By a unanimous vote of the Moderators last night the Minnow Support Project has approved the following white paper to be published to the Steem Blockchain describing PALcoin, which is a Steem-Engine token to be powered by scotbot and seen in a Nitrous instance through https://www.palnet.io.

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Steem is a blockchain. On that blockchain lives an app called steemit.com, which is a blogging platform, and the most widely used social media application in all of crypto. It attracted artists, devs, musicians, bloggers, business leaders, photographers, and people of all walks of life because what you produce on the platform can earn crypto.

Earning crypto and getting started was hard so a group of people got together and formed a Discord group called the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network to help new users (often called minnows) get a strong start on the platform. Within that group a team of leaders emerged who called themselves the Minnow Support Project (MSP) and helped the Discord group grow to 20,000 users and helped the Steem ecosystem grow to over 1M accounts.

The next step for the Minnow Support Project is to launch a community token. This is in line with the mission to spread the values of Peace, Abundance, and Liberty, grow the Steem ecosystem, and train and retain new members on ths platform. Specifically, launching a token will enable users to earn PALcoin, gain status within the largest Steem community, and stay engaged on the platform.

Executive Summary

MSP is launching a token called PALcoin. It's a token launched on the Steem-Engine.com smart contract platform. It will feature:

• an airdrop,
• an ICO on steem-engine.com
• on-going distribution to active participants in the PALnet Discord,
• ongoing proof-of-brain distribution powered by Scotbot (a python based voting bot that distributes rewards based on PALcoin stake)
• a custom website similar to steemit.com where post rewards are displayed in palcoin as opposed to steem
• it is redeemable for upvotes from @minnowsupport
• it returns value to delegators to @minnowsupport based on their percent of delegation
• it is redeemable for various roles, activities, and customizations in the PALnet Discord

Initial Distribution of PALcoin

There will be 21M tokens initially minted and launched
10% is planned to stay on a Minnowsupport account which won't be used to vote on posts, but exists as an emergency fund.
10% will go to moderators/team members
20% will go out in an airdrop to a white list of 7000 people
the remaining 60% will be sold on the market for Steem and used to powerup the @minnowsupport account and pay for expenses

ICO

Of the 60% (12.6M) PALcoin to be sold they will be made available at a string of prices

0-1,000,000 at 0.01 Steem
1,000,000-2,000,000 at 0.02 Steem
2,000,000-5,000,000 at 0.05 Steem
5,000,000-10,000,000 at 0.10 Steem
10,000,000-12,000,000 at 0.25 Steem
12,000,000-12,600,000 at 0.50 Steem

Team Rewards

There are 2.1M Palcoin that will go to moderators (140,000 each, ~$420 at a price of 0.01 Steem/PALcoin)

@victoriabsb
@swelker101
@r0nd0n
@juliakponsford
@ma1neevent
@kubbyelizabeth
@isaria
@followbtcnews
@discordiant
@crimsonclad
@clayboyn
@aggroed
@ausbitbank
@danielsaori
@drakos

Primary Account

2.1M PALCoin will go to the Minnow Support Project. These tokens will be staked on a Minnow Support account that isn't @minnowsupport. It will not be used for upvoting posts, and will be there for long term and emergency funding. We reserve the right to downvote posts to counter abuse in accordance with guidelines that will be published and updated on the minnowsupport account.

Claimdrop

The Minnow Support Project keeps a dynamic whitelist of 3k accounts that moderators have personally verified. We'll be claimdropping the 4.2M tokens to the whitelisted accounts. This is around 1200 tokens per account in the white list.

A claimdrop is like an airdrop, but the mechanism involves having to claim tokens rather than just being sent it. If it isn't claimed it'll remain on the issuing account. Those on the list will have 1 month to claim the tokens or forfeit them.

MSP-Active

People who have already been active in the PAL discord and interacting have already been receiving msp-active tokens. These are currently redeemable for votes from msp-active as a trail. The msp-active voting mechanism will be eliminated, the steem power will be moved to manual curation on msp-curation. Msp-active tokens will be redeemable for palcoin after the claimdrop is over.

On Going Distribution

Faucets

All financial systems relying on currency requires faucets for the currency as well as sinks. A faucet is how the curreny enters the system. A sink is how it is removed from the system. PALcoin will have 2 primary faucets that stem from token inflation: Proof of Brain and Proof of Interaction.

Overall Inflation PALcoin will have an initial target inflation of 10% and decline every year by 1% until it reaches 4% and it will stay at 4% inflation.

Proof of Interaction Every day Minnowsupport will supply 1000 tokens (365,000 tokens anually) to users interacting in the PALnet Discord.

Proof of Brain The remaining inflation will occur through Proof of Brain and rewards voting (author and curator rewards) on chain.

