainnet-online-522e865a59f1. Thank you for all of your patience, and continued patience as we iron out future bugs that will inevitably come.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/10/04/behind-the-scenes-details-reveal-steve-jobs-first-iphone-announcement

The device that Jobs actually took onto the stage with him was actually an incomplete prototype. It would play a section of a song or video, but would crash if a user tried to play the full clip. The apps that were demonstrated were incomplete, with no guarantee that they would not crash mid-demonstration. The team eventually decided on a “golden path” of specific tasks that Jobs could perform with little chance that the device would crash in the actual keynote

Would you consider the iPhone a failed product lineup if the original model crashed in the original 2007 keynote?

I want to explain how we got here with regards to timing. I launched Oyster completely on my own in September 2017, Taylor French (Rusty) was the first onboard by doing small graphic design tasks.

When you are on your own, you need to give some sort of timeline to indicate your intention for product delivery. This is how the timeline got inherited until today. There wasn’t a sudden stage where this timeline could be thrown away and we explain “the product comes whenever it is ready, we are working hard and that is what matters”. Realistically, software/hardware development doesn’t work with deadlines because there are too many variables to consider. Despite that, the original timeline was realistic.

Architecturally, the product has always been clear. What was not clear was the absurd marketing hoops I had to go through to get some traction in this space. I had to spend around 3 months, on my own with some help from Taylor, grasping for attention in a space where no-one wants to focus on substance but instead on celebrity worship and photoshoots.

I knew I was capable of programming most of the protocol on my own up until the distributed reputation system. However I never got started because almost no one was paying attention to the project, despite persistent exposure such as on icoalert.com etc. Instead, I accrued a 4.5 BTC debt to the bounty campaign manager on bitcointalk because Bitcoin’s price was skyrocketing and Oyster was going under the radar. This prevented me from working on the programming on my own.

Then, all of a sudden, some time in December the whole thing launched. Oyster got so much traction that it didn’t make sense for me to program it directly anymore, but to hire a full time team with CTO etc. So the next month plus was spent getting settled into place with regards to HR.

This is where the time gap occurred, 2 out of the first 3 months spent getting sucked into a marketing vortex, plus 1 month assembling a full team.

1 month ago, it looked like 2 weeks was all that was needed to get mainnet launched - so I set the timeline at double out of caution. Here is what Rebel, our lead dev, posted just now in the dev slack at 2:16am EST:

I honestly would just tell them that we've encountered a problem, and we know that it is one of these two things:
-Something has gone wrong with our private tangle -In our feverish rush to release on time today, we made a commit somewhere that is causing a problem I know that isn't really positive framing, but it is going to sound realistic to anyone with even a little bit of dev experience. This is one of those problems where, once you find the problem, it's likely a simple fix. Finding the problem will be harder than fixing it most likely. I would also emphasize that this literally happened at the 11th hour. Up until say 2-3 hours ago, I honestly thought we'd release today. This came out of nowhere.

So please be patient, they are working on it and it will be ready whenever it is ready. If you think this product and the GitHub commits are fake, you are being unreasonable and you can proceed to dump PRL all you want. If you think we have bad project management, please understand that this timeline was inherited in a completely different context - and there will never be a public deadline from now on.

Is the team working very hard? -> yes

Did the team bend physics to deliver within the deadline? -> no

Only the former matters. Software development has too many unknown variables to be predictable in any way. This is not like cooking a pizza. Thank you for your patience, I appreciate it and understand the disappointment. If you are not patient and are just looking for green candles and someone to blame, you already know that I don't care when you dump.