PALcoin Issued  annual inflation    PoI PoB PoM

Initial 21,000,000 na na na 0.05
year 1 21,000,000 2100000 365000 1630000 105000
year 2 23,100,000 1890000 365000 1430500 94500
year 3 24,990,000 1680000 365000 1231000 84000
year 4 26,670,000 1470000 365000 1031500 73500
year 5 28,140,000 1260000 365000 832000 63000
year 6 29,400,000 1050000 365000 632500 52500
year 7 30,450,000 840000 365000 433000 42000
year 8 31,290,000 840000 365000 433000 42000
year 9 32,130,000 840000 365000 433000 42000
year 10 32,970,000 840000 365000 433000 42000
year 11 33,810,000 840000 365000 433000 42000
year 12 34,650,000 840000 365000 433000 42000
year 13 35,490,000 840000 365000 433000 42000
year 14 36,330,000 840000 365000 433000 42000
year 15 37,170,000 840000 365000 475000 42000
year 16 38,010,000 840000 365000 475000 42000
year 17 38,850,000 840000 365000 475000 42000
year 18 39,690,000 840000 365000 475000 42000
year 19 40,530,000 840000 365000 475000 42000
year 20 41,370,000 840000 365000 475000 42000

Proof of Moderation

Similar to how the Steem blockchain provides 10% of the inflation to witnesses; 5% of annual inflation goes to @msp-finance for project management including expenses.

Token Redemption (sinks)

Tokens can initially be redeemed for 1 of three things: upvotes, advertisement, and status.

Upvotes - The main account, @minnowsupport, currently allows anyone in the Discord community to use a command $upvote, and receive a low percentage vote on a post. After a year of trying to manage this we're still concerned that it leads to low quality posting. We'd like to continue to encourage posting, but we're attempting through this process to increase the quality.

Going forward users can exchange palcoin they receive for upvotes from @minnowsupport. The ability to store and use PALcoin later decreases the need to burn votes on a timer, which puts pressure to put out content on a schedule rather than when quality content is written. The goal remains the same of getting new users and active discord community members to post, but this approach we think will incentivize higher quality content.

A portion of the tokens received by the voting bot will be burned. A portion of the tokens will be distributed to delegators. Any Sp owned by minnowsupport will have the percentage of tokens simply burned/used instead of issuing new tokens. Any SP delegated to the bot will receive a portion of the daily earnings relative to it's amount.

Ex. Minnowsupport has 100,000 SP on it. 10,000 is organic to the account and 90,000 is from delegation. When PALcoin is sent to the account 10% of what's collected will be burned (or used instead of new issuance), and 90% will be returned to delegators to the @minnowsupport account.

Ads Banner advertisement opportunies exist to bring in revenue. The Minnow Support Project will run a modified instance of condenser (the software that runs steemit.com) called Nitrous, but it will be tailored to PALcoin and managed by this community. Ads will be displayed on the site, and money that's earned through advertising will be used to purchase PALcoin and burn it.

Post Promotion Users will be able to promote posts on the site using PALcoin, which will be burned.

Discord Status A large part of the Steem experience is interacting with a social group. There are a variety of roles that are available for fine tuning within Discord. After the initial token offering, we'll organize a variety of roles to be applied onto users depending on the amount of PALcoin they have staked, steem they have delegated, interaction they've gained, and other ways as makes sense.

In the future

The value of a currency is typically determined by two things: the ways the currency can be used that are exclusive to a given ecosystem, and the number of people that want to hold the currency and use the currency to receive those benefits. As time moves on focus will be on finding new sinks and utilities for the token while attracting new users to it as well.

Palcoin Settings

7 day payout windows
unstaking occurs in 28 days in 4 installments

Scotbot Settings

Here's the list of initial settings.
"author_curve_exponent":1.05,
"author_reward_percentage":50.0,
"cashout_window_days":7.0,
"curation_curve_exponent":0.5,
"downvote_power_consumption":20,
"downvote_regeneration_seconds":432000,
"issue_token":true,
"json_metadata_key":"tags",
"json_metadata_value":"minnowsupport",
"reduction_every_n_block":10512000,
"reduction_percentage":1,
"rewards_token":15.5,
"rewards_token_every_n_block":100,
"token":"PALcoin",
"token_account":"pal",
"vote_power_consumption":2,
"vote_regeneration_seconds":432000

Reward curve is just slightly superlinerar to encourage keepign PalPower on one account rather than spread out.
Author reward is 50:50.
Cashout window is a 7 day payout like steemit.com.
Curation is like steemit.com.
There is a downvote pool. Here you get 5 free downvotes a day.
Downvoting power goes from 0-100 in 5 days like upvote power refills on Steemit.com.
To get a vote which receives palcoin the post has to include palnet as a tag
The inflation rewards shrink every year by 1% (faster than steemit, but will change to 0% by the time it hits 4% annual inflation).
Voting calculation works like steemit.com.
You get 10 votes a day similiar to steemit.com.
Your voting power recharges completely from zero over 5 days (20% per day).

Next steps

Publish the white paper
Receive public commentary

Allow users to exchange MSP-Active to palcoin
Remove the msp-active delegation, move to msp-curation
Stop the discord voting bot
Initiate the new @minnowsupport community rewards mechanism
Initiate an instance of Nitrous

List the palcoin for sale on steem-engine.com
Setup Scotbot
Setup nitrous on www.palnet.io

Change the minnowsupport comment to reflect the palcoin approach

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This is an experiment we think is worthy to take on. We look forward to constructive commentary and getting palnet.io up and running soon